IFF study of D.C. schools: The pushback begins

Great news!!! Bill Turque's blog today coveredTeacher and Parents for Real Ed Reform and SHAAPE's critique of the IFF with a link to the Teachers and Parents blog. See Turque's Washington Post piece below:

Posted in the Washington Post at 11:19 AM ET, 01/31/2012

Click here to go directly to the article in site of origin.

By Bill Turque

Deputy Mayor for Education De’Shawn Wright has encountered some sharply negative responses to the IFF study of school capacity in the nation’s capital.

The study commissioned by D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), made public Jan. 26, divided traditional public and public charter schools into four tiers, based primarily on test scores. It took a deep dive into 10 seriously underserved neighborhoods to assess their education needs.

Wright stresses that IFF delivered recommendations only, and he promises that the report is the beginning of a long conversation with communities about the future of their schools. But his statement Monday that the report “does not call for the closure” of DCPS schools and “does not recommend transforming those schools into charter schools” contradicts what is in the document.

On page six, the report says (with my addition of bold type for relevant passages):

“IFF recommends:

1. Invest in facilities and programs to accelerate performance in Tier 2 schools.

2. Close or turnaround Tier 4 DCPS schools. Close Tier 4 charter schools.

3. Fill seats in Tier 1 schools, Sustain the performing capacity of Tier 1 schools.

4. Monitor Tier 3 schools.”

On Page 42, Recommendation 2 says:

“Within the Top Ten [underserved neighborhoods] close all Tier 4 charter schools or negotiate a transfer of the charter to a Tier 1 charter operator. U ndertake a cost/benefit analysis to determine whether to turnaround or close Tier 4 DCPS schools.”

On Page 43:

“If the cost/benefit analysis reveals that renovation is prohibitively expensive or an alternative DCPS school is a better investment, t he school should be closed.”

A bit further down on the same page:

“To retain building capacity, coordinate the closure of DCPS schools with [the Public Charter School Board]. As necessary, authorize a charter school within the same building or in the immediate vicinity before school closure.”

Wright appears to be trying to contain the incendiary politics that come with these issues. Over the last few days, some observers who were skeptical of IFF because of its connections to the charter movementhave questioned the report’s methodology and conclusions.

Washington Teachers’ Union president Nathan Saunders expressed concern about the implications for traditional public school jobs. He described the report as “an assault on traditional public education and a serious threat to thousands of public school teachers that shoulder the responsibility of educating children every day in the District of Columbia.” He’s called a Feb. 23 membership meeting to discuss possible union actions. None of the District’s charter schools have unionized teachers--consistent with the pattern in most charters around the country.

In a letter to Gray, Cathy Reilly of SHAPPE (Senior High Alliance of Parents, Principals and Educators) said the report leaves an impression that decisions have been made before people have had a chance to be heard.

“The choice to release this report with these recommendations as the out-of-boundary and enrollment process prepares to kick off has already hurt and destabilized the very neighborhoods we should be working to strengthen,” Reilly said. “Even if unintentionally, it sent the message to the communities where trust is very thin, that decisions have all ready been made. This severely threatens the potential of a process that will truly engage our citizens in a conversation about the quality education we all want.”

Mark Simon of Teachers and Parents for Real Education Reform, questioned IFF’s heavy reliance on test score data, especially in light of evidence that raises the possibility scores were inflated at some schools by cheating in 2008-09. Simon added:

“The IFF researchers failed to consider recent history in DCPS, before making their recommendations. The track record of school turnarounds in DCPS since 2008 has been an embarrassment. Outside management firms have been brought in to run Dunbar, Anacostia, and Coolidge high schools. Two have abandoned their partners. None of them have achieved significantly better results. School consolidations have led to explosive results at Hart MS and elsewhere. The national report card for national charter chains has not been good. In other words, there is no silver bullet contained in changing the management of schools. Nevertheless, the folks at IFF are wedded to this recommendation as their bias. It will be resisted in DC for good reason.”

