Does Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's "turnaround" school-reform model work? News from one of Duncan's first turnaround schools, William T. Sherman Elementary in Chicago, is mixed. Yes, test scores are up, and that's a good thing for the 591-student elementary in the city's violence-plagued Englewood neighborhood. The bad news? It took five years to see results, and the scores still aren't as high as the average Chicago public school.
Duncan ordered a turnaround plan for Sherman back in 2006 when he was still Chicago's superintendent of schools. Sherman was the first campus placed under the jurisdiction of what was at the time a new non-profit turnaround organization, the Academy for Urban School Leadership. As an AUSL turnaround school, Sherman gave students renovated facilities, a new curriculum, and an entirely new staff—new principals, new teachers, even new custodians.
A year after the turnaround, the Chicago parent organization Parents United for Responsible Education researched Sherman's data and found, "during its first turnaround year, Sherman had a 20 percent drop in enrollment, a 10 percent drop in the number of low-income children, a 17 percent increase in the mobility rate, a lower parent involvement rate and lower science test scores."
Even though more critics said AUSL's efforts were unproven, Duncan handed over a dozen more schools to the organization.
After Duncan accepted President Obama's offer of the Secretary of Education job, he touted Sherman and the turnaround method as central to education reform. Indeed, turning around schools is one of the key pieces of Duncan and Obama''s national Race to the Top initiative. Duncan regularly refers to the school as a success, even though Sherman's 68-percent average in math last year is lower than non-turnaround regular public schools, and is below the Illinois state average.
Taking the turnaround method of reform national has another problem beyond effectiveness. It could lead to lawsuits. A group of mostly black, female teachers fired from dozens of Chicago turnaround schools just won a discrimination suit against Duncan. In the suit, the teachers said they were being replaced with, "less experienced, younger, whiter teachers at lower salaries." According to the judge's ruling, Chicago has 30 days to rehire the teachers axed through the turnaround process.
So let me get this straight - the turnaround model that Duncan and Obama are promoting from Chicago doesn't work.
The school Duncan promotes as a "model" for his turnaround program doesn't do as well as the other schools in Chicago even though they brought in new students, fired the entire staff right down to the fucking lunch lady, and have had five years to improve.
And yet somehow nobody in the media has called Duncan on this.
Not one of the stenographers at TIME or Newsweek or even Education Week has said "Hey, you know what, Arne? We noticed your model turnaround school in Chicago kinda sucks. It doesn't do as well as other Chicago schools. And they've had five years to improve. So how come you're using the same turnaround model that failed at that school as the turnaround model for the entire country?"
Nope - not one media stenographer has asked Duncan that question. They're too busy fellating him on Morning Joe to bother checking out to see if what he says about his education record is true IS ACTUALLY TRUE.
Now it could be that the reason they don't bother to ask this question is because they know his turnaround model is bullshit but they don't care too much because the agenda is NOT to improve schools but to actually do EXACTLY what Arne did in Chicago - fire staff, get rid of the black people in the school system, shed expensive salaries and hire cheap, stupid, young, white, female missionaries who work 60 hours a week for three years until they get smarter and realize THEY'RE BEING EXPLOITED.
Yeah, that could be it.
Check that - that IS why they don't ask that question.
So Monday I'm going to call both the DOE and the White House and ask the question for myself.
You should do so too.
Maybe write your local papers and ask the same question.
It seems like an important question to ask.
Matt Taibi is a relentless "disser" of Tom Friedman the writer.
ReplyDeleteRecent review of Friedman book by Taibbi. Seems like Friedman is married to a filthy rich woman, and they had thousands of acres of pristine Hawaian land razed for a massive shopping mall, or some such. They also live in an exorbitant, opulent home or homes. So OF COURSE we should kiss this little creeps ass every time he farts in our direction:
"When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.
Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything—just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts— along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.
Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.
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ReplyDelete"I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Thomas Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care about—in particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.
Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:
The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging.When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”
First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen."
The ONLY way "turnaround" would work is if schools replaced their entire student body with students from wealthier areas.
ReplyDelete(cont.)
ReplyDeleteTo review quickly, the “Long Bomb” Iraq war plan Friedman supported as a means of transforming the Middle East blew up in his and everyone else’s face; the “Electronic Herd” of highly volatile international capital markets he once touted as an economic cure-all not only didn’t pan out, but led the world into a terrifying chasm of seemingly irreversible economic catastrophe; his beloved “Golden Straitjacket” of American-style global development (forced on the world by the “hidden fist” of American military power) turned out to be the vehicle for the very energy/ecological crisis Friedman himself warns about in his new book; and, most humorously, the “Flat World” consumer economics Friedman marveled at so voluminously turned out to be grounded in such total unreality that even his wife’s once-mighty shopping mall empire, General Growth Properties, has lost 99 percent of its value in this year alone.
So, yes, Friedman is suddenly an environmentalist of sorts.
What the fuck else is he going to be? All the other ideas he spent the last ten years humping have been blown to hell. Color me unimpressed that he scrounged one more thing to sell out of the smoldering, discredited wreck that should be his career; that he had the good sense to quickly reinvent himself before angry Gods remembered to dash his brains out with a lightning bolt. But better late than never, I suppose. Or as Friedman might say, “Better two cell phones than a fish in your zipper.”
So, basically Friedman is a lot like Arne Duncan . . . a vacuous , ineffective, windbag, but he's IN THE CLUB . . .
ReplyDeleteSad...really sad . . . They destroyed our economy, so now the only place to steal from is the public trough. The private consumer dollar is tapped out, so now they steal tax dollars in broad daylight. Kind of tells you what they were all about all along, eh? The Pinstripe Pirates don't play . .
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ReplyDeleteA lot of that article was omitted. However, it goes on to detail all of the Friedman predictions and utterances that have proved to be bogus over the last 20 years. This guy is a complete loser. Where is the accountability? If you're in The Club, there is no accountability. That's only for the slaves.
Another Anon: Remember Rod Paige and the "Texas Education Miracle?"
ReplyDeleteChicago Trib article reprinted here is pretty compelling:
ReplyDeletehttp://millermps.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/chicago-school-reform-plan-launched-during-duncan%E2%80%99s-tenure-fails-%E2%80%9Cto-make-the-grade%E2%80%9D/