The Old Paradigms For Education Cannot Work In This World Anymore

The editorials from the NY Post about de Blasio and Farina get more vicious and ridiculous by the day.

Today's is about how ruthless competition among schools and putting extra stress on students is the key to success for children:

In the course of admitting he didn’t have a good reason for taking a good school away from kids in Harlem, Mayor de Blasio said that to fix a “broken” city school system, we have to “shake the foundations.”

Today, some 1,500 students and teachers from Success Academy charter schools will be doing that at the Armory on the Hudson. They are holding a giant pep rally as they head into next week’s tests. It’s called “Slam the Exam!” And it’s a terrific example of how to “shake the foundations” of a public-school system mired in low expectations and even lower performance.

This Empire is centrally organized, overly bureaucratic and failing 85 percent of our black and Latino students.

Yet it has its defenders. Look at Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña. She’s already made clear charter children are not her concern. So what does she tell principals of the children who are her concern? Not to go overboard on “test preparation.” Hmm. Wonder if that’s the approach in Singapore or South Korea, whose students score well above ours in reading, math and science.

Fariña worries about “stressing” students. She should go to the armory today. These kids believe they can compete with the best of them, and that tests give them an opportunity to prove it. So their approach to testing is simple: “Bring it on.”

Then there’s Mayor de Blasio’s idea of shaking it up, which is to take away good schools for kids if they are charters and keep failing schools open if they are traditional schools. That’s the instinct of the old guard who put teachers union above student performance.

The mayor complains about competition. But competition is the key to shaking the foundations. Because charters are showing kids can learn, and in so doing, deprive failing public schools of excuses. And they invite comparisons important to parents.

Our students need more of this, no matter how much the Empire of the mayor and his schools chancellor may strike back.

I figured when the Post published the story a few days ago about Farina talking about the rash of suicides that has struck New York City school students the last seven weeks, they would look to use her statements against her.

And they are - they're mocking her for worrying that the current system is "stressing" students, that she should instead be teaching these kids the kind of "grit" and "determination" the Success Academy students show while trying to "Slam the Exam!"

The sociopath who wrote this editorial clearly does not understand that teaching kids to divorce themselves from their feelings and use external events and extrinsic motivation to get through works to make for a good and healthy life in the long run.

Neither does Jeb Bush, who defended the Common Core this week by railing against people who worry that the current battery of education reforms isn't healthy for children.

The refrain from the reformers is always the same here: "Screw what you think or feel, do what you have to do to succeed the way we tell you to succeed!"

One of the reasons we have such a screwed up culture these days is because so many people are divorced from their inner selves, so many people are leading lives of distraction and isolation, alone with their technology and their material things.

This is the sort of culture sociopaths like Jeb Bush and the Murdoch people like because it keeps them in the money, everybody playing on their field with their rules, with competition and materialism the highest order of the day.

One of the best lessons we can teach students these days is to be able to judge if they want to live by these rules the Bushes and their ilk make for them or if they want to find their own way in life, find their own sources of value and beauty.

I dunno, might be the Jesuit education I received as a teen, but I come from the school of education that looks to teach kids to have the confidence that they can find their own way in a society and a culture that is clearly troubled and getting worse by the year.

I'm not a big fan of teaching them to "slam the exam!" or telling them to get some "grit" to outcompete everyone else.

According to the sociopaths at the Post, that makes me a bad educator.

I'm supposed to be teaching children to "slam the exam!", to learn "grit" and "determination" to succeed no matter the cost.

But looking around at what is left of our dying ecosystem, deteriorating economy and dreadful culture, I think we need to find a different way for education going forward that emphasizes collaboration over competition, intrinsic motivation over extrinsic, and new ways of looking at ourselves and our world that take into account not just the material but also the emotional and, dare I say, the spiritual.

How's that for "shaking the foundations!"?

Oh and about South Korea and their terrific education system?

It leads the world not just in test scores but also suicides of children and adults.

Jeb Bush Channels David Coleman In A Defense Of The Common Core

College Board President David Coleman, one of the architects of the Common Core State Standards, famously told an audience in New York State that one of the things you learn in life when you get older is that nobody gives a shit what you think or feel about stuff.

Jeb Bush channeled that Coleman sentiment in a recent defense of Common Core:

Bush has repeatedly explained the standards, implemented and controlled by the states, are designed to make the United States more competitive with the rest of the world. He said those who oppose the standards support the “status quo,” oppose testing and are worried too much about children’s self-esteem.