By Bill Turque | 11:19 AM ET, 01/31/2012

Tags: DCPS Wright, DCPS IFF

Parents Across America releases a proposal for real parent empowerment in schools-An antidote to phony “parental choice”

Posted in the Parents Across America (<-----Click on Parent Across America to go to their website)

Press release * For immediate release

January 31, 2012

Contacts:

Julie Woestehoff, PAA co-founder, Parents United for Responsible Education, Chicago 773-715-3989

Leonie Haimson, PAA co-founder, Class Size Matters, New York City – 212-674-7320

Lorie Barzano, PAA, The Coalition to Strengthen Austin (TX) Urban Schools – 512-447-5577

Karran Harper Royal, PAA founder, Education advocate – 504-722-8174

Chicago, IL and other cities across the US – Today, Parents Across America (PAA), a non-partisan, non-profit national network of public school parent activists, released a proposal for true parent empowerment that authentically involves parents in collaborative school decision making and has a strong research base in improving student achievement. Please see our position paper, “The Empowerment Parents Want: A Real, Effective Voice in our Children’s Education.”

PAA proposes its “LSC model,” a form of elected parent-majority school governance, as an antidote to recent efforts of corporate school reformers to brand parent triggers, school choice, vouchers and other attacks on public education as “parental empowerment.”

We know that these strategies do not reflect what most parents actually want, or what works for children and schools. A 2010 Phi Delta Kappa poll found that 54 percent of Americans think the best thing to do about low-performing schools is to keep the school open with the same staff and give it more support. Only 17 percent wanted to close the school and reopen it with a new principal, and just 13 percent wanted to replace it with a charter school.

Even strong charter school proponent Ben Austin, of the Parent Revolution, recently said that parents at most of the schools his organization is working with are not interested in turning their school into a charter school, but rather want to focus on improving their existing schools (EdSource Extra, 1/12/12).

According to parent Lorie Barzano of the Coalition to Strengthen Austin (TX) Urban Schools, PAA’s newest affiliate, “At every meeting I have attended in the past year, at least one parent speaks out that ‘we want to fix our public schools, not bring in outside contractors or untested experiments.’ ”

It’s not that parents aren’t concerned about bad schools. We are. But, as explained in a recent report by Public Agenda, “What’s Trust Got to do with it?,” parents and community members give tremendous value to their local public schools. Closing their schools feels like a body blow – as though the community itself is being written off.

Parents also doubt the ability of elected officials and district leaders to make the right intervention and policy decisions; in fact, Public Agenda found that a strong majority of the public trusts the judgment of parents and teachers far more.

This lack of trust is reinforced when public officials cozy up to wealthy hedge fund operators, venture philanthropists, and school privatizers, take their marching orders from astroturf advocacy groups, or “rent” supporters, as recently happened during school closing hearings in Chicago.

“Parents in New York City and elsewhere are furious about the way in which their children’s public schools are being forced to close, or share space with charter schools,” said Leonie Haimson, a co-founder of PAA and the head of Class Size Matters. “School choice does not really exist when the priorities of thousands of parents to strengthen their local public schools, rather than write them off, are completely dismissed by policy makers.”

In New Orleans, parents’ efforts to have a voice in charter schools have been blocked. “(Louisiana State School Superintendent) John White wants us to believe that we can give input to those charters and they will run the schools based on our input. There is nothing in law that requires them to hear us. In fact, the time to engage the community should have been before the charter was written, not after. This is fake community engagement; input after you write a charter is not authentic community engagement,” said New Orleans parent Karran Harper Royal, a founding member of PAA.

Rather than requiring parents to “trigger” a restrictive, damaging set of reforms or shop around among wildly divergent charter schools, PAA supports the kind of empowerment which involves parents authentically at the ground level and in district-, state-, and nationwide policy discussions about how to improve schools.

To provide the opportunity for such authentic parent involvement at the local school level, PAA recommends adoption of a school governance model based on Chicago’s Local School Councils. 
LSCs are duly-elected, parent-majority bodies at nearly every Chicago public school. They have real power – including hiring, evaluating and firing a school’s principal. LSCs oversee a school wide process of program and budget evaluation, planning, and monitoring that offers the kind of collaborative effort researchers say is needed to make local reform succeed.

Chicago’s LSCs have proven to be a positive
 element of effective school reform for nearly two decades (for details, please see the fact sheet, “Research Shows that Local School Councils Help Improve Schools!”.

“Anyone interested in learning about and advancing democratic, participatory models of parent representation and governance needs to understand the operational history of Local School Council (LSCs) in Chicago, Illinois. As a teacher, organizer, and parent advocate, I highly recommend those interested in improving conditions in public education investigate the LSC model as an archetype for change,” said Mark Friedman, a PAA member from Rochester, NY.

PAA understands that parent involvement and the LSC model are not magic bullets.
 Chicago’s schools, for example. continue to struggle for a variety of reasons — despite 
the best efforts of LSCs.

