HumidCity

My daughter goes to a charter school. I got an email the other day about tomorrow’s rally in Baton Rouge in celebration of Charter Schools Week (I’ve never heard of this one and wonder why it is the same damn week as Teacher Appreciation Week):

Louisiana Celebrates National Charter Schools Week Wednesday, May 7, 11:30 a.m.
Steps of State Capitol, Baton Rouge

With: State Senator Cheryl Gray
House Speaker Pro Tem Karen Carter
Algiers Charter School Association
Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans
Eastbank Collaborative of Charter Schools
Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools
Louisiana Charter School Association
New Schools New Orleans
and others!

Open to the public

And then at the end, the email says:

We intend to:

• Increase awareness that charter schools are public schools;
• Advocate for more favorable policy environment for charter schools in Louisiana; and
• Show how the quality and accountability of charter schools is transforming public education in Louisiana.

Even if I could be there, I wouldn’t. Why? Because charter schools here are NOT public schools. More than a handful of charters, regardless of the supervising agency, have selective admissions and even those that don’t get to cap their enrollment where they choose. They are not obligated to provide for special needs students (at either end of the spectrum) and a fractured “system” makes providing that extra care harder or impractical–how can one single school afford a full-time special education teacher paid out of its current budget for 3 or even 10 students? How can that expense be justified to the 99+% of parents whose children do not need these services? Also, where’s the accountability if no research has been done and is only going to be started at some point in the future AND when schools can provide whatever data they want however they want? There is no standard system for comparing current charter schools or comparing schools now to schools before (and I get this from the Cowen Institute report, not my ass)? A public school takes every child who walks in and educates every child that stays, regardless of need. That’s what public schools are supposed to be about and for. And do we need a “more favorable policy environment” for charters in LA? There are bills in the state legislature now which aim to make our charter school “system” permanent regardless of results, flaws or failures. And no transformation of public education has occurred yet. From my vantage point, we have a few innovators but mostly we have new themes for schools–social justice, college prep (whatever that means), math and science, math and business, art and technology. A theme is not a reform.

There is a place for charters in a public school system. But that doesn’t mean that charters should become a school system. How can we be sure all our children are educated if they are divided into fiefdoms or placed on their own islands? And it will take years, at least one generation, for charter schools to change NO public schools from being schools of last resort (a Cowen Institute phrase) to just plain schools.

You will not see this black mother at that rally.

pic cropped from SanFranAnnie

Reading First, included in the No Child Left Behind legislation, does not increase reading comprehension. When I first saw the story this morning, Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Education, still had made no public statement about the study:

“Reading First did not improve students’ reading comprehension,” concluded the report, which was mandated by Congress and carried out by the Department of Education’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. “The program did not increase the percentages of students in grades one, two or three whose reading comprehension scores were at or above grade level.”

The study, “Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report,” analyzes the performance of students in 12 states who were in grades one to three during the 2004-5 and 2005-6 school years. It is to be followed early in 2009 with a final report that will analyze additional follow-up data, the institute’s director, Grover J. Whitehurst said.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and President Bush have consistently extolled Reading First as a highly effective program. But last year, Congressional Democrats reduced financing for the program for this year by about 60 percent, to about $400 million from the $1 billion it had received in several previous years.

On Thursday, Ms. Spellings had no comment on the study. Amanda Farris, a deputy assistant secretary of education, said in a statement that Ms. Spellings planned to look at the study “to inform our efforts,” and would “look forward to reviewing the final report.”

Ms. Farris said that one of the consistent messages Ms. Spellings has heard from educators, principals and state administrators “is about the effectiveness of the Reading First program in their schools and their disappointment with Congress” for cutting its financing.

There can be all kinds of anecdotal “evidence” that Q or F-3 works but we owe all children, not just suburban ones and not only low-performing ones, best practices that are based on actual results and research rather than political loyalties:

In 2006, John Higgins, the department’s inspector general, reported that federal officials and private contractors with ties to publishers had advised educators in several states to buy reading materials for the Reading First program from those publishers. The Reading First director, Chris Doherty, resigned in 2006, days before the release of Mr. Higgins’s report, which disclosed a number of e-mail messages in which Mr. Doherty referred to contractors or educators who favored alternative curriculums seen as competitors to the Reading First approach as “dirtbags” who he said were “trying to crash our party.”

On NPR, I heard a new teacher say that a parent at her school, a school that had been mostly minority and failing for many years, appreciated the state tests that her daughter was still flunking because she felt it showed that, finally, those in power cared about her child’s education. And one point the teacher made in her segment was that all children deserve well-rounded educations that promote critical thinking, creativity, problems-solving skills and more than test-taking tricks and methods and rote drill. And I have to disagree with the parent–the powers that be still don’t care about your child’s education because your child is being taught to and held accountable for a test that doesn’t necessarily benefit her as much as it gives those powers that be, those adults, cover for not caring about her or most other children’s education. The idea is to raise the test scores of failing schools enough to make it look like something is being done, not to really reform them, not to bring the best practices of the suburbs and magnet schools to every school, and certainly not to fulfill the promise of Brown and desegregate public schools.

With Bush set to leave office, NCLB is being looked at. We’ll see what comes out of it all.

G Bitch (yeah, still)

NOLA

G-Bitch’s post inspired me to follow up with this one on the ‘OZ Blog.