“Let me tell you something. In Asia today, they don’t care about children’s self esteem. They care about math, whether they can read – in English – whether they understand why science is important, whether they have the grit and determination to be successful,” Bush said.

“You tell me which society is going to be the winner in this 21st Century: The one that worries about how they feel, or the one that worries about making sure the next generation has the capacity to eat everybody’s lunch?”

We've covered how the education system is in China just a bit here at Perdido Street School blog, but I'm going to revisit two recent posts as a rebuttal to Jeb Bush's jive:

Tell Me Again Why The U.S. Should Mimic The Chinese Education System?

A lot of these suicide stories are coming from South Korea, another country with a high stakes education system that leads to an awful lot of stress and pressure on children and teens, but this one's from China:

Surveillance cameras have caught the shocking moment an under-pressure Chinese student jumped to his death during class.

Heart-stopping footage claims to show the at first motionless boy suddenly leaving his desk, running over to a ledge and leaping out.

His actual jump occurs out of shot, and was not filmed due to the camera's angle.

But the devastated reaction of his fellow classmates, who sprint over to see what's happened before pacing up and down with their heads in their hands, appears to suggest he had tried to commit suicide.

A commenter at the Daily News writes:

How much longer are we going to pretend that children are something to ignore, mistreat, and mis-educate..... This child was coerced into believing this test was so important that combined with the rest of the stress he was feeling he ended his life. Here in the US the children are equally mistreated but they are ignored and mistreated along with being misled.

The older you get the more you realize it's not that big of a deal, and that you should be focusing on aspects of education that actually aren't in the curriculum. This common core crap and the overstressing of test results are completely destroying our children's futures.

And that's absolutely what the plutocrats in power want.

 

And this one:

Many In China Hate The Chinese Education System - Even If Arne And Barack Love It!

From The Guardian:

The streets surrounding Shijia primary school in Beijing were mobbed by a crowd of parents so dense that cars were obliged to beat a retreat.

At 3.45pm on Friday, 11-year-old Zou Tingting, five minutes late, bounded through the school's west gate and into her waiting mother's arms. Tingting's classes were over, but her day was just beginning – she had an hour of homework, plus lessons in ping pong, swimming, art, calligraphy and piano.

Tingting's mother, Huang Chunhua, said that, like many Chinese mothers, she once considered Tingting's academic performance her top priority; now she realises the importance of a well-rounded education. "I've seen British curricular materials, and I'm actually kind of jealous," she said. "British teachers guide students to discover things on their own – they don't just feed them the answers, like in China."

In recent weeks British parents and educators have been in a panic about the discrepancy between the Chinese education system and the UK's. In December the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the 2012 results for its triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) test – a reading, maths and science examination administered to half a million 15-year-olds in 65 countries. Shanghai students topped the rankings; the UK ranked 26th.

Next week education minister Elizabeth Truss will lead a "fact-finding mission" to Shanghai to learn the secrets of China's success. She plans to adjust the UK's education policy accordingly.

Yet Chinese parents and educators see their own system as corrupt, dehumanising, pressurised and unfair. In fact, many are looking to the west for answers. Huang said that some parents bribe Shijia primary school to admit their children (though she declined to say whether she had done so herself).

Tingting attends an expensive cramming school at weekends, leaving her tired. She will probably have to abandon extracurricular activities in high school to devote more time to the college admission exam, called the gaokao. Many parents consider the gruelling nine-hour test a sorting mechanism that will determine the trajectory of their children's lives.

Chinese experts are also less impressed than Truss by the Pisa scores. "Even though Shanghai students scored well on the test, this doesn't mean that Shanghai's education system doesn't have any problems," said Lao Kaisheng, a professor in the education department of Beijing Normal University. "In fact, it's the opposite."

As long as China's education system remains vast but resource-constrained, Lao added, its schools will default to testing as a reliable indicator of competence. "The education system here puts a heavy emphasis on rote memorisation, which is great for students' test-taking ability but not for their problem-solving and leadership abilities or their interpersonal skills," he said. "Chinese schools just ignore these things."

Read the whole article - this is an important piece of journalism that gets at the lie that Asian education systems like the one's in China or South Korea, are vastly outperforming public schools in the United States or Britain.

We keep hearing from Duncan, Obama, et al. that the Chinese or the South Koreans are vastly outperforming us.

