What next . . .

Though it has nothing to do with our work, I found this video on Russo's This Week In Education fascinating.   It is about 3D printing and shows a crescent wrench being reproduced on a printer.  When finished it actually works.

I have no idea on cost or potential, but it is intriguing.  I'd like to embed the video on my post, but I still haven't been able to do that.  You can get to it on the Russo post (he is obviously more technically adept than I am) or on the link below.  Let me know what you think.  Any education uses?  Maybe we could use it to build a new school or at least a few more permanent classrooms.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZboxMsSz5Aw&feature=player_detailpage

Find comon ground and get moving . . .

Reflecting on the President’s and Mr. Duncan’s waiver proposal leads me back to a series of blogs from the previous week on four NCLB bills proposed by four republican senators. It leads to believe that there is some common ground to get moving with some sense of urgency on reauthorization.  I think the bills and the waiver opportunities have merit and are at least moving in the right direction, something that we have not yet seen from either house.


Key features of the proposed bills include the following.
• Removal of 100% at standard by 2014 and labeling of failing schools.
• Continuation of testing at grades 3-8 and once in high school in reading and math.
• Required reporting on subgroups.
• Adoption of college and career ready standards with similar flexibility to the proposed waiver standards.
• Required support for lowest achieving 5% of schools with additional intervention options.
• Scrapping the highly qualified teacher provisions.
• Consolidating 59 federal programs into two flexible funds.
• Expansion of charter options.

These are certainly a beginning and foundation for dialogue. Yes, others want more flexibility and the removal of mandated testing while still others see any change as rolling back progress on changes supporting all children. Unfortunately, as I shared in my previous post on the proposed waivers, the reauthorization process has now become an election issue with each party blaming the other. Below is a response from a House Democratic aide to the proposal from the four senate republicans.

. . . said the Senate GOP is "continuing to play politics with education policy, and not doing anything serious for kids." The move is "fully in line" with the GOP's desire not to give Obama a victory on education, the aide argued.

In this Democrats for Education Reform post they take a similar stance.

"In one fell swoop, Senators Alexander, Burr, Isakson, and Kirk have capitulated in the one issue area where Republicans could reasonably claim to stand with rank and file voters against the political and economic powers that be," said Charles Barone, DFER Director of Federal Policy. "By giving in to those in the education establishment for whom education reform recently has made life difficult, they have pulled the rug out from under parents and state and local advocates across the political spectrum who have used federal law to leverage unprecedented changes in their school systems."


What I find interesting is the similarity between the senator’s proposals and the proposed waiver conditions. These include no longer needing to meet the testing benchmarks and labels that go with it, adoption of a set of core standards, continued testing, and support for the bottom 5% of schools. Why can’t this agreement result in meaningful attempts to reach agreement on a reauthorization?

Senator Alexander, one of the authors of the senate bills is going further in an attempt to move legislation and accomplish reauthorization by the end of the year. In an attempt to move forward he will be resigning his Republican Senate Leadership position to work more closely in a bipartisan manner with democrats on education reform. We need more of this – the foundation is there for dialogue in these four bills, in the house action to date, and in the waiver proposal. It is time to move forward. Yes, there are very difficult issues that need to be resolved, but making it an election issue will only polarize positions, not move us forward.

Waving goodbye . . .

Last week the NCLB waiver possibility became a reality as President Obama shared the plan in a White House news conference.  We have been hearing about it for months in speeches by Secretary Duncan and now know that states can apply for the waiver, under certain conditions.  Like most things related to education, the response has been varied and depends upon the publication or blog you choose to read.  For example, if you go to the Education Department site you will read how positive the move is for states and schools.  In SecretaryDuncan’s letter to Chief State School Officers explaining the waiver process he shares some of his reasoning.

. . . Instead of fostering progress and accelerating academic improvement, many NCLB requirements have unintentionally become barriers to State and local implementation of forward-looking reforms designed to raise academic achievement. Consequently, many of you are petitioning us for relief from the requirements of current law. One of my highest priorities is to help ensure that Federal laws and policies can support these reforms and not hinder State and local innovation aimed at increasing the quality of instruction and improving student academic achievement.

