KIPP’s DC turnaround plan surfaces at Wikileaks

As you know two of three KIPP schools in DC had their reading and math scores fall precipitously. I was just over at wikileaks and saw the turnaround plan posted. I’ve excerpted a bit of it below.

Fire all teachers and administrators at the affected school(s).

Detonate a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon, removing all traces of student records, test scores, employment records and the like.

Hire new TFA grads to go in and clean up the radioactive debris.

When they die, hire more TFA grads to bury the bodies and clean up the remaining debris and rebuild the new schools under new names.

Hire different administrators.

Hire the TFA grads that haven’t died from radioactive exposure because, through natural selection and the 8-week course they take, that means they’re gonna be great teachers.

Enroll new students.

Update mission statement to “Work hard, be nice, take high-pressure showers before you leave the school grounds.”

Airlift Jay Matthews in on opening day so he can give us a glowing review in the WaPo.

Store this plan for and reuse it when other schools’ test scores drop.

So it passed….

…and there were tweets and pressers and everything associated with it. I got two emails from Dennis Van Roekel, and I got one proclaiming “Victory” from the AFT. Not one mention within those union-produced communiques of exactly where the funding came from.

I still cannot believe that this bill was allowed to be funded the way it was. There had to be some other kind of offset availible in order to fund it, right? I am something of a hawk when it comes to national security, and I haven’t been paying enough attention to our future occupation plans, but aren’t we leaving soon, or transferring roles or something? Won’t that cost less money, money that could have been better spent on teachers?

A bitter taste in my mouth and in my soul….

So I’ve been somewhat disconnected from the ‘net lately. By that, I mean I’ve been too lazy to blog much. Or read blogs. It comes in waves.

So I log in to Google Reader and go right over to Prea Prez’s place. He wrote about how the edujobs bill was funded; when I read it, it stopped me in my tracks. Dead in my tracks.

Long and short of it is that the $10 billion in funding we got from Congress to help save teacher jobs, at least some of it was paid for by a phase-out of food stamp increases provided under the stimulus bill. That means families who qualified at some point won’t be getting the extra $80 a month.

Let me get this straight: 

In order to maintain a quality educational system for our students, we’re going to prevent teacher layoffs with this multi-billion dollar bill, bring these teachers back into the classroom to teach a bunch of students who don’t give a damn about learning because they’re hungry due to fact that the extra money their families would have gotten in food stamps now pays the teacher who watches over their hungry child?

There’s no other way to say it:

This is so fucked up. I want these teacher jobs back, but at the cost of hungry families? I agree with Antonucci on this one; where the money came from won’t make it to a presser anywhere.

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The events in DC as a spaghetti western: A Fistful of Pink Slips

I’m not the first to blog about this. When I saw it coming through on EdWeek’s Twitter account, first I thought it was a typo. But it wasn’t. 240-plus teachers in D.C. will be let go, courtesy of Chancellor Michelle Rhee. 

The Washington Teachers’ Union is challenging the dismissals (or most of them) and everyone has been weighing in on what the dismissals mean. I think there are many superintendents across the country who have dreams of being Michelle Rhee; thinking that they are going to be the next vigilante superintendent, riding from school to school, dispatching those vile, shiftless bad teachers. 

I can see it now, done up properly as a spaghetti western. 

A tumbleweed rolls down the main hallway, propelled by a gust of wind let in from the opening of the front door to the school. It’s carrying fifteen erasers’ worth of chalk dust and an assorted variety of incomplete homework papers. 

A dark-suited figure steps into the school entrance, silhouetted from behind by the sun. An audible gasp from the students and school staff members is heard; it is…the Superintendent. 

The footfalls of the Superintendent’s designer leather shoes ring throughout the now-silent halls. 

“I’m a-lookin’ for Susie Schoolmarm,” says the Superintendent, glancing from student to teacher to student again. “Where is she?” 

Is an expert’s professional judgement phony science?

In a previous post, I had asked the question: If education “experts” had never set foot in a K-12 classroom, were they really experts? I said no.

Of all people, Jay Greene writes a blog post today that validates what I said. And he smacks down upon the Fordham Foundation, which I think will make the brothers Klonsky happy.