We hear the same from Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein et al.

But the truth is much more complex than the test scores these deformers hawk.

Later we'll take a look at the epidemic of suicides in South Korea and the misery many children in the South Korean education system feel over their circumstances.

I've asked this before, I'll as it again - is this the kind of education system we want to mimic here in the United States?

Tell Me Again Why The U.S. Should Mimic The Chinese Education System?

A lot of these suicide stories are coming from South Korea, another country with a high stakes education system that leads to an awful lot of stress and pressure on children and teens, but this one's from China:

Surveillance cameras have caught the shocking moment an under-pressure Chinese student jumped to his death during class.

Heart-stopping footage claims to show the at first motionless boy suddenly leaving his desk, running over to a ledge and leaping out.

His actual jump occurs out of shot, and was not filmed due to the camera's angle.

But the devastated reaction of his fellow classmates, who sprint over to see what's happened before pacing up and down with their heads in their hands, appears to suggest he had tried to commit suicide.

A commenter at the Daily News writes:

How much longer are we going to pretend that children are something to ignore, mistreat, and mis-educate..... This child was coerced into believing this test was so important that combined with the rest of the stress he was feeling he ended his life. Here in the US the children are equally mistreated but they are ignored and mistreated along with being misled.

The older you get the more you realize it's not that big of a deal, and that you should be focusing on aspects of education that actually aren't in the curriculum. This common core crap and the overstressing of test results are completely destroying our children's futures.

And that's absolutely what the plutocrats in power want.

Putting Common Core In Perspective

A commenter at the Newsday story reporting Cuomo is going to run his own pro-CCCSS ads:

CC is part of a world-wide corporate globalization initiative to dumb down teachers, currricula and students and turn them into scared, uncreative, unimaginative, test- taking drones. The de-skilling of teachers and students will turn them into lower-paid, passive people with the ultimate goal of increased corporate profits by cutting wages, benefits, teacher pay and destroying teacher unions. Junk it and go back to the old system which has produced outstanding students, teachers, districts and exceptional American innovation. Asians have a test-centered CC system producing uncreative drones. They rely on stealing US innovation or buying patents and US companies.

The corporate reformers, especially the politicians like Obama, keep talking up South Korea and China for their education systems.

But as we have seen here at Perdido Street School, we shouldn't be emulating either the South Koreans or the Chinese education systems.

Many In China Hate The Chinese Education System - Even If Arne And Barack Love It!

From The Guardian:

The streets surrounding Shijia primary school in Beijing were mobbed by a crowd of parents so dense that cars were obliged to beat a retreat.

At 3.45pm on Friday, 11-year-old Zou Tingting, five minutes late, bounded through the school's west gate and into her waiting mother's arms. Tingting's classes were over, but her day was just beginning – she had an hour of homework, plus lessons in ping pong, swimming, art, calligraphy and piano.

Tingting's mother, Huang Chunhua, said that, like many Chinese mothers, she once considered Tingting's academic performance her top priority; now she realises the importance of a well-rounded education. "I've seen British curricular materials, and I'm actually kind of jealous," she said. "British teachers guide students to discover things on their own – they don't just feed them the answers, like in China."

In recent weeks British parents and educators have been in a panic about the discrepancy between the Chinese education system and the UK's. In December the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the 2012 results for its triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) test – a reading, maths and science examination administered to half a million 15-year-olds in 65 countries. Shanghai students topped the rankings; the UK ranked 26th.

Next week education minister Elizabeth Truss will lead a "fact-finding mission" to Shanghai to learn the secrets of China's success. She plans to adjust the UK's education policy accordingly.

Yet Chinese parents and educators see their own system as corrupt, dehumanising, pressurised and unfair. In fact, many are looking to the west for answers. Huang said that some parents bribe Shijia primary school to admit their children (though she declined to say whether she had done so herself).

Tingting attends an expensive cramming school at weekends, leaving her tired. She will probably have to abandon extracurricular activities in high school to devote more time to the college admission exam, called the gaokao. Many parents consider the gruelling nine-hour test a sorting mechanism that will determine the trajectory of their children's lives.

Chinese experts are also less impressed than Truss by the Pisa scores. "Even though Shanghai students scored well on the test, this doesn't mean that Shanghai's education system doesn't have any problems," said Lao Kaisheng, a professor in the education department of Beijing Normal University. "In fact, it's the opposite."

