Arne Duncan Runs A Faith-Based Program

Teacherken at the Daily Kos:

Does that title surprise you? It shouldn't. When a department and its leadership are advocating for courses of actions either lacking research supporting effectiveness or -- even worse -- where the research clearly demonstrates that the course of action does not work or provides inaccurate and unreliable information, to insist on pursuing such a course can only be because one has a blind faith, is operating on the basis of theological or ideological purity.

That is not scientific. It certainly should not be how the United States Department of Education operates.

Sadly, that is the clear pattern of this administration under the leadership of Arne Duncan.

Read the rest.

It's good.

I would argue that EVERYTHING the Obama administration promotes is faith-based.

The economic policy - based on the belief that feeding money to the banks would heal the housing market and make everything all right - was clearly faith-based.

The mortgage relief program has been faith-based and the evidence is now in that it is making the foreclosure crisis worse rather than better.

The stimulus was also a faith-based policy. Not nearly enough money and not put into the right things. Thus unemployment stands near 10%.

Renominating Ben Bernanke, one of the architects of the current economic mess, to the Federal Reserve has also been faith-based. So far, Bernanke has done nothing to heal the job market but sure has provided free cash for the banksters through Federal Reserve Open Market Operations.

And the war policy in Afghanistan is faith-based too. Think we'll be out of there by 2020?

But as Teacherken notes in his diary at the Daily Kos, the Obama/Duncan education policy is totally faith-based and will be about as successful as Bush's abstinence only education programs.

In fact, as I have already noted here, the evidence from Duncan's time in Chicago is already in. His turnaround program for schools sucks.

But they'll just keep doing what they've been doing and pray for it to all work out.

Dear God, help us all.

So Much For The Research

The Obama administration likes to make believe its education reform program - tests in every subject at every grade level, teacher pay and evaluations tied to those tests, and the closing of schools and the firing of teachers based upon those test scores - is a proven, research-based strategy to "turnaround" the public education system.

But a new book written by the National Education Policy Center, a university-based research organization in Boulder, Colo. that critiques the work of prominent think tanks, says it is not research-based at all:

The Obama administration's education plan lacks a solid research basis for its proposals, a new book says.

The Obama Education Blueprint: Researchers Examine the Evidence is the first major effort from the National Education Policy Center, a university-based research organization in Boulder, Colo., that critiques the work of prominent think tanks. ("Think-Tank Critics Plant a Stake in Policy World," this issue.)

In the book, scholars take a look at the six research summaries the administration released in May in support of its blueprint—a guiding document it sent to Congress in March to explain its vision of the next iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the main federal law on K-12 education. ("Administration Unveils ESEA Reauthorization Blueprint," March 16, 2010.)

The researchers found "the overall quality of the summaries is far below what is required for a national policy discussion of critical issues."

"Each of the summaries was found to give overly simplified, biased, and too brief explanations of complex issues," co-editors William J. Mathis and Kevin G. Welner, both University of Colorado at Boulder academicians, write in the book's introduction.

Mr.Welner, who is also the NEPC's director, said the book is aimed at informing the discussion about the administration's policies.

"It's not that I don't like a lot of the ideas and want to see them be successful," he said. "But when the government makes statements that something is supported by research and it isn't, that's an important message to get across."

Mr. Welner and the other authors say the U.S. Department of Education relied too heavily on the work of advocacy groups to bolster claims and showed a strong focus on the use of standardized-test scores without justifying their use as a valid measure of learning and school success.

The researchers also note a lack of research provided for two key pieces of the blueprint: the accountability system that is to replace the "adequate yearly progress" measure under the No Child Left Behind Act and the four models school districts are to use to turn around low-performing schools.

The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment on the book's critiques.

If you're watching Oprah, NBC's Education Summit, or Waiting for Superman or listening to the president and Mayor Bloomberg talk about education issues, you'd be under the impression that all the research is settled and if we just close 10,000 schools across the nation, turns lots more schools into for-profit privatized charters, get rid of tenure and seniority and add new standardized tests to every grade at every level at least twice a year, all the problems in public education will be solved.

That turns out to be as fact-based and rigorously researched as the Bush administration's "We'll Be Greeted As Liberators" prognostication about the Iraq war.

Education "Reform" In Place Of A Jobs Policy

Lois Weiner on Democracy Now:

I think it’s also very important to understand that this focus on educational reform is replacing, is a substitute for, a jobs policy. We need to understand that. Education can democratize the competition for the existing jobs, but it cannot create new jobs. And when most jobs that are being created are by companies like Wal-Mart, education cannot do anything about that. So, we need to—we really need to look critically at Race to the Top and understand the way that it fits into this new economic order of a so-called jobless recovery and that what’s really going on is a vocationalization of education, a watering down of curriculum for most kids, so that they’re going to take jobs that require only a seventh or an eighth grade education, because those are the jobs that are being created in this economy.

The Wall Street Journal on the August 2010 jobs report:

The U.S. jobless rate rose to 9.6% in August, but the government’s broader measure of unemployment rose even more to 16.7%, the highest rate since April.

