Monday, July 19, 2010

Resegregation in Raleigh?

Associated Press writer Allen G. Breed tells of the "Wake County Board of Education's decision to scrap a much-praised busing-for-diversity program" in Raleigh, North Carolina, in Fear of `resegregation' fuels unrest in NC. The program "was considered a model for those looking for a way around race-based assignment scheme rejected by the courts" during the late 90's. Parents weary of long bus rides for their children established a new school board majority dedicated to "dismantling the old diversity plan...in an election last fall that saw just 8 percent turnout." Breed writes of the turmoil caused by the board's decision:

The superintendent resigned in protest. A coalition of residents and civil rights groups filed suit. Months of rallies, news conferences and candlelight vigils against the feared "resegregation" of the state's largest school district culminated in the recent arrests of four activists for refusing to vacate board members' chairs.

Locals are lecturing Northern transplants about the Jim Crow past; white school board members are quoting Brown v. Board of Education to the NAACP.

Alternate link

Odds 'n' Ends

Michael Winerip had a good article last week (that I missed) in The New York Times, A Chosen Few Are Teaching for America. Also, Bill Gates spoke at the AFT convention in Seattle, while Arne Duncan, who was in town, didn't (wasn't invited, I think). With both the NEA and AFT conventions having come and gone, it appears neither national teachers' union has yet come to terms with the reality that they're going to have to openly and aggressively oppose the President and Secretary of Education's "reform" plans included in Race to the Top and the blueprint for reauthorization of ESEA to save public education.

And if you have an iPhone 4, you probably already know that on Friday Apple CEO Steve Jobs said Apple will give all iPhone 4 owners a free case to correct connectivity problems. Unfortunately, the way it was done wasn't pretty. Slate's Farhad Manjoo tells the sad story in Here's Your Free Case, Jerk: Apple's condescending iPhone 4 press conference.

Annie and I have iPhone 3Gs. We both get asked quite often if we're going to upgrade to the new iPhone. People seem surprised when both of us respond that we're fairly pleased with what we have now and don't plan to upgrade soon. With the problems with the the iPhone 4, I'd guess we'll wait for the next model before upgrading.

In the meantime, I'll just have to learn to live with the lousy iPhone 3G camera. The photo at left of Annie's breaded tenderloin (a midwest treat) was taken in our favorite pub last week in rather low light conditions. I had to do a bunch of stuff to it in Photoshop just to get a useable image.

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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Teacher Bailout Still in Limbo

Congressional Quarterly has reported that "House Democratic leaders will accept the Senate's plan to pass a stripped-down supplemental spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while seeking another vehicle for money to prevent the layoffs of some 140,000 teachers, a well-informed House aide said Monday." That ends the standoff between House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey and the Obama Administration over the House bill that cut Race to the Top funding to help pay for the bailout and produced a threatened veto from the President. In addition, the Obama Administration revealed some of its priorities with "their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps" to fund a bailout.

Now it's getting awfully close to the start of school, and Congress is back to the drawing board on saving teacher jobs. And the dustup has produced some unusually revealing information from Representative Obey who is retiring at the end of this term:

• David Obey: I Leave More Discontented Than I Started - Excerpts of an interview with Wisconsin Rep. David Obey with the Fiscal Times' Washington Editor, Eric Pianin
• David Obey Locks Horns with Obama in Budget Battle by Eric Pianin and Adam Graham-Silverman

(Note: Thanks to reader Ed Harris for the links above.)

A couple of other related articles, Rick Hess's Bleak Omens for Obama's Ed Agenda on the Hill and David Rogers's The Democrats' education debacle are good reads.

The thought I've taken away from the recent events is that the Obama Administration's turnaround strategies, which I view as fatally flawed, are far more important to them than saving teacher jobs (and thus helping cut class size, course offerings, and...student learning). A posting by Valerie Strauss last month of an email exchange with education historian Diane Ravitch revealed the Administration's intransigence on the subject of education reform. Ravitch wrote, "I was recently invited to meet with high-level administration officials in the White House. I told them my concerns. I told them what I have heard from teachers and parents. They told me I was misinformed." She added later, "Maybe it will turn out to be a winning strategy for Secretary Duncan. He may get what he wants. It just won’t be good for American education or our kids."

Dora Taylor, a teacher at Nova High School in Seattle, blogged about her meeting with Secretary Duncan last week in I Met With Arne Duncan Yesterday. Her impressions are much like Ravitch's experience above, but Taylor adds:

After listening to Duncan, I came away with the impression that he thinks that what he is doing is the right thing but is not aware of how his agenda is affecting schools, students and communities. But then again, how could that be? What he did in Chicago he is trying to nationalize now through RTTT. I know that he has heard this all before from teachers and parents in Chicago over the last few years. Then, knowing that it’s not working in Chicago, why is he continuing to think that his idea of education reform will work anywhere else?

Somewhat on the same topic, Michael Winerip's A Popular Principal, Wounded by Government’s Good Intentions tells of a good principal removed in a turnaround effort because the school system needed the turnaround funds. School year shrinking as budget crisis grows by Louis Freedberg is more specific to California's school funding problems.

Odds 'n' Ends

NBC hosting education summit in September by David Bauder (alternate link) announces NBC's upcoming look at education on Education Nation 2010. The site says lots of "experts" have been scheduled to participate in the discussions. (Did you get an invite?) My guess is that this will end up being another round of teacher bashing by neo-experts that further denigrates our profession.

An Answer Sheet guest post today by Marion Brady suggests that "An emergency national conference should be called to rethink it" [school reform].

Currently, of course, the only reforms being taken seriously are those being pushed by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Waltons, and other rich theorists.

They may never have taught even the first eight hours of the 10,000 that Malcolm Gladwell says is necessary to become really knowledgeable about a profession, and they may never have tried to convince a bunch of skeptical adolescents that trees don’t get big by sucking stuff up out of the ground, or they may never have gotten a class of college students to accept that they can’t make good sense of the world if they don’t understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but never mind all that. It’s that old Golden Rule again: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.

I'm encouraged that more and more people with real experience and knowledge of education are speaking out about the current misdirection of education reform, but the folks with the gold and those in the Obama Department of Education simply aren't and won't listen.

Publication Note

I'll be taking a week or so off for a little medical tuneup I wrote about last month.

Closing on a Lighter Note

We began picking honeydew melons last week from our garden, and got our first cantaloupe this week. Now it's a race to see if we get to the ripe melons before the raccoons do!