However, the LSC model is a vastly superior “choice” for 
involving parents when included in a comprehensive set of research-based 
reforms including equitable and sufficient funding, pre-K programs, full-day Kindergarten, small classes,
 strong, experienced teachers, a well-rounded 
curriculum and evaluation systems that go beyond test scores.*

We believe that
 parents will be truly empowered, and children better educated, only when parents
 are full partners in education policy making.

Why the Education State of the Union Matters

Sabrina Stevens Shupe

Teacher-turned-activist; Writer

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Posted in the Huffington Post : 01/29/2012 6:25 pm

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(Or, A Tale of Two Speeches)

Over at Teacher in a Strange Land, Nancy Flanagan asked, ""Who speaks for public education?"

I'd answer that a lot of people do (for better, and for worse) but we don't all get the same kind of microphone, or the same airtime.

After watching the State of the Union address Tuesday night, I found myself thinking about the differences between President Obama's statements on education and those of California Governor Jerry Brown.

In public statements over the past year, Governor Brown has said what many educators and parents nationwide have been saying for over a decade: that current state and federal education policy has emphasized high-stakes testing so much it has distorted and undermined the learning process. And in his address, he outlined a specific direction for policymakers: that the amount of standardized testing be reduced, that the data be returned to schools more quickly and that more qualitative measures of school performance be developed and used. He ended his education remarks with these words:

The house of education is divided by powerful forces and strong emotions. My role as governor is not to choose sides but to listen, to engage and to lead. I will do that. I embrace both reform and tradition -- not complacency. My hunch is that principals and teachers know the most, but I'll take good ideas from wherever they come.

By contrast, in the State of the Union Tuesday night, President Obama made vague allusions to a few existing K-12 education policies. They include paying teachers to increase test scores ("merit" pay) and encouraging states to seek 'waivers' that exchange freedom from NCLB's impossible requirements for the adoption of the Administration's preferred policies, which are just as strict. Hidden in applause lines aboutrewarding the best teachers and granting flexibility are unproven policies that many researchers and public school stakeholders agree are hurting education.

But, some ask, why does this matter? Neither of these leaders have any direct say over what happens in classrooms. Speaking strictly literally, school systems are typically run by local district officials and school board members (or mayoral appointees... ) overseeing schools, principals and teachers. So why should we care what a president, or even a governor, says or does about schools?

Because aside from the influence and funding at their disposal, their policy advocacy shapes public perceptions of public education, and those perceptions shape our behavior. (They have bigger microphones, and better airtime.)

It pains me to say this, but it's the truth: Most people have no clue what goes on in their local government. Everyone knows who the president is; most people know who their governor is. But how many people can even name their representatives on their town council or school board without a Google search? Of them, how many know what their policy positions are, or how they've voted to spend their neighbors' property taxes? (Answer: Not a whole lot.)

As I talked to Denver voters during our local school board races last fall, it was clear that -- exceptionally involved community members excluded -- most voters were taking their cues on how to vote from what they'd heard about education in the national media. (This is why it's possible for the majority of people toapprove of their local schools and teachers, but believe that public education as a whole is failing.)

So when a governor says he believes principals and teachers know the most about education, and asks for policies that reemphasize teaching and learning instead of testing, that matters. And when a president says he wants teachers to teach with creativity and passion, but uses the influence of the federal government to increase high-stakes testing, that matters too.

For starters, voters who consistently hear positive messages about how schools should be funded, and teachers trusted, are probably going to be more inclined to support policies that fund schools and empower teachers. And when under-informed voters hear misleading statements about "merit" and "flexibility," they're being set up to support policies, at all levels of government, that will hurt schools instead of helping them.

Moreover, when the most powerful and visible leaders promote a vision of schooling that works from the bottom up, they empower the local actors who do the work to do what they think is best. But when those leaders deceive the public, and position themselves as the grantors of "flexibility" and the arbiters of "merit," local stakeholders get stuck dealing with inappropriate (and just plain bad) policy, which can create some pretty toxic circumstances where the rubber meets the road.

Of course, we shouldn't (as one Tweeter accused) "blame the POTUS" entirely for bad things happening in our local schools, nor should we give a governor undue credit if and when his state's schools improve. But high-profile leaders wield a disproportionate amount of power over the circumstances under which public school stakeholders work. And we have every right to demand that they wield that power responsibly.

Follow Sabrina Stevens Shupe on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TeacherSabrina