As long as China's education system remains vast but resource-constrained, Lao added, its schools will default to testing as a reliable indicator of competence. "The education system here puts a heavy emphasis on rote memorisation, which is great for students' test-taking ability but not for their problem-solving and leadership abilities or their interpersonal skills," he said. "Chinese schools just ignore these things."

Read the whole article - this is an important piece of journalism that gets at the lie that Asian education systems like the one's in China or South Korea, are vastly outperforming public schools in the United States or Britain.

We keep hearing from Duncan, Obama, et al. that the Chinese or the South Koreans are vastly outperforming us.

We hear the same from Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein et al.

But the truth is much more complex than the test scores these deformers hawk.

Tom Friedman, Arne Duncan Miss This Part Of The South Korea Story

Tom Friedman wrote another doozy of a column this morning, blaming lazy American children and parents for the so-called education crisis in American schools.

He used an Arne Duncan speech from 2009 to drive his point home - American students and parents are lazy, American schools are bad.

Unlike, say, schools, parents and students in South Korea:

“In 2009, President Obama met with President Lee of South Korea and asked him about his biggest challenge in education. President Lee answered without hesitation: parents in South Korea were ‘too demanding.’ Even his poorest parents demanded a world-class education for their children, and he was having to spend millions of dollars each year to teach English to students in first grade, because his parents won’t let him wait until second grade. ... I [wish] our biggest challenge here in the U.S. was too many parents demanding excellent schools.

“I want to pose one simple question to you: Does a child in South Korea deserve a better education than your child?” Duncan continued. “If your answer is no ... then your work is cut out for you. Because right now, South Korea — and quite a few other countries — are offering students more, and demanding more, than many American districts and schools do. And the results are showing, in our kids’ learning and in their opportunities to succeed, and in staggeringly large achievement gaps in this country. Doing something about our underperformance will mean raising your voice — and encouraging parents who aren’t as engaged as you to speak up. Parents have the power to challenge educational complacency here at home. Parents have the power to ask more of their leaders — and to ask more of their kids.”

Here's that world class South Korean school system in a nutshell:

SEOUL: Nearly 140 South Korean school students killed themselves in 2012, according to a new government report that cited family problems, depression and exam stress as the main triggers.

The report, published this week by the Education Ministry, covered all students from elementary to high school.

The figure of 139 suicides recorded last year was the lowest for three years, but still worryingly high in a country with one of the world’s highest overall suicide rates.

Of the total, 88 were high school students, 48 from middle school and just three from elementary school.

About 40 percent were motivated by family-related problems, while 16 percent were triggered by depression and 11.5 percent by exam-related stress.

Dozens of teenagers kill themselves every year around the time of South Korea’s hyper-competitive college entrance exam, unable to cope with the intense scholastic and parental pressure to secure a place in a top university.

Last year’s student suicide figure compared with 202 suicides in 2009, 146 in 2010 and 150 in 2011.

South Korea has the highest suicide rate among members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, with an average of 33.5 people per 100,000 taking their lives in 2010, far higher than Hungary (23.3) and Japan (21.2) which ranked second and third.

The figure for South Korea equates to nearly 50 suicides a day and shows a steep increase from 2000 when the average incidence of suicide was 13.6 people per 100,000.

The capital Seoul has installed anti-suicide monitoring devices on bridges over the Han river after 196 people jumped to their deaths last year.

South Korea - a country that leads in international test score competitions, child and teen suicides and overall rates of people killing themselves.

Hell, so many people were killing themselves, they had to put up anti-suicide monitoring devices on the freaking bridges.

And this is the school system and school culture Duncan and Friedman want to bring here?

Is This The System We Want To Emulate?

President Obama likes to point to South Korea as one of the countries we should emulate when it comes to education policy.

Here is the NY Times tonight on one disturbing trend in South Korea education - suicide:

DAEJEON, South Korea — It has been a sad and gruesome semester at South Korea’s most prestigious university, and with final exams beginning Monday the school is still reeling from the recent suicides of four students and a popular professor.

Academic pressures can be ferocious at the university, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, formally known as Kaist, and anxious school psychologists have expanded their counseling services since the suicides. The school president also rescinded a controversial policy that humiliated many students by charging them extra tuition if their grades dipped.

After the last of the student deaths, on April 7, the Kaist student council issued an impassioned statement that said “a purple gust of wind” had blown through campus.