The comprehensive gauge of labor underutilization, known as the “U-6″ for its data classification by the Labor Department, accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs.

...

The 9.6% unemployment rate is calculated based on people who are without jobs, who are available to work and who have actively sought work in the prior four weeks. The “actively looking for work” definition is fairly broad, including people who contacted an employer, employment agency, job center or friends; sent out resumes or filled out applications; or answered or placed ads, among other things. The rate is calculated by dividing that number by the total number of people in the labor force.

The U-6 figure includes everyone in the official rate plus “marginally attached workers” — those who are neither working nor looking for work, but say they want a job and have looked for work recently; and people who are employed part-time for economic reasons, meaning they want full-time work but took a part-time schedule instead because that’s all they could find.

The disparity in the rates in August was largely driven by an increase in the number of part-time workers who would prefer full-time work. That can be a worrisome indication that the jobs being created in the recovery aren’t the same quality as pre-recession positions.

And of course many of the jobs that replaced the ones lost in the recessions of the 80's and 90's weren't the same quality as those that existed before either.

What we have in the economy at large is what Juan Gonzalez and Lois Weiner noted we have happening in education:

LOIS WEINER: Well, I think it’s important to understand that there are—No Child Left Behind is part of this global project to deprofessionalize teaching as an occupation. And the reason that it’s important in this project to deprofessionalize teaching is that the thinking is that the biggest expenditure in education is teacher salaries. And they want to cut costs. They want to diminish the amount of money that’s put into public education. And that means they have to lower teacher costs. And in order to do that, they have to deprofessionalize teaching. They have to make it a revolving door, in which we’re not going to pay teachers very much. They’re not going to stay very long. We’re going to credential them really fast. They’re going to go in. We’re going to burn them up. They’re going to leave in three, four, five years. And that’s the model that they want.

So who is the biggest impediment to that occurring? Teachers’ unions. And that is what explains this massive propaganda effort to say that teachers’ unions are an impediment to reform. And in fact, they are an impediment to the deprofessionalization of teaching, which I think is a disaster. It’s a disaster for public education.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you know, one of the—I’ve been, for several years now, looking deeply into these charter schools, and especially their tax forms. And one of the things that has struck me as I look at their various audited financial statements is that, generally speaking, the pay levels of the teachers in the charter schools are far lower than they are for normal public school teachers, but the pay of the executives—

KAREN LEWIS: Yeah.

LOIS WEINER: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —of the charter schools is far higher—

KAREN LEWIS: Higher, yeah.

LOIS WEINER: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —than it is for superintendents. So you’re, in essence, creating a much bigger wage gap in the schools through the charters—

LOIS WEINER: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —between management and the employees who actually cover the work.

LOIS WEINER: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’m wondering what you found.

LOIS WEINER: Well, that’s part of the—you know, that’s part of the thinking here, that teaching really is not—does not have to be a skilled profession, because we’re not going to teach—we’re not going to educate kids to do anything more than work in Wal-Mart or the equivalent. They only need a seventh or an eighth grade education, at most a ninth grade education, and so we don’t need teachers who are more than, as Grover Whitehurst, a former Undersecretary of Education, said, "good enough." That’s all we need is teachers who are "good enough" to follow scripted curriculum and to teach to these standardized tests. And if you only need teachers who are good enough, you don’t have to pay them very much. And that’s the project. And regardless of the rhetoric, regardless of the intentions of some of the people who are supporting these reforms, people like the Education Trust, whose work I respect, I think it’s important that we look at something beyond the intentions and the rhetoric, and we really look at this project as being a project that’s global in its nature.

This is why so many of the education reformers are hedge fund managers and Wall Street types.

It is in THEIR interests to de-professionalize the teaching corps, lower costs and open up public education to for-profit companies.

And of course so many of the charters they run have six day school weeks, 9-10 hour school days, and 48 week school years, so both students and staff get socialized to expect to work longer and harder to make less money and have fewer job protections.

And rather than FIGHT this trend, Randi Weingarten and the unions bring a prime financier of it (Gates) to speak to the union.

Rather than fight this anti-labor, anti-teacher administration on this, the unions say "Well, it would be worse if the Republicans were in charge..."

How?

Seriously, how?

As was noted over at Fred Klonsky's blog a few days ago, so many of these "Democrats" on the side of education reform also belong to right wing organizations like the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.

These guys ARE Republicans, no matter what they call themselves.

And those are the policies they are pursuing.

This Labor Day Weekend we will hear pro-labor jive from President Obama as the administration starts to get worried that the midterm elections are going to make 1994 look like a minor GOP victory.

But don't you believe it.

As I posted yesterday, these guys in the administration DESPISE labor.

They need the GOTV organization labor has, so they pay lip service to unions and working people every so often, but their policies and attitudes are distinctly anti-labor as summed up by Rahm Emanuel's "Fuck the UAW!" comment when someone in the administration pointed out that if they didn't help the auto industry out, thousands of auto workers would lose their jobs.

And their attitudes about teachers can best be summed up by their applauding of the firing of the teachers in Rhode Island as part of their Race to the Top program.

