KY General Assembly Dismembering Public Schools

Eliminate basic standards for what we teach our children.

Scrap rules preventing school boards from hiring their idiot nephews to teach.

bibble!  Lots n lots n lots uh bibble!

And that's before they hand billions of Kentucky tax dollars to private corporations and freakazoids to make a profit not teaching our kids.

In 1990, Kentucky progressives finally forced the then-Democratic General Assembly to pass sweeping education reform.  It wasn't perfect, but as the 21st century approached, it dragged the Commonwealth's medieval school system screaming and kicking into the the 20th century.

At a time of incessant alarms about the need to revamp American education, one state has actually done it -- Kentucky, where a landmark court ruling six years ago produced the most comprehensive overhaul of public education the nation has ever seen.

The 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act, or KERA, has produced almost everything critics of American education call for: higher standards, more money, fairer allocation of resources, new curriculums, more creative teaching, better counseling, improved technology and a philosophy that acknowledges the myriad influences outside the classroom that affect learning.

 What KERA did not do, and why it has failed to correct the severe inequities in Kentucky's public education, is the one and only thing that works:  Investing massive amounts of money in eradicating poverty.  And overturning the property tax funding mechanism that gives rich counties more than they need and leaves poor counties with nothing.

Eliminating basic education standards will not solve either poverty or inequity.

Hiring everybody's unemployable relatives won't solve either poverty or inequity.

And forcing bibble down kids' throats will make both poverty and inequity worse.

Confiscatory taxes on the rich and corporations, equalizing funding for all counties, setting real standards for content and teachers and banning religion are our only hope.

The repugs running the legislature and executive branch have incarcerated that hope and are torturing it to death right now.

Charter Schools Are Killing the Nation: Creationism Edition

I am personally acquainted with the valedictorian of a christian madrassa - really bright kid with a flair for math and enormous potential. But when he moved from his freakazoid private school to a public university, he flunked every single class, even though they were introductory classes and he had aced advanced classes in the same subjects at the madrassa.

Because he really "learned" was bible. Bible math, bible history, bible science, bible english, bible spanish.

Took him 13 years to get a college degree, and he'll be stuck in minimum wage jobs for life because of it.

And that's exactly the way the corporate plutocrats want it.   The big money and power behind charter schools is not the freakazoids; it's the corporate billionaires establishing a work force too stupid and impoverished to maintain a democracy.

Because what's in the charter schools today is in the public schools tomorrow.

Charles Pierce:

Bravo to Stephanie Simon of Tiger Beat On The Potomac for her deep reporting on how taxpayer dollars are being used to fund the teaching of creationist nonsense in direct conflict with the Constitution, several decisions in the federal courts, over 200 years of scientific achievement, and basic common sense.

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This should be a gigantic issue. American children are being taught ridiculous hogwash at the public expense, It should serve as a red flag for the people who are enthusiastic about charter schools. It should be a measure of our maturity as a nation and as a people that we simply don't do this any more. This week, the "religious liberty" scam in the Hobby Lobby case is going before the Supreme Court. I am sure that there will be a "religious liberty" argument made in defense of making American students dumber when they get out of school than they were when they went in. Dear Mother of Jesus, we are a heavily armed nation of fkwits.

Churning Out Drones

Decades ago, a friend quite teaching kindergarten after many years because the "reformed" and "improved" public school system demanded she turn out what she called "peas in a pod" instead of allowing her to encourage each child's individuality.

That was the height of individualistic teaching compared to what the public education DEformers are trying to replace public education with today.

Digby:

And that's really the whole point here: destroy teachers' unions, eliminate the possibility of the government being able to attract decent teachers, then use the resulting chaos to privatize the entire education system. The billionaires want to do this not only because private education is a big, booming business, but also because they want to change the way children are taught to make them more docile, pliable units fit for the brave new corporate workforce of the 21st century. That's what the anti-Proposition 30 efforts were all about, and that's what the Vergara case is all about.

