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I do not know how many of you saw this in Newsweek.  For those of you who didn’t, here it is.

Diane Ravitch is one of the brightest educational writers in America.

The Shame of Newsweek
By Diane Ravitch on March 16, 2010 8:33 AM | 55 Comments | No TrackBacks
Dear Deborah,
Did you see Newsweek last week? What a stunning and uninformed attack on teachers and teachers’ unions. The cover of the magazine told the story: The Key to Saving American Education, by Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert. It was printed on a classroom blackboard. In the background, on the same blackboard, was the handwritten phrase, repeated again and again, “We must fire bad teachers.”
The story itself is a parody of a right-wing rant. It seems that the nation’s classrooms are overrun with “bad teachers,” pedophiles, “weak” teachers, ineffective teachers, dumb teachers, and others who remain in the classroom only because they have “lifetime tenure.” Evil teachers’ unions protect these people who are harming our nation’s children. Researchers now know, the writers say, that if we could fire all these malingerers, the notorious achievement gap between the races would soon close and America would once again lead the world in education.
The writers hold out hope: non-union charter schools and Teach for America will “save” American education.
Leave aside the odd assertion that “much of the ability to teach is innate.” (How do they know?) Leave aside the adulation for Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, KIPP, and anyone who fights teachers’ unions. Leave aside the horror stories about teachers accused of abusing students and keeping “a stash of pornography and cocaine at school.” The article is a flamboyant example of outright hostility to teachers, to the organizations that represent them, and to public education itself.
Nowhere does the article mention that the highest-performing state in the nation is Massachusetts, where all or almost all teachers belong to unions; nor does it mention that the highest-performing nation in the world is Finland, where all or almost all teachers belong to unions. Nowhere in the article is there an example of a non-union district or state in the United States that has achieved high academic performance.
Instead, the article baldly asserts that “New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out.” Hurricane Katrina made it possible to get rid of public education and to wipe out unions, which the article claims are the biggest impediments to high academic achievement.
No use to point out that TFA, with its 4,100 new teachers every year and its 17,000 alumni, is not going to “save” American education or replace a teaching force of 4.6 million. No mention of the many studies that show that TFA often does not outperform ordinary, experienced teachers. No reason to note the high attrition rate of students at charters like KIPP and YES Prep or to acknowledge that teachers at such schools typically work 50-60 (or more) hours each week, which is not sustainable. (By the way, all of this is documented in my book.)
The Newsweek writers applaud the firing of all the teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. It doesn’t bother them that teachers were not individually evaluated, but fired en masse. But that is not enough. They won’t be satisfied until large numbers of teachers are dismissed, teachers’ unions are crushed, and public education is replaced by non-union charter schools.
Never mind that the research on teacher effectiveness on which they rely is highly speculative and highly contested. Never mind that non-union charters, on average, do not outperform regular public schools. Why bother with such details?
Newsweek, it seems, speaks for the Jack Welch School of Management: Fire the bottom 10 percent every year. A friend said the other day, “If Newsweek is so smart, how come the magazine is in such deep financial trouble? Maybe they need to fire 10 percent of their staff every year.” A dose of their own medicine?
Diane

It is critical to any nation to have sufficient number of highly qualified teachers.

The National Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics released a report which indicates that of 23,000 teachers of high school physics, only one-third have a major in physics or physics education.  The task forces urges physics departments and colleges of education to”recognize that they have a responsibility for the professional preparation of  physics teachers.”

As long as industry has the ability to pay people who major in physics two to three times more than schools can afford to, we will have a shortage of qualified people who are teaching science or math.  Expecting people who paid $14,000 or more per year for their college education to go into education for the glory of working in schools, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

You’ve heard of addiction to alcohol and drugs?  You’ve heard about food addiction.  Have your heard about “internet addiction”?

In a study conducted by the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, 1,300 people between the ages of 16 and 51 found that many of them were addicted to spending many hours scanning websites, texting, gaming sites, and online communities.  The study found that these people were more likely to be depressed. Of the sample, 1.2 percent were “internet addicted”.  Because of the amount of time they spent on the web, their online relationship had replace real social activities in the real world, leaving them isolated and depressed.

