The Worst Person on the Planet

Arne Duncan was the first to say it. He said that Hurricane Katrina was the "best thing that happened" to education in New Orleans. So what, he seemed to be implying, if a bunch of people died? They were mostly poor black people, and it's important to implement your charter school wet dreams no matter what. If some minorities have to drown, well, that's the price ol' Arne was willing to pay.

You'd think everyone would have learned that it isn't a good idea to root for death and destruction in order to implement your "reform" plans. And you'd really think that no one would be stupid enough to echo Arne Duncan's idiocy on the tenth anniversary of Katrina.

Enter Kristen McQueary of the Chicago Tribune, with her knuckles dragging. She wrote an Op Ed for the Tribune that looked wistfully back at Katrina, and wished a similar fate on the residents of Chicago. Here's part of what she said:

I find myself wishing for a storm in Chicago — an unpredictable, haughty, devastating swirl of fury. A dramatic levee break. Geysers bursting through manhole covers. A sleeping city, forced onto the rooftops...That's what it took to hit the reset button in New Orleans. Chaos. Tragedy. Heartbreak.

Nice, huh? And she tips her hand in the next paragraph (italics mine):

An underperforming public school system saw a complete makeover. A new schools chief, Paul Vallas, designed a school system with the flexibility of an entrepreneur. No restrictive mandates from the city or the state. No demands from teacher unions to abide. Instead, he created the nation's first free-market education system.

Yep. That's the giveaway. Katrina was fine--as long as it did away with those nasty teachers' unions and put the "free market" (i.e., hedge fund billionaires) in command.

This is why our unions should not be dealing--ever--with the proponents of "reform", like Duncan, Gates, Eva Moskowitz, or Campbell Brown. They don't give a damn what happens to people, including the kids they claim to be "saving". To them, anything goes as long as they can break the back of the unions and scoop up the lion's share of educational dollars for themselves.

Kristen McQueary offered a non-apology for her tirade, claiming that she was engaging in "metaphor and hyperbole", and basically that the great unwashed really didn't understand the point she was making or how she was making it.

No, Ms. McQueary, we know exactly what you were doing. And the reason you didn't offer an apology for your reprehensible words was that you are not sorry you said them.

That makes you the worst person in the world.

TDRs To Be Released Friday

EDIT: TDRs will be released Friday, not today, as previously reported.

The only question about today's release of Teacher Data Reports for 12,500 teachers is: Who will get the data out first? While the teacher-bashing Post would seem a good bet, New York Times Schoolbook seems to be straining at the leash, with up-to-the-minute coverage and even a place where teachers can add comments to their numbers.

I'm sending kudos out to GothamSchools, which, as far as I can tell, is the only news outlet refusing to release the data. That's merely a gesture, of course, because the data will be plastered everywhere. Nevertheless, I thank them for their journalistic integrity in this matter for refusing to join the teacher shaming parade.

In a real twist, even Bill Gates came out in favor of teachers today, with an op-ed in the Times calling for the city to use whatever data they have to help teachers rather than publicly humiliate us in the papers. How bad have things gotten when Bill Gates is the person defending teachers?

I've already discussed my numbers and the reasons I believe they are garbage, so I won't go into that here. But I would like to send a word out to my colleagues:

Don't get obsessed with your numbers. You know how hard you work. And only you know the challenges that your particular population of students presented to you. If you know that you're doing your best for your kids, that's what should matter. Don't let the bullies at Tweed define you. Teaching is an incredibly challenging and complex profession, and most of us in this city are doing wonders every day under far less than ideal circumstances with minimal support. Bloomberg wouldn't last a day in your classroom, nor would most of those people who bash us on a regular basis.

Be proud. Your reward is in the faces of your students when they comprehend something for the first time. Nothing in your TDR can offset that.

The Best Data Money Can't Buy

Some days, it must suck to be Bill Gates. All those billions, and the one thing he can't change is facts.

As it turns out, Tom Kane, former NJ governor and current member of Gates' education reform team, headed a study called "School Choice, School Quality, and Post-Secondary Attainment".  Even the title of the study would lead you to believe this was a gold mine for ed deformers. Quite the contrary.

As Anthony Cody of EdWeek reported, the study actually supports the status quo that the deformers are attacking. Student who were moved from lower quality to higher quality schools showed almost no difference in performance. It turns out that you can't change student performance just by changing schools and testing, testing, testing. You can, however, improve student performance by starting schooling early and getting kids off to a good start in reading (gee, who'd have thunk it?)