It's certainly not designed to actually help children. We already know what produces good results in education, based on examples around the world: 1) incentivizing adults to pursue a career in teaching by paying a decent salary, 2) teaching real critical thinking skills instead of rote memorization; and 3) properly funding education. As long as teachers can barely make ends meet and our society encourages every bright college-age student to try to become the next Wolf of Wall Street or SnapChat millionaire, we're not going to be able to fix education--or anything in society for that matter. As long as we continue to preach the lie that anyone who can't do advanced calculus is not only destined to live in poverty but ought to do so, we can't fix education. And as long as we continue to believe that it's more important to lower taxes on billionaires than to properly fund our schools, we can't fix education.

We know how to fix education. But the billionaires aren't interested in actually fixing education. They're interested in profit. If they get their way, the country will be much the worse for it.

KY Chamber Pushing State-Ruining Legislation

Remember: No matter how civic-minded are the members of your local Chamber of Commerce, the national and state organizations are run by big corporations who don't give a flying fuck about genuinely small businesses.  The laws and policies the Chamber pushes are beneficial only to Wall Street, and death to Main Street.

John Cannon at the Independent:

Staying the ground on education reform, allowing for charter schools, enacting liability reforms, giving local governments the option to impose a local option sales tax, and approving a statewide ban on public smoking are among the top  items the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce is advocating as the Kentucky General Assembly begins its 60-day legislative session in January.

For details on how education deform improves nothing but the speed at which taxpayer dollars flow into the pockets of private corporations, and how charter schools kill local public schools, read Diane Ravitch's Reign of Error.

"Liability reform" takes away your individual right to sue the big bank that falsely foreclosed on your home, or the big corporation whose product killed your child or the chain store that had you falsely arrested for shoplifting.

Sales taxes directly harm low-income working people and local businesses who depend on their custom.

And while fewer people smoking benefits Kentucky in many ways, local bans and social pressure seem to be working well enough to make me wonder just how a statewide ban would benefit the Chamber. Maybe give the false impression that the Chamber supports public health? Check its position on Obamacare and kynect - supporter of good health it is not.

Prescribing Arsenic for A Stomach-Ache

That's what replacing poor-performing public schools with private charter schools will do. But that's what a bunch of either misinformed or bought-off Louisville ministers are proposing.

From the Courier:

A Louisville group of African-American ministers said Friday that it wants charter schools to replace the 18 low-performing Jefferson County public schools that have been ordered to undergo overhauls.

Private charters do worse than merely fail to improve student learning; they actually perform worse than poor public schools while costing taxpayers more and devastating local communities. The ones that appear to succeed are cheating.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

It never ceases to amaze me, that voters keep falling for the same old tricks. An already-expensive school system will magically perform even better when a private company slashes costs in order to skim a layer of profit off the top? It hasn't worked yet. Instead, these for-profit schools continue to manufacture scandal and fraud -- yet the Very Important People on both sides of the aisle continue to push them as a solution. Via Raw Story:

A for-profit school that was hyped by Republican lawmakers as a solution to Tennessee’s education problems recently admitted deleting bad grades to “more accurately recognize students’ current progress.”

SNIP
Democratic state Rep. Gloria Johnson said she was horrified because the school’s instructions amounted to cheating.

SNIP
The Virtual School Act was pushed through by lobbyists and approved by Republican lawmakers in the closing minutes of the May 2011 legislative session. The bill allowed Union County Public Schools to contract with K12 Inc. to set up Tennessee Virtual Academy. In exchange, Union County was expected to keep 4 percent of the $5,387 being sent to the private company for each student.

Democratic lawmakers are now attempting to cap enrollment at 5,000 after 2011 test scores showed that only 16.4 percent of middle school students were proficient in math, and only 39.3 percent were proficient in language arts.

Need more proof private charters are poison?  Here's Laura Conaway at Maddowblog:

Last year the state of Michigan took over the struggling school district in Muskegon Heights. With a promise of "dramatic changes" ahead, the state-appointed emergency manager announced, "[W]e're off to the healing process." He then laid-off the school district's entire staff, and hired a private, for-profit company to run the reconstituted charter system.