“Day after day we are cornered into an unrelenting competition that smothers and suffocates us,” the council said. “We couldn’t even spare 30 minutes for our troubled classmates because of all our homework.

“We no longer have the ability to laugh freely.”

And just in case you think the unhappiness is isolated to just one university campus, here is more from the Times:

Young people in South Korea are a chronically unhappy group. A recent survey found them to be — for the third year in a row — the unhappiest subset among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Education Ministry in Seoul said 146 students committed suicide last year, including 53 in junior high and 3 in elementary school.

South Korea as a whole ranks first among O.E.C.D. nations in suicide and is routinely among the leaders in developed nations. Subway stations in Seoul have barriers to prevent people from jumping in front of arriving trains, and eight bridges in the capital have installed closed-circuit suicide-watch cameras.

Suicides of singers, models, beloved actors, athletes, millionaire heiresses and other prominent figures have become almost routine in South Korea. A former president, Roh Moo-hyun, threw himself off a cliff in 2009 after losing face with his countrymen.

But the suicides of the four Kaist undergraduates — three jumped to their deaths and a 19-year-old freshman overdosed on pills — have stunned the nation in a profound and poignant way. (The professor, a biologist who was reportedly being audited for the misuse of research funds, hanged himself on April 10.)

The competition for a place in a leading university begins in middle school for most South Korean students. More than 80 percent of Korean young people go to college, and parents here spend more money per child on extra classes and outside tutoring — including military-style “cram schools” — than any other country in the O.E.C.D.

The pressure builds to a single day in November, when a national college entrance exam is held. Some mothers pray at churches or temples throughout the day as their children take the test, which is given only once a year and lasts nine hours. The South Korean Air Force even adjusts its flight schedule so as not to disturb the test takers.

The ultimate goal for most students is acceptance at one of the so-called SKY schools — Seoul National, Korea or Yonsei universities. In South Korea’s status-conscious society, a degree from a SKY school is nearly a guarantee of a big career and lifelong prosperity. Pedigree is everything.

Oh, yeah - that sounds like a country we ought to emulate when it comes to education policy and competition.

Oh, wait - that is exactly what our education reformers and policy makers want to do.

Everything comes down to the test.

Nothing else matters.

Score high on the test or be considered a "failure".

Add "value" to your students test scores or be publicly humiliated in the newspapers as a "bad teacher" and then summarily fired.

Increase test scores every year in every category of students or the school is shut down.

Competition is good, they tell us.

It brings out the best in all of us.

Uh, huh.

Eva's First Annual Poker Tournament Fundraiser

The NY Times ran a story about all the chaos the Duncan/Obama policy of "school turnaround" has brought to Chicago.

Here's an emblematic quote from a parent of child who has been in not one but two schools closed by the policy:

Josephine Norwood, a Bronzeville mother of three Chicago public school students, has rebounded from two rounds of school closings that displaced her children from their schools. As she watched the Board of Education approve another set of schools for closing or turnaround last week, Mrs. Norwood had a simple question: Can Chicago Public Schools officials promise that the new schools will be better?

“If this process could guarantee the child the best and they would benefit from the school closing, then maybe it is a positive thing,” Mrs. Norwood said. But she spoke out last week, along with many others, about the need for more transparency and proof that the disruptions are warranted.

Ahh yes, transparency and proof that the disruptions are warranted.

Well, we know from the two articles published by Juan Gonzalez in the New York Daily News on Thursday and Friday that there is neither transparency nor proof that the disruptions are warranted in the school closure process here in New York City.

Using 125 emails between New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and charter school operator and former city councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, Gonzalez documented the ease of access and cozy relationship that borders on quid pro quo between the schools chancellor and a woman who sees her life's mission to privatize public schools.

You really need special access and a cozy relationship with Klein to write this sort of thing that Eva Moskowitz wrote on August 3, 2007:

Joel,

Hope all is well. Wanted to invite you to be the guest speaker at our first annual poker tournament fundraiser for the Success Charter Network and for Harlem Success. When I asked the hedge fund folks who they wanted to speak, your name was unanimously agreed upon. You seem to have a lot of fans in that crowd!

But the relationship between Klein and Moskowitz goes beyond a WHAT CAN YOU DO FOR EVA? thing and more into a HOW CAN EVA HARM PUBLIC SCHOOLS? thing.