Cody's blog post also points out that the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school system, winner of this year's Broad Prize, actually stunk up the joint. The system, much touted by Arne Duncan and his ilk, "...failed dismally in meeting its academic targets for the 2010-2011 school year. Emily Dalesio of the Associated Press wrote on July 21 that “preliminary schoolhouse data show fewer than three of 10 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools met the targets set for them in the academic year that concluded in June.”"


Other than on EdWeek, I haven't seen anyone discuss these revelations. Maybe much of the education media, supported by the largesse of Bill Gates, saw fit not to bite the hand that feeds it. But make no mistake about it--this is big news. Yet another of the deformers magic bullets, school choice, has been shown to be a pipe dream. 


Even Bill Gates, as rich as he is, isn't entitled to his own facts.

Instant Pundits

I watched John Legend stick it to teachers once again on the Bill Maher show the other night. Bill, to his credit, refused to bite, stating (correctly) that most teachers go in it for the love of teaching and the bad ones are only a small part of larger societal and political problems facing the schools. Legend would have none of it. He stuck to his tired Superman stat of how only 1 in 2500 teachers loses their license, compared to something like 1 in 97 lawyers or something. Did it ever occur to Legend that that stat may be skewed due to the fact that almost half of all teachers are either fired or leave voluntarily before the end of five years? That's almost 1250 in 2500 teachers who either lose or give up their licenses. How many doctors and lawyers leave their professions?

Of course, we can't expect John Legend to think of everything. Despite a great public education that allowed him to graduate from high school at the age of 16 as salutatorian and subsequently go on to Harvard, Legend has decided that public schools stink. He has become a pundit on education. How did that happen? He sang a song in "Superman". By that reasoning, Elton John should be a pundit on the crisis in the Congo because he sang "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" in The Lion King.

It seems to me the bar has been set pretty low for pundits these days. If you have a little celebrity or a lot of cash, you can be an instant pundit, especially on education. Unfortunately, you also end up sounding like an idiot, but that doesn't faze most of them.

To be a real pundit, you used to have to actually have experience in a subject. For example, John Legend would have been an excellent pundit on how to look ridiculous in a cowboy hat.

In that spirit, I'd like to offer a few helpful suggestions to today's ed deformers as to what field of punditry they might enter based on their actual life experience and expertise:

Bill Gates:

• being a dweeb
• "borrowing" ideas from Steve Jobs
• forming monopolies and crushing competition

Michelle Rhee:

• getting engaged to an alleged pedophile
• alienating entire communities
• marrying guys named Kevin

Oprah Winfrey:

• surviving on thigh fat alone for months at a stretch
• pimping mostly crappy books
• making middle class women squeal at the thought of maybe winning a toaster

Joel Klein:

• inflating things, such as test scores and his own ego
• scalp waxing
• being a toadie for a billionaire

Michael Bloomberg:

• controlling the lives of others, especially those on food stamps
• settling harassment cases out of court
• overturning laws he doesn't like, such as term limits

I'm working on a few others, such as Randi Weingarten on Fence Straddling and Davis Guggenheim on Weeping for Public School Children as You Drive Your Own Kids to Their Exclusive Private School in your Mercedes. Any other suggestions are welcome.


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Fixing the Schools, in Five Easy Steps! Step Three--Reduce Class Size

OK, I know reducing class size is a no-brainer. But as the people running the schools have no brains and still have not done this, perhaps it's time for someone with a brain to step in. (I'm available, Mr. Mayor. Call me.)

Reducing class size is the only sure fire way to improve student performance. Almost everything else is a gimmick. I've spent most of my career teaching classes in excess of thirty students, and sometimes far in excess. I've also taught in so-called 'triad' classes in which three teachers split up two classes, giving each teacher roughly 22 students. Guess which way worked better?

Decreasing class size will also improve teacher quality dramatically. It's a simple fact that teaching 35 kids is hard, which is why Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee fled the field as soon as they could. Teaching 22, while not easy, lightens the burden considerably, especially in terms of planning, grouping, and giving individualized attention. Discipline problems float away. Real teaching occurs.

Many high powered education pundits (by which I mean know-nothings) regularly discount class size as a factor. Oddly, most of these individuals are extremely wealthy and send their children to private schools--schools that trumpet their low class sizes as a major plus. I've never heard a millionaire say, "Hey! That public school has 35 kids per class! Let me send Muffy there!"

The main problem in tackling class size is money. It simply costs more to hire more teachers and build more schools. While I don't have all the answers, I do know that it would cost less to lower class sizes nationwide than it is costing us to bail out a bunch of multi-millionaires who invested in unintelligible mortgage-backed securities.

And I do have a plan for getting more teachers into the classroom at virtually zero cost. Unfortunately, it's also a no-brainer, so it's unlikely that it will ever be implemented. Still, I have hope.