How's it going there now? Michigan Public Radio reports that as of last month, just over 10 percent of the Muskegon Heights teachers it checked through public records were not certified to teach. That could be costly for the district, which was already broke. From MPR:

A little quick math and salary records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show those fines could add up to more than $100,000 in Muskegon Heights for these eight teachers.

Not only that, but the contract between Mosaica Education and Muskegon Heights’ charter school says the company has to follow state laws, including a specific mention of the need for teachers to hold a valid certificate. If it doesn’t, it could be grounds to revoke the 5-year contract worth at least $8.75 million dollars.

But it’s not at all clear that’s something the charter school board, that’s been appointed by Muskegon Heights Public Schools’ Emergency Manager Don Weatherspoon, is considering.

With the old school board long sidelined, the people of Muskegon Heights have no immediate means of weighing in on what happens there anymore.

Kids in poor neighborhoods do poorly in school because of poverty: you can't concentrate in school if you're not getting enough to eat, or enough sleep because your home isn't safe. Charter schools can't fix that. But they are extremely efficient at sucking tax dollars out of public education and into the pockets of education deform hucksters.

They Are Not Reformers, But Thieves

Just as with tax "reform," the proponents of education "reform" are out not to improve the public system, but to strip its assets to enrich corporations and the wealthy.

Even as yet more proof piles up that charter schools perform worse, not better than their public counterparts ...

From Firedoglake:

Charter schools only accept the students they want from the pool of applicants, unlike public schools. Charter schools also pay teachers less, on average, than public schools. The result? In Chicago, not one charter elementary school was in the top 40 on ISAT scores.

... anti-teacher "reformers" push frantically to privatize even more public resources.

 Scott Lemiuex at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Michelle Rhee is the most famous fraud among the education union-busters whose fake stories flatter various elites while doing nothing to advance the interests of underprivileged children. But Joel Klein, former chancellor of the NYC Department of Education, would seem to be another one. Like Rhee, he has pleasing anecdotes about how the education system has gone to hell because of unions that don’t care about education. But as Richard Rothstein explains, Klein’s tales hold up about as well as Rhee’s:

The lesson Klein, Duncan, and others draw from this autobiography is that poor children today fail because their teachers, unlike the 1950s Mr. Harris, are overprotected by union contracts, have low expectations for poor students, and so barely try to teach them. To correct this, Klein and others who call themselves “school reformers” hope to identify ineffective teachers and replace them with new ones who rest their security not on union rules but on an ability to rescue children from material and intellectual deprivation.

Unlike a politician’s biography, which gets vetted by the press, Klein’s account has never been questioned. That’s too bad, because in nearly every detail the story he tells is misleading or untrue. The misrepresentations call into question the reforms he and his acolytes promote.

The bottom line:

But his less-than-honest autobiography has been accepted unquestioningly by allies like Arne Duncan who use it, as he does, to support needless test obsession for millions of schoolchildren, on the theory that more accountability for teachers will cure our social ills. Klein’s story has contributed to the demoralization of tens of thousands of teachers who are now blamed for their low-income students’ poor test scores. Klein and Duncan’s conclusion that public schools must be failing because they don’t perform the miracles they allegedly performed in the past has helped justify a rapid expansion of charter schools. Most charter schools have done no better for disadvantaged children than the schools from which they came, while stripping regular schools of their most motivated students. Contemporary reforms have produced much turmoil in public education but little or no meaningful improvement. Meanwhile, social inequality has grown and with it, challenges to educators hoping to narrow the achievement gap.

Right now, Kentucky legislators are pre-filing bills for the General Assembly session that starts in January.  Have no doubt that bills to cut public education while establishing private charters will feature prominently.