It is hard to argue with this reasoning, but will the waivers free us up from the onerous requirements of NCLB without adding additional requirements?  Once again, it depends upon who you read.  For example, in this Washington Post blog by Monty Neill, executive director of FairTest one comes away thinking this may not be a good idea.

The Obama administration’s new No Child Left Behind “flexibility” plan offers our struggling public schools a leap from the frying pan to the fire.

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan provide no relief from No Child Left Behind’s massive over-use of testing — more testing than in any other advanced nation. In fact, they are demanding more, not less, testing. They provide no relief from NCLB’s mandated misuse of test scores for school accountability. And their plan will push states into adopting highly flawed and inaccurate uses of student test results to judge teachers and principals.

Or this from Senator Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

“The truth is the secretary has the states over a barrel. Most governors want a waiver. Almost every state, they’ll be asking for a waiver,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who has introduced a Republican education package that would remove most of the national standards and leave them to the states. The waivers “run the risk of 100,000 schools being supervised by a national school board,” he said.

What must states do to receive the waiver that can be awarded as early as January?  They must adopt college and career-ready standards.  They don’t force states to adopt the Common Core, but they are promoted as college and career-ready.  Second, they must have in place rigorous interventions to turn around the bottom 5% of schools and an additional 10% of schools with low graduation rates or large achievement gaps.  Third, they must have in place a teacher and principal evaluation system that in some way uses student achievement data.

What do states get in return for agreeing to these waiver conditions?  They are free of the requirement to have ALL children at standard in math and reading by 2014, a goal that never had a chance of being reached.  Schools would no longer be labeled as failing if this provision of the law is waived.  As shared above by Neill however, the testing requirements remain in place. 

What next?  In the short term the political battle and finger pointing will continue.  The Republican response has been swift and negative as seen in this NY Times article.

“In my judgment, he is exercising an authority and power he doesn’t have,” said Representative John Kline, Republican of Minnesota and chairman of the House education committee. “We all know the law is broken and needs to be changed. But this is part and parcel with the whole picture with this administration: they cannot get their agenda through Congress, so they’re doing it with executive orders and rewriting rules. This is executive overreach.”

An obvious question then would be if we all know it is broken why have we not been able to fix it considering the law has been due for a rewrite since 2007?  There will be much political capital to gain as election season heats up and the major players use NCLB to seek votes.  For us, it means more waiting to see what eventually will land on us from above.  In the meantime we will continue to move forward on what we believe will support success for more young people in our system.

Turnaround . . .

Most of the turnarounds I read about are the ineffective strategies used to turnaround "failing" schools.  This turnaround, however, is about football.  We went from 0 and 3 last week to 3 and 0 this week.  The Bears, Huskies, and Seahawks all won.  Once again the Bears and Huskies put up big points, something it appears they will need to do all season as they struggle on defense.  The Seahawks on the other hand  have little offense, but yesterday came through on defense.  For one week at least the results feel good.

Not good for us . . .

The deepening budget problem has resulted in the Governor calling for an unprecedented special session in late November.  Normally, the legislators would wait until the regular session and begin with a supplemental budget process as they did last year when cuts were made at that time.  This is not good for us for many reasons.  I have shared many times how difficult it is to cut once a budget has been adopted and now this will happen two years in a row.  We have also been "trimming" our budget for the last three years so the "fat" has been pretty much lost.  I understand and have empathy for our elected officials because they are in a similar position. 

This does not, however, remove them form the need to provide us with an adequate and stable funding base.  Something must change so that we do not go through the painful process of developing a balanced budget and then find within the first month that there will be less state revenue than what the budget was built upon.  Even more troublesome is that they then decide we should go three months into the budget year before they can tell us how much less revenue we will have. 

One additional reason for concern is the timing.  They are waiting until November for the next revenue forecast.  That makes sense for them, but for us it is a problem because we must certify our levy collection that month.  If we knew the cut by then we might have the capacity to offset some of it through this process.  Waiting until the end of November, if they even get done by then, eliminates this important option for us and for many others school districts.

In this Seattle Times article we learn that cutting at the state level is also much more difficult.  According to the Governor, they have fewer options.