Many of us know children (and adults) who have become so dependent on cell phones, mp3 players, and the Internet that they forget to eat, play or sleep.

The real questions are what are the implications for schools?  For school counselors?

My other concerns are which comes first:  Do depressed people turn to the Internet?  Or does the Internet cause people to become depressed?

One other thing to consider and question:  With the growing number of virtual schools, will this (does this)  result in depressed and lonely people and what do we do about that?

With states finding shortfalls in their budgets because of the recession, Missouri along with other states has decided to cut spending for public education.  I understand the need for cuts but I believe that cuts in education should be among the last cuts made by states.

The Kansas City Star reported that Missouri’s yacht buys can save up to $30,000 on the purchase of a $500,000 yacht.  This exemption, experts say, costs the state $6 million a year.

Missouri State Senator Jason Crowell (R, 27th District) says that $47 million is being cut out of K-12 classrooms and $15 million is being cut from the school bus transportation budget.  But that $25 million is being added to the Kansas City Chiefs’ budget.

I don’t know about you, but I am getting extremely tired of hearing politicians say how important education is for the nation and for states and then cutting spending.

Alexa Gonzalez, 12, was arrested by  New York City Police for drawing on her desk in her middle school because of a zero tolerance law.  Zero tolerance policies became more popular after the Columbine High School massacre.  There was no profanity, no hate. Just the words, “I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 :)” scrawled on the classroom desk with a green marker.

She was handcuffed by the police and escorted out of the school past students and teachers.  This is not the only time police were called into a school to enforce school zero tolerance laws.

The Strategy Center, a California-based civil rights group that tracks zero tolerance policies, found that at least 12,000 tickets were issued to tardy or truant students by Los Angeles Police Department and school security officers in 2008. The tickets tarnished students’ records and brought them into the juvenile court system, with fines of up to $250 for repeat offenders.

And another California school — Highland High School in Palmdale — found that issuing tardiness tickets drastically cut the number of pupils being late for class and helped tone down disruptive behavior. The fifth ticket issued landed a student in juvenile traffic court.

In 1998, New York City took its zero tolerance policies to the next level, placing school security officers under the New York City Police Department. Today, there are nearly 5,000 employees in the NYPD School Safety Division. Most are not police officers, but that number exceeds the total police force in Washington, D.C.

In contrast, there are only about 3,000 counselors in New York City’s public school system. Critics of zero tolerance policies say more attention should be paid to social work, counseling and therapy.

Kenneth Trump, a security expert who founded the National School Safety and Security Services consulting firm, said focusing on security is essential to the safety of other students. He said zero tolerance policies can work if “common sense is applied.”

“There is zero intelligence when you start applying zero tolerance across the board,” he said. “Stupid and ridiculous things start happening.”

Should these people be punished for doing this?  ABSOLUTELY! Should they be arrested instead of being taken to the principal’s office and have their parents called?  And then be given “community service” like cleaning graffiti in and around the school?  Sure!  Zero tolerance laws make little sense when common sense is not taken into account.  Each offense and the person who has committed them needs to be taken into account.  How would you like it if the police took away your driver’s license every time you went faster than the speed limit?  Or how would you feel if your car was taken whenever you passed a red light?  There needs to be some rational thought when schools call in police officers.  And we need to admit that certain offenses need to be penalized with more rational thought.

On March 1, 2010, General Colin Powell, America’s Promise Alliance Chair Alma Powell and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the formation of Grad Nation. Grad Nation is a 10-year campaign to mobilize the nation as never before to reverse the dropout crisis and enable our children to be prepared for success in college, work and life

The goals:

• Ensure that 90 percent of today’s fourth-graders graduate high school on time.
• Help fulfill the President’s pledge to be the world’s leader in the proportion of college graduates by 2020.

Just 12 percent of the nation’s high schools generate half of the nation’s dropouts.  By focusing our community work on these 2,000 lowest-performing schools, their feeder schools and neighborhoods, we can have tremendous impact.