It is time to STOP supporting these anti-labor, anti-teacher Dems and instead find pro-labor, pro-teacher politicians to support.

Yes, I know there aren't many out there.

There are some.

And yes, it's true the Greens won't win many races.

But maybe if we can help them to win some, Dems will start to wake up to the fact that there is a very large and angry constituent of former Democratic supporters who are looking for a pro-labor, pro-teacher party to belong to.

The Fed Vows To Print More Money

Oh, goodie - more free money for the banksters:

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve acknowledged on Tuesday that its confidence in the economic recovery had dimmed, and announced that it would use the proceeds from its huge mortgage-bond portfolio to buy long-term Treasury securities.

Saying it would buy relatively modest amounts of government debt, analysts said the Fed signaled that it had no intention to back away from steps that it took, starting in 2007, to prop up the financial and housing markets. While the central bank held off on taking more aggressive steps, like a new, huge round of asset purchases, it left open the possibility that additional easing of monetary policy could take place in the fall if the recovery were to continue to weaken.

The Fed’s new stance marked the completion of a turnabout from a few months ago, when officials were discussing when and how to eventually raise interest rates and gradually shrink the $2.3 trillion balance sheet the Fed amassed through its response to the 2008 financial crisis.

In buying new Treasury securities to the tune of about $10 billion a month — a small fraction of the roughly $700 billion in Treasury debt sitting on the Fed’s balance sheet — the Fed will not let the balance sheet shrink for the time being.

More than anything, the announcement was a signal to the markets that the Fed was concerned about the pace of the recovery, and had shifted from its more optimistic assessment earlier this year, that economic growth was sufficiently strong to begin thinking about how to gradually return to normal monetary policy.

It would be nice if the Uncle Ben and the rest of his merry men and women gave a shit about, you know, jobs.

Actually it would be nice if President Accountability gave a shit about the same thing.

But so long as the banksters are happy, Uncle Ben and the FOMC are happy.

And so long as the ed deform movement is happy and Uncle Arme has $4.3 billion in walking around money to fire teachers, close schools and hire all sorts of people who don't know the first thing about education or school turnaround, President Accountability is happy.

And really, other than those things, what else matters?

Two Emails This Week

That's how many I got from UFT head Michael Mulgrew - one touting the changes in teacher evaluation, the other offering the rationale for why he agreed to the changes and a FAQ link for all the questions a teacher might have over how the changes will be enacted and what they will entail.

And of course it is all jive.

He claims that these changes will limit test prep in New York City schools - but they will force new tests in every grade in every subject.

Exactly how is that limiting test prep?

Interestingly enough, Obama said the same thing about what he wanted to do with his education policies when he was running for president - that he wanted to limit the test prep that had to be done under NCLB.

And of course he has since promoted policies that add more and more tests to every subject and raise the stakes for the tests by placing people's jobs and salaries in jeopardy if the scores do not "add value" to students' scores every semester.

Yesterday in my remedial Regents class, we worked on a poem about guilt. I had students write a journal about things that made them feel guilty, then they shared their journal writings. Finally I offered my own experience with the subject, we read the poem and talked about the theme and why it was important to find healthy ways to overcome feelings of guilt for things we may or may not have done in the past.

Only at the very end did I mention "literary elements" and tie the poem and the discussion to the Regents exam work we have been doing ALL semester.

For the next 20 days of class, I will have to return to ALL test prep ALL the time because I need to make sure that these children - many who are in the support services program or resource room program - are prepped well enough to remember all the idiotic things they have to remember for the four part, two ELA Regents test.

Tell me, Mr. Mulgrew, how your "agreement" with Steiner and Tisch at NYSED enables me to limit test prep and engage my classes with more lessons like the one I did on guilt and fewer lessons on multiple choice strategies and Task 2 essay writing outlines?

Same question to you, Obama - how does your forcing all this test prep and teacher salaries and evaluations based on test scores improve the quality of education?

The NY Daily News says today that New Yorkers feel betrayed by Obama who came to town yesterday to raise funds from Wall Street while cutting the homeland security budget funds for New York at the same time.

While that is just one more piece of hypocrisy from this very hypocritical person (Change We Can Believe In?), I want to say that if you're a teacher and have watched the policies enacted by this administration or listened to the things they say about teachers as whole high schools are fired and the president and the secretary of education "applaud" the move, you already know about betrayal.

Same goes if you're a UFT member. I did not vote for Mulgrew - I voted straight ICE. So I am not one of the 91%ers who elected Mulgrew. But they ought to be feeling betrayed today as well

Betrayals all around, blame for education problems solely on the backs of "bad" teachers (and the DOE thinks 2/3rds of us are bad - presumably the most expensive two-thirds.)

You can be sure that firings will increase with this new system and that they will neither be justified nor rational.

Older teachers who make too much money will be set up to fail and canned.

Systemically, New York City schools will be full of 5 year and under teachers within 10 years of these changes.

That should make for some great education.

Change we can believe in?

Nope - change for change's sake - because Obama and the other education deformers mistake activity for action and change for progress.