From Greene’s post, “Expert panels are phony science”

Education studies based on the professional judgment of experts is phony science and is usually nothing more than an exercise in political manipulation.  Unfortunately, the recent “study” released by Fordham assigning grades to state standards and the national standards proposed to replace them is an example of this kind of research.

Did the NEA out-union the AFT this summer?

Both organizations had their large meetings over the past three weeks. NEA (of which I am a member) has theirs annually; AFT holds its convention on a biannual basis.

Personally, I’ve always thought of AFT as the bulwark of the teacher-unionist movement. They were, after all, the first national teacher’s union to engage in collective bargaining. AFT is the house that Al Shanker built. NEA had to play catch-up and go from there.

The aftermath of the recent conventions makes me think that the NEA did out-union the AFT. But is that a good thing? Read on.

Ask three blind people to tell you what an elephant looks like…

…and they will give you three completely different answers.

One will say that the elephant is serpentine and flexible, after feeling the animal’s trunk. After feeling one of the animal’s legs, another blind person will say that an elephant is much like a tree trunk, thick, rough to the touch, cylindrical and oriented vertically. The final one, after feeling the animal’s torso will say that it is tall and large.

Why three different answers? Well, the obvious answer is that they’re blind. They each have a different part of the animal, and aren’t able to comprehend its entire shape and thus the reason for the different answers.

The metaphor is quite apropos when one reads a recent post on the National Journal’s Experts in Education blog. It asks the following question:

What do you think should define an effective teacher or principal? Will these definitions lead to systems with better educators?

The sticking point is that of the six experts that responded to the post, only one has K-12 experience mentioned in the bios they posted on the site.

Jay Matthews makes me smh…

I remember being a student, and when we’d have a substitute teacher more often than not we’d have some kind of audio-visual part of our lesson(s). It was either one of those filmstrip things (the ones that had an accompanying cassette tape that went “BEEP” when you had to advance the filmstrip), and actual movie projector, or a newfangled VCR. I remember when the subs could load, unload and de-bug the filmstrip and movie projector with their eyes closed, asleep. Yet they could not figure out how to work the stinkin’ VCR. I promised myself then if I ever became a teacher I’d know how to work the VCR in my classroom (or other relevant technologies).

So, the reason for that long introduction was because of the acronym in the post title. For the unitiated, smh= Shake my head. Just found that out the other day, and boy did I feel stupid not knowing. Rarely do I show my age, but then I did. So now that I know how to work the proverbial VCR, on to complain about Jay and the WaPo…

Day 1 at the RA. Ahh, elections…

Well folks, we’re about an hour away from the kickoff of the 2010 NEA RA. Survived my state caucus meeting and spoke out against NBI #2.

What I’d forgotted about was the organized politicallness (is that a word) of the RA. All the candidates coming in and out for speeches. The word “fight” a lot. Since being in NOLA, I really haven’t heard the term “GPO-WEP” yet. I guess there are a few more things ahead of that bit of legislation in the eyes of NEA.

Of course we have the CCC (Campaign Cheering Committee) at the entrances to the RA. Your usual incumbents, but there are quite a few candidates running for the few Executive Committe seats up for reelection.

What’s interesting is the two folks who are running out of Oakland. The word “militant” doesn’t really describe them; I think they would kick the ass of anyone who was militant. As you may remember, Oakland did a one-day walkout/strike recently that was an amazing success in terms of membership participation. I don’t support job actions that violate contracts that are currently in effect; things like walk-outs, sick-outs and the like. If you’re going to play the game, play it by the mutually agreed-upon rules. Once your contract expires, anything is fair game.

Another thing that I’ve heard about those two is that they filed at the last minute. Incumbents on the EC file well in advance, and campaign for the maximum duration possible. Filing at the last minute tends to upset state officers and leaders because they see it as underhanded or cowardly. I personally don’t care; as long as they sign on the dotted line and do everything they’re supposed to, they’re following the process too.

I don’t think either of them have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, but I do appreciate their participation in the democratic process; it’s what makes NEA great. I did read their campaign literature, and I don’t agree with much, or any of it at all. But they did lay it all out there, so I appreciate their transparency, just don’t agree with their views. They will play the spoiler role and make it a closer race for the other candidates, so it could be interesting. There was an EC candidate last year that lost by less than 100 votes, which is a very tight race in an electorate that is close to 10,000.