Why Grad Nation?

• Every 26 seconds, another student drops out of school in America ““ more than 1.3 million students per year.
• Today, more than one in three students fails to graduate from high school.  As a result, we lose an entire graduating class every three years.
• Among minority students, less than 50 percent of Native American and a little more than half of African American and Hispanic students completing high school on time.
• Young people who drop out are twice as likely as likely as graduates to be unemployed; three times as likely to live in poverty; eight times more likely to wind up in prison; and twice as likely to become the parent of a child who drops out.
• Of those who do graduate, only about one-third have the skills they need to succeed in college and the 21^st century workforce.

The funding for the project will come through America’s Promise Alliance.  Go to America’s Promise Alliance’s website for more information.

Why shouldn’t high school be two years for those students who can complete all of the credits they need in a shorter time?

An article in the New York Times (2/18/10) indicated that dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.

Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers  said. Students who fail the 10th-grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but also subjects like science and history.

The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, England, Finland, France and Singapore.

The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and its goals include insuring that students have mastered a set of basic requirements and reducing the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college. More than a million college freshmen across America must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has provided a $1.5 million planning grant to help the national center work with states and districts to get the program running. He estimated that start-up costs for school districts would be about $500 a student, to buy courses and tests and to train teachers.

To defray those costs, the eight states intend to apply for some of the $350 million in federal stimulus money designated for improving public school testing.

High school students will begin the new coursework in the fall of 2011 in Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. The education commissioners of those states have pledged to sign up 10 to 20 schools each for the pilot project, and have begun to reach out to district superintendents.

The project’s backers hope it will eventually spread to all schools in those states, and inspire other states to follow suit. Supporters include the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union.

Kentucky’s commissioner of education, Terry Holliday, said high school graduation requirements there had long been based on having students accumulate enough course credits to graduate.

“This would reform that,” Dr. Holliday said. “We’ve been tied to seat time for 100 years. This would allow an approach based on subject mastery “” a system based around move-on-when-ready.”

Its backers say the new system would reduce the need for community colleges to offer remedial courses because the passing score for the 10th-grade tests would be set at the level necessary to succeed in first-year college courses. Failure would provide 10th graders with an early warning system about the knowledge and skills they need to master in high school before seeking to enroll in college.

Currently, many high school graduates enrolling in community colleges are stunned to find that they cannot pass the math and English exams those colleges use to determine who need remediation.

In that respect, the effort is similar to the growing early college high school movement, in which students begin taking college-level courses while they are still in high school and earning college credit through nearby community colleges.

As long as we are looking into going in that direction, why not extend high school to “as long as it takes” for those students who need more time to master high school curricula?  Isn’t that preferable to having students drop out?

Six in 10 Americans now say colleges mainly care about their bottom line instead of making sure students have a good educational experience.  And that feeling has been rising, jumping eight points in just two years, according to the latest survey.

Squeeze Play 2010,is a new report from Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education tracking public views on college costs and access.

Americans remain skeptical that colleges are doing all they can to keep costs down. Six in 10 say colleges could take in more students without raising prices or reducing quality, and more than half say colleges could spend less and still provide a quality education. Two-thirds believe colleges should use federal stimulus money to hold down tuition, even if it means cutbacks in programs and services.

This public skepticism comes as two other trends collide in the Squeeze Play research: Americans believe that higher education is necessary, even as they worry that it’s becoming less available. The number of Americans who believe college is essential for success remains high, at some 55 percent (a 24 point increase from 10 years ago). Yet majorities believe college is out of reach for many students (69 percent say many qualified students don’t have the opportunity to go to college).

This could not happen at a worse time for colleges.  The recession has cut donations from alumni and foundations.  See a previous posting from this website of whether the cost of college is worth it.  The question is whether colleges will look into their purses and see if cuts in cost can be achieved.  California attempted to raise the cost of public colleges by 1/3, in order to raise funding in a near-bankrupt state, and had to deal with student protests.