In fact, as NYC Educator found in the Klein/Eva emails here, she tells Klein how important it is for him to "distinguish the good guys from bad. And yes take away resources from institutions that are harming children and give to those who are truly putting children first."

As Gonzalez reported, she actually got Klein to agree to close two regular public schools whose space she coveted even though those schools were later given A ratings by the NYCDOE:

On Oct. 3, 2008, Eva Moskowitz, a former city councilwoman and head of four charter schools in Harlem, e-mailed schools Chancellor Joel Klein for help.

Moskowitz wanted more space to expand her Harlem Success academies and she had two specific public school buildings in mind.

"Those schools are ps194 and ps241," she wrote to Klein. "It would be extremely helpful to move quickly on."

Less than two months later, the Department of Education announced plans to phase out those schools and use the space to expand two Harlem Success academies.

...

DOE officials deny Moskowitz's appeal for more space had anything to do with their decision to close the public schools.

"We based [it] ... solely on the determination that they could not turn around years of poor performance," DOE spokesman David Cantor said.

The chancellor's e-mail address is publicly known and many people often write to him, his aides add.

Asked if Klein directly participated in choosing those particular schools, Cantor said: "The Chancellor signs off on all closure decisions."

Moskowitz rejected any suggestion that she received special treatment.

"I have repeatedly not gotten what I wanted," she said, adding that some of her schools have been forced to relocate "like some nomadic tribe." Harlem Success 2, for example, has moved twice in two years.

Public School 194 and Public School 241 were failing schools, she said, and should have been closed.

Both received a "D" in 2008 on the DOE's performance evaluation. The closing announcement drew the ire of parents and political leaders.

That's because they were the only zoned public schools for their respective neighborhoods, and Klein had not submitted the closings to a vote of the community district education councils, as required by state law.

His action led the United Federation of Teachers to sue, after which the DOE suddenly withdrew its decision and let the schools stay open.

Amazingly, both PS 194 and PS 241 received "A" ratings from Klein's evaluators later in the year, contradicting the DOE's claim the schools could not be turned around.

The Harlem Success academies had to find other space to grow.

Students and staff at PS 194 and PS 241 were fortunate that Eva Moskowitz didn't get her way, but students and staff at other schools slated for closure have not been so lucky.

Now that Juan Gonzalez has provided us with just a little transparency in the process of school closings and the cozy relationship between charter operators and the government officials that administer the public school system and run those school closings, we can see that the charter operators are looking to declare public schools "failing" whether they are or not so that they can grab the resources, space and students (albeit, only the ones who aren't behavior problems or low test scorers) from the regular public schools.

We have absolute proof of this.

Yet because Mayor Bloomberg has sole control over the schools system and as he soon often likes to tell us, accountability moments only come once every four years when he spends $108 million to run for re-election, there seems to be little that is being done by other elected officials to mitigate this disaster.

More needs to happen.

State Senator Bill Perkins (D-Harlem) plans to hold hearings up in Albany to review DOE policy toward charter schools.

But that's not enough.

The city council, Eva's former playground, needs to also hold hearings and both City Controller John Liu and Public Advocate Bill De Blasio need to investigate the relationship between the NYCDOE and the charter school operators in general and between Klein and Eva in particular.

We all need to call Liu, De Blasio, and our city council members a few times a week to remind them how important these investigations are, especially with Klein and Bloomberg closing 19 schools this year, the state readying more closures as part of Obama's Race to the Top policy, and more closures to come from both the city and the state next year.

You can get the numbers for those calls right hear.

And this brings me back to the story about the school closures in Chicago.

It is the Chicago education deform mafia that started this policy and has now forced it upon the nation as a whole through Obama's RttT policy and maybe even when NCLB gets re-authorized later this year.

There is no proof whatsoever that the turnaround policy actually does what it is purported to do, i.e., improve the education students receive. Rather, it adds more chaos to an already chaotic system, but provide no changes in either test scores or graduation rates.

Here's how the Times story puts it:

As the public schools system entered its annual process of selecting schools for closing or turnarounds, parents, teachers and community groups leveled criticism at school officials for the lack of communication with the communities involved and questioned data from the central office that does not match the reality in the schools. Some also pleaded for the district to delay any action until the corrective measures taken at the lowest-performing schools — the wholesale turnover of administrators and teachers — could be better evaluated and a comprehensive plan for school facilities could be developed by a new task force.