Gregoire contends that nearly two-thirds of the budget is essentially off-limits to cuts because of federal mandates and state constitutional restrictions. The biggest components are basic education, Medicaid, pensions and state debt.

That means the $2 billion in cuts must come from the remaining $8.7 billion of the budget that is unprotected by the constitution or federal law, the governor said. "That is, bottom line, a 23 percent cut," she said.

. . . "We're going to have to admit there are things we simply as a state can no longer do," she said.

The ranking Republican on the Senate Ways and Means Committee, however, has a different opinion.

Zarelli disagreed that any part of the budget is off-limits. For example, he said, the state could choose to stop certain services even if it meant losing federal matching dollars.

"A lot of times we simply do things because there is a 50 percent federal share. We still have state money in there. If that's not a high priority lets look at it from the perspective of what could you do with that money," he said.

I think this might be a long session or the leadership will cut a deal and get it approved and out so that they will be ready for the regular session where they can begin the process all over again.

Losing respect . . .

I seem to lately be focusing on the issue of respect for teachers and battles between the various groups attempting to fix us, meaning public schools.  This post is from Larry Ferlazzo a teacher sharing his Q and A ongoing column on Education Week Online about teacher respect.  Weekly, Larry is asked a question that he responds to online.  The question for this week is:

What social/political causes have contributed to the downgrading of respect for the teaching profession?

In his short response he agrees that there has been a decline in respect for teachers though  he does site the recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll I blogged about where 71% of those surveyed say that they have trust and confidence in the men and women teaching their children.  He goes on to share, how in the same poll 68% of people heard more bad stories about teachers in the news media than good ones.  He doesn’t say so, but this can’t help but be a contributing factor to the overall feeling that current teachers have about their profession.

He also uses something called Google Books Ngram Viewer to search, compare, and graph word usage in hundreds of years of books.  He admits it is not scientific research but the resulting graph is interesting, how the words blaming teachers passed the words respecting teachers about 1990.

In the column Ferlazzo invites guests to respond to the question.  One of the invited guests was Dennis Van Roekel, NEA President who shared the following in his reply agreeing with the questioner that respect for teachers is indeed declining.  

Improving public education is a shared responsibility. Too many of us have fallen prey to a fallacy that schools can overcome all problems. Our students need social programs and safety nets that make it possible for them to arrive at the schoolhouse door ready to learn. Our foreign competitors have found ways to limit inequality--why can't we?

I find this argument in much of my current reading about the “reformer” battle and am influenced by it.  I think that the reformers tend to shunt the poverty and social issue to the side in their eagerness to focus on the teacher as the pivotal point of successful reform. 

Though we do not have significant poverty in our system our Free and Reduced Lunch numbers are increasing and this does have an influence on the capacity of our schools to meet the needs of every child.  This was once again evident to me today in my conversation with one of our principals where we discussed the problems associated with students coming to our schools not ready to be students.  They aren’t prepared for participating in a classroom setting, they struggle to sustain a focus over time, they do not have the life experiences that prepare them for the school success, they don’t have  support at home, and the system struggles to provide the non-academic interventions that are needed prior to or at least concurrently with the academic support.

Van Roekel also addresses this point.

We hear all the time that American students score lower than some of our foreign competitors, but critics don't seem to want to know how and why that happens. One reason: Our child poverty rate is over 20 percent. Finland's is less than five percent. In American schools with low child poverty, our students can take on the best in the world.

Ferlazzo’s blog is one that I have shared before.  He is definitely on the other end of the continuum from those labeled as “reformers” and one you might want to follow as he regularly updates his readers on this issue. 

The good vs. the bad . . .

I’ve been holding a blog post sent to me by Amy Adams for about a week as I was focused on other things and also because of what it pushed me to think about. Amy is TEA’s chief negotiator and has been for many years. Over this time and even before that we have had numerous conversations about our work and her advocacy for teachers. Though we don’t always agree on an issue, we share our thinking, seek to find common ground, and I believe leave with mutual respect for the roles that we play and for our concern with the future of public education.


The post that she shared with me is by David Sirota and comes from SALON. It is titled, The bait and switch of school “reform” and is a lengthy blog post. In it, Sirota takes on the positions espoused