I Support Public School Teachers

Because the Chicago Teachers Union strike is just the beginning of a long fight against public school Deform: against replacing actual teaching with high-stakes testing; against using tax dollars to enrich charter and voucher con artists; against using crumbling schools and impoverished students to punish teachers; against eliminating public employee unions and crippling public education.

Which side are you on?

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money ends a passionate plea with this:

The Chicago Teachers Union deserves the world because they take kids like me out of working-class families and help them fulfill their dreams. Those who attack them place themselves on the other side of the class divide, on the side that promotes social inequality and the side that provides no incentives for good teachers to stay in working-class schools since poor test scores, largely a result of poverty, will cost them their job. They claim to help children but don’t understand poor public schools; they claim to support policies that will improve education but promote ideas that will enrich capitalists at the expense of students.

And these pundits, these people who have never worried about money a single day in their lives, who were born with a silver foot in their mouth to quote Ann Richards, claim to support unions but never actually provide that support when working or middle-class people decide that enough is enough and walk off their jobs for the betterment of themselves, their families, and their community. And that makes me very, very angry. To quote Campos from yesterday’s post on Yglesias’ commentary, “Look, either you support this strike or you don’t. If you don’t support it on the merits then come out and say so, and why. If you do support it, then say so, and why.”

Indeed. You are either on the side of teachers or on the side of those who will crush their union. In the middle of the strike, there is no gray area. Which side are you on? I side with the people who changed my life.

Me, too.  I became a writer because of a hard-ass English teacher who refused to cut me any slack. Maybe ten percent of the students in that rural Kentucky high school went on to college, but every one of us did so because of a teacher who made the difference.

UPDATE: Charles Pierce is on the ground covering the strike and just nailing the anti-teacher deformers to the fucking wall.

Quote of the Day

On those attacking striking Chicago teachers, via Erik Loomis, Alex Pareene tweets:

Fun fact: pundits supporting test-based teacher evals work in a field with no professional consequences for making readers stupider

Go Charter - or the Kids Get It

You people are just not rejecting public schools in favor of corporate drone factories fast enough. Time for some Two-Minute Hate!

karoli at Crooks and Liars:

There is a frontal assault on public schools coming (Saturday), courtesy of Phil Anschutz, ALEC and Wal-Mart. ProPublica has the story:

The world’s largest private-sector employer and the country’s most prominent conservative entertainment company have teamed up to sponsor a fundraiser called “Teachers Rock.”

Backed by Walmart and Anschutz Film Group, the August 14 event will feature live performances from musicians like Josh Groban and appearances from actresses like Viola Davis; it will be broadcast August 18 as a CBS special with messages from actresses like Meryl Streep. And it will promote the upcoming feature film Won’t Back Down, Anschutz’s entry in the “education reform” wars.

Won’t Back Down is reportedly a highly sympathetic fictional portrayal of “parent trigger” laws, a major flashpoint in debates over education and collective bargaining. Under such laws, the submission of signatures from a majority of parents in a school triggers a “turnaround option,” which can mean the replacement of a unionized school with a non-union charter. Such laws have been passed in several states, but due to court challenges, the "trigger" process has never been fully implemented.

SNIP

The point of the movie is to get parents all excited about the ALEC-created "parent trigger" law, or what is more commonly referred to among teachers as the "parent tricker law." The "parent trigger" law is effective here in California, but efforts to actually pull that trigger have been turned back, at least so far.

The law allows parents to petition school boards to take over the school and then close it, turn it over to a charter management firm, or firing all of the staff. All three options are a way of scapegoating and shaming teachers. Oh, and nullification of the teachers' union contracts. Big surprise there.

SNIP

Post parent-trigger, the WalMart model for public education kicks in. Inexperienced teachers with no seat at the table and a corporate profit model make a school into something else, something that's not necessarily good for students or their parents. Worse yet, the so-called trigger is based upon test results that are not necessarily reflective of the school's performance or student achievement.

SNIP

At any rate, this parent trigger isn't being pulled by parents. It's being pulled by outside organizations like StudentsFirst and for-profit organizations who stand to profit.


SNIP

The movie, due to open September 28, is produced by 20th Century Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and Walden Media, owned by Philip Anschutz. Murdoch’s right-wing politics are well known. Anschutz is an oil-and-gas billionaire who co-produced the anti-teacher film, “Waiting for ‘Superman’.” He contributes to organizations that oppose gay rights and support teaching creationism in schools. Anschutz has also donated to Americans for Prosperity, founded by the Koch brothers, which opposes environmental regulations and union rights, and to the political career of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

Because of how this event and the movie is being marketed, it's playing like a big parent empowerment movie that everyone should march out of with a song in their heart and triggers in their hand. It's soft-played from the privatization side, just like Paul Ryan's Medicare-murdering proposals. Using terms like "choice" and "voice", they soft-pedal the end of universal education and universal health care for seniors with equal alacrity.

Spread the word. They lie.

Don't be fooled by school "reform" that promises to bring corporate efficiency to education. Think Wall Street and Bain Capitol, and look to Louisiana, where the repug "public' education vision is coming true:

Casey Michael at TPM:

Only a month before nearly 120 Louisiana schools are set to welcome their first voucher students, the state has finally released a slate of standards that approved schools must meet in order to receive both students and concurrent state dollars. And while the standards, created by Superintendent John White and approved by the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) this week, are widely considered a step in the right direction, voucher opponents say the standards fall far short from the accountability they sought.

Where every public school in Louisiana is subjected to a standardized slate of testing, the voucher students — who will bring an average of $8,000 in tuition from “failing” public schools to many that are affiliated with religious denominations — will only need to face testing if their new school has taken an average of 10 students per grade, or if the schools have accepted at least 40 voucher students into the grades testing.

 SNIP

Opponents say the greatest weakness in the standards is not that 75 percent of the schools accepting voucher students aren’t subjected to any penalties, or that many of the schools in that 75-percent umbrella teach an amalgamation of Christianist creationism and anti-scientific methods — including rebuts to evolutionist theories and proof that the Loch Ness Monster still exists.

Rather, they say, the big problem lies in the fact that the students may be transferring, on the taxpayers’ dime, to a school that will score worse than the one from which they left. That is, a student can leave a public school if it scores a “C” or below on state standardized testing — but if the new private school scores the minimum of 50, the equivalent of a D-minus, it could still recruit new voucher students.

“There are still 19 schools that we know about that are blatantly teaching creationism … [and] we’re funding them with state money,” Zack Copplin, who monitors Gov. Bobby Jindal’s education reforms, told TPM. “White says he’s waiting on state testing and things like that, and that’s absolutely absurd. We know that the these schools don’t meet the public schools standards that they’re supposed to be better than.”

Students in charter and voucher schools nationwide will learn less than a 16th-century serf, but they will make excellent obedient, underpaid and unquestioning corporate drones.

Setting Up Schools to Fail So Corporations Can Profit

Remember that what corporations want is not educated citizens - those are the troublemakers who prevent corporations from killing people and taking over the world.

Corporations want ignorant, obedient drones incapable of thinking for themselves or doing anything but following orders.

So now those oh-so-benevolent corporate sponsors of "education reform" are gaming the system to make sure schools fail to meet phony standards, thus forcing them to become corporate-owned-and-operated charter - well, you can't really call them "schools." "Drone factories" is more accurate.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

This really goes to the heart of the morally bankrupt education "reform" movement. Pushed more by corporate interests and right-wing foundations than the needs of the students, standardized tests set impossibly high standards that relatively few students -- or teachers -- can reach. That's why Marion Brady, a teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author, forwarded this shockingly informative piece to the education page of the Washington Post:

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.

He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Here’s the clincher in what he wrote:

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”

“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

Go read the rest, it's quite eye-opening.

As I've written before, public education is just that - public education. Performed by public servants paid with public taxpayer dollars for the benefit of the public. Any education "reform" that inserts a profit-seeking corporation into the mix is by definition not public education.