Parents and people in the communities where these schools are feel completely disenfranchised from the process which is being run by political appointees like the schools CEO (yeah, that's what they call the schools chief in Chicago) and education deform non-profits like The Academy for Urban School Leadership.

The Academy for Urban School Leadership was founded by venture capitalist, Martin J. Koldyke, whose investments include for-profit colleges like Devry Institute and Rasmussen College.

Politicians in Chicago and in Illinois say that they have no power or oversight over the school closure process, yet the politician who does - the mayor - has turned the process over to a "non-profit" founded by a guy who makes his money off for-profit colleges.

Quite a cozy relationship between the venture capitalists, the for-profit schools and the politicians who say their "reform" policies are developed to help kids even though the groups the policies seem to help the most are the hedge fund/finance/for-profit schools industries.

Like the cozy relationship between Klein, Moskowitz and the hedge fund managers she lovingly refers to for her FIRST ANNUAL POKER TOURNAMENT FUNDRAISER here in New York, you can see the cozy relationship in Chicago between the financial industry and the government officials charged with running the schools, but the complete disenfranchisement of other elected officials or even people in the community themselves to weigh in on policy.

In fact, if anything, Eva's FIRST ANNUAL POKER TOURNAMENT FUNDRAISER that brought together the charter operators, the hedge fund managers, and the schools chancellor is a perfect emblem for how the school closure policy is being run.

You have a smoke-filled back room, unelected officials, former elected officials using their access to enrich themselves, and a bunch of wealthy guys looking to open up public education to private profit.

This is the process that President Obama thinks works so well in Chicago and New York that he has used it as a model for national policy in Race to the Top and wants to enshrine it permanently in the NCLB re-authorization.

This is also the process that brought us the closure of a Rhode Island high school and the firing of over 100 teachers and administrators last week that is highly controversial because it is Obama's preferred education policy of the future (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said he "applauded" the firing of the teachers.)

Close the schools, fire the teachers (especially if unionized), turn the school over to for-profit operators like Mr. Koldyke or Eva Moskowitz and keep it up until you "reform" the entire public school system so that it looks like South Korea's (10 hour school days, 6 day school weeks, 48 week school years.)

This despite the fact that South Korea's education system which President Obama seems to be so enamored of is one of the worst performing in Asia:

I live in Korea. I've taught in Korea for three years. My wife is Korean, and my in-laws are parents of children in the Korean education system. And I'm here to warn President Obama that Korea is a model to treat with way more skepticism than he shows above.

I'll start with Samuel S. Kim’s doctoral dissertation, “First and Second Generation Conflict in Education of the Asian American Community,” Columbia University, October 2008 (reported in The Korea Times, 10/3/2008). In a nutshell, Kim's research suggests that all that hyper-schooling in Korea does not result in high university performance. On the contrary, Korean students who enter "top" American universities drop out before graduating at the staggering rate of 44%. China and India, with populations 20 times larger than Korea's, post drop-out rates almost half as low: China at 25%, India at 21%. (American drop-out rates at the same colleges were at 34%.)

...

Let me drive the point home: Koreans are so good on international test scores because they work overtime being taught to pass these tests. When they hit the real academic world in college, they don't have the skills necessary to succeed. They're great at acing college admissions tests - that's what their k-12 education emphasizes - but they're America's worst at actually getting through college. And Obama and Duncan are sorely disappointing for not understanding this.

And I'll end with my own observations and readings while living and teaching here in Korea: Korean students are forced to study in "hagwons" - private night- and weekend-classes, and yes, full summer classes too. The overwhelming emphasis is on learning English.

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I see these kids in their school uniforms at midnight outside my apartment, going home after their night classes at the English hagwon down the block. And the funny thing? Koreans spend all this time and money on English, but they don't learn it. They don't speak it to foreigners, they write and read it horribly for all the time invested. A westerner who teaches English at Korean universities blogs about the problem here. I'll just add that most of that study is worksheet-based, scripted, and devoted to passing college examination tests, the SAT, TOEFL, and all the other tests these classes teach to.

The president is pushing for a school turnaround policy honed in his hometown that has demonstrated plenty of systemic chaos and teacher firings but very little improvement (and some would argue none) in outcomes for students and wants to use a failed South Korean education model to reform America's public school system.

And of course he wants to turn as many public schools as he can to for-profit charter school operators run by hedge fund managers and finance guys.

