The allegation that Gov. Malloy is intent on “privatizing” the public schools has paralyzed efforts to pass education reform legislation this year. The rhetoric is softening as the General Assembly enters its final days of the session. Maybe that’s good news.
The Connecticut Education Association this weekend appeared to move away from warning about privatization and instead said that ”third-party school operators” are the problem:
In Cromwell, 500 teachers today expressed concern that the negotiations may be deadlocked with the governor’s representatives still unwilling to put students’ needs before the interests of third-party school operators, a feature of the governor’s reform proposal that has been a sticking point. “It’s been a sticking point because it takes the public out of public schools,” said CEA Executive Director Mary Loftus Levine. “Public schools are fundamental to democracy, and we can’t put educational opportunity at risk with unproven and untested ideas.”
In a column in the Courant on April 16 by Levine and CEA president Phil Apruzzese, painted a more alarming picture.
As education reform moves forward in the state legislature with a substitute education reform bill, teachers and their union now find themselves being told to take a seat on the bench by wealthy and powerful interests, from CEOs to charter management companies to out-of-state, ultraconservative, anti-union organizations. Make no mistake; they look to privatize education and run roughshod over teachers’ rights in the closing weeks of what was supposed to be the collaborative “Year of Education.”
But what if these third party operators are also parents, teachers and taxpayers? Aren’t these folks just as much part of “the public” as the teacher unions? We should stay away from unproven and untested ideas, but if a public charter school model is successful, shouldn’t it at least part of the reform package?
Meanwhile, take a look at Mary O’Leary’s story in the JRC papers on what can be learned from Massachusetts, particularly when it comes to making sure that teachers and labor unions feel like they are a part of the reform.
The CEA also elected a new president Saturday. It’s Sheila Cohen, a veteran teacher from Orange.
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12 Responses to The Evolving Language of Education Reform
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Jonathan Pelto has reported time after time on the big money interests that are behind so much of the “education reform” movement. If you want to parse word selection and ignore the bigger picture don’t expect the rest of us to do so.
These are not successful schools Rick. Do you research for a change. Opps..I mean hang up on Malloy’s office when they call sometimes. Maybe you should start a journalism school. It can be called “Rick’s Dollar Magic School of Anti-Union, non-research based,Corporate Journalism Annex”. I see there is already one graduate.
http://naacp.3cdn.net/ec6459eda5247ea257_d1m6bxsf6.pdf
http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/National_Release.pdf
Rick,
Do you have a point or are you merely cutting and pasting from other articles now? I am unable to determine how much effort you are investing in this so- called blog. No wonder why newspapers are worried these days.
The teachers’ unions drew a line in the sand where anyone who disagrees with them on any issue is anti-union.
So be it.
It’s like the War on Women. Support late-term abortion and free pills or you are at war against women and a hater.
Seriously, how can we live with ourselves?
Some of those rich people, including The Gates, are looking for answers to a perplexing problem.
Nothing has ever stopped the teachers union from creating model schools that demonstrate the success of their agenda and alternate proposals including social services. Doing so is a fraction of the money the unions spend on hate lobbying. The fact is, the unions agenda won’t succeed. If it would you can believe they would open up 4 middle schools in NYC, Chicago, LA and DC to demonstrate their proof of concept.
If you think Palmer or Loftus-Levine is sitting on a solution then you are delusional Mr Marko. They are egotistical enough to roll that solution out and take the credit for being the nation’s leading educational reformers. No proof of concept is coming forth from them, that’s for sure. No cost containment or accountability proposals either. Anything third-party is taint. Non-kosher. Unclean. Ritually suspect.
Are you responding to the cut and pasted opinion piece above or are you just stating your general opinion?
I don’t really see the point in Rick’s “Blog” or report or whatever it is.
However, the fact that you actually think the motivation of Gates is to “look for answers” is amusing.
Small schools, false start
The last thing you’d expect from an organization headed by Bill Gates is a math mistake. Yet, according to Wharton School statistician Howard Wainer, the foundation may have misread the numbers when it arrived at its first prescription for American education. Wainer, who used the foundation as a case study in his 2009 book, Picturing the Uncertain World, says it seized on data showing small schools are overrepresented among the country’s highest achievers and started pouring money into creating small high schools and subdividing big ones. Tom Vander Ark, a former schools superintendent in Washington state who was tapped to oversee the foundation’s educational arm, was—and remains—a booster of small schools. The Gates Foundation declined comment on Wainer’s assertion and research.
Here’s the Teacher’s Union doing what they do best: Filing lawsuits defending their members incompetency.
In this case the CT Union, the CEA, was slapped down like a dog for suggesting that computerizing IEP plans was more laborious and required additional time, staff, and compensation or there should be a complete rollback to paper plans.
In Milford a teacher was climaing an additional 12 hours a week for 6 students woudl be required to complete the computerized IEP process.
Fortunately the Labor Board made a thorough examination and came to the sane conclusion: the problem was the teacher not the computerized IEP noting that “the complaining teachers were simply not comfortable with technology and or refused to avail themselves of technical support offered by the school district, the Milford Public Schools.”
http://tinyurl.com/773kx2v
THe CEA wasn’t helped by other teachers claiming it took less time using the computerized system.
As in Ricci v. DiStefano the issue was whether those who do not study or train or invest in themselves should be the baseline for ‘normal’.
A typical union case based on the premise that the baseline should be the worst performing union member not a baseline based on some bell curve with an established normative standard of performance.
The Gates Foundation posted this study as a response.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/united-states/Pages/transforming-high-school-experience.aspx
Methinks the Unions doth protest too much…
One of the popular default responses to anyone raising the issue of the influence of big money on the “reform movement” is “Why don’t the teachers run their own model schools if they know so much”. That’s like asking the UAW why it doesn’t open its own car factory if it doesn’t like what Ford or GM are doing. We (yes I’m a CEA member)want to preserve public schools not open our own version of the Brave New Educational World. We also want a voice in the operation of those schools and due process, not dictatorial rule by the latest Educational Wunderkind.
I know an administrator who loved to inundate his staff with literature saying that classrooms should not be top-down and that students should be involved in their own education. He would then proceed to roll out new initiatives that were not discussed with the faculty but only with his inner circle and announce “this is the way it’s going to be, no discussion.” He failed to see the irony there but believe me it wasn’t lost on the teachers. We’re not asking to make all the decisions, we just want our rightful place at the table.
How can you do that Allen? You have a union that sits at the table. Are you suggesting that the present unions are part of the problem and not part of the solution and that your ideas aren’t presented by them? That the centralized union structure gets in the way of decentralizing schools so that teachers can have more say on a school by school basis?
If so it would sound like you are ripe to work for a Charter.
No Richard – my point was that too many administrators do not give their teachers, as represented by their union local officers, a seat at the table when devising initiatives. Instead they either listen to consultants peddling the solution de jour or to a hand-picked inner circle that acts as an echo chamber. They then roll out their initiatives when school starts in Sept. and are shocked when it all goes to hell by mid-October. If we had true collaboration between teachers and administrators many problems could be anticipated and resolved.
By the way, none of the above gets at the real problem in CT schools – the inequality inherent in funding schools primarily with the property tax. I had hoped this would be the focus of reform when Governor One Term announced his “Year of Education”.