It sounds like Secretary Duncan and President Obama were the two other guys sitting at the poker table in the backroom of Eva's FIRST ANNUAL POKER TOURNAMENT FUNDRAISER with Eva, Chancellor Klein and the hedge fund guys.

On the other side of the door to that smoke-filled backroom where the wheeling and dealing is going on over education policy are the students, parents, teachers, administrators, and communities disenfranchised from the democratic process over schools policy.

I guess we shouldn't be surprised that this is what a couple of connected guys from Chicago brought us nation-wide.

Or what a bully billionaire who bought himself an illegal third term brought us in here New York City.

So much for the democratic process.

It has been replaced by wheeling and dealing at the poker table in the smoke-filled backroom.

UPDATE: I should note that Devry Institute, the for-proft school that Martin Koldyke, founder of the "non-profit" entity that is running Chicago's turnaround process, has his money in ought to be shut down and everybody running it tossed in jail.

Here is a sampling of the consumer complaints against Devry Institute.

Devry wasn't any better ten years ago when students filed a class action lawsuit against the college/company for "widespread deception and unlawful business practices, and charges that contrary to advertising claims, DeVry students are not being prepared for high-tech jobs."

So Secretary Arne Duncan steered the Chicago public school turnaround business to a non-profit run by a guy who made lots of his money from one of the most notorious for-profit schools with a track record of consumer complaint and fraud a mile long.

And President Obama put Duncan in charge of running the nation's education policy.

How is this CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE?

Sounds more like old style, smoke-filled backroom Chicago politics to me.

Obama Wants To Turn U.S. Into South Korea

Obama speaking to a group of U.S. governors yesterday:

Meeting with the nation’s governors at the White House, Mr. Obama stressed the importance of education to America’s economic competitiveness in a tough global marketplace, a theme he has cited in recent days to undergird a number of his domestic priorities.

He said the depth of the competition was brought home to him during a visit to South Korea last year, when he was told of that country’s determination to educate its children to out-compete American children.

“That’s what we’re up against,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s what’s at stake — nothing less than our primacy in the world. As I said at the State of the Union address, I do not accept a United States of America that’s second-place.”

Alan Singer at Huffingtonpost on the We MUST COMPETE WITH SOUTH KOREA!!!! education meme:

President Obama told a meeting of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce:

'Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea every year. That's no way to prepare them for a 21st-century economy. We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day. That calendar may have once made sense, but today it puts us at a competitive disadvantage."

Expect Education Secretary Arne Duncan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and New York School Chancellor Joel Klein and a long line of politicos and supposed edu-experts to make the pilgrimage to South Korea any day now, so they can view this educational miracle first hand.

Everybody is not as enamored with the Korean educational system as President Obama is. According to one Korean news source, "Obama's remarks came as a surprise to many South Koreans as the country's education system has been under constant public criticism due to its lack of creativity and heavy dependence on private tutoring." But their kids do get high scores on standardized tests and apparently that is all that counts.

One critic of the Korean educational system, Dr. Samuel Kim, a senior research scholar at the East Asian Institute of Columbia University, reported that 44% of Korean students who enter "top" American universities drop out before graduating. This is much higher than the dropout rate for students from China (25%), India (21%) and even the 34% dropout rate for American students at the same universities. Essentially, years of extra tutoring prepares Korean students for college entrance exams but not for acquiring a college education.

Clay Burell, an American high school humanities teacher, who currently lives with his family in South Korea, reports on his blog that Korean students are forced to study in "hagwons" -- private night, weekend, and summer classes where the overwhelming emphasis is on learning English. The Korean Education Ministry estimates that as a percentage of GDP, South Korean parents spend four times more on average on private education than their counterparts in any other major economy. Most of what they study is "worksheet-based, scripted, and devoted to passing college examination tests, the SAT, TOEFL, and all the other tests these classes teach to." What Burell finds ironic is that despite all of this investment and high test scores, Korean students are notoriously poor at reading, writing, and speaking English. In other words, they can't use what they are supposed to have learned and what they test well at.

There you have it - Obama wants to turn the U.S. education system into Korea's, yet the Korean system is dysfunctional.

And he's using the recession that has devastated the states and federal money as the means to do it.

By the time he is done with his one term presidency, there is going to be some serious damage done to public education.

But I can guarantee you that all the "reforms" he is forcing onto the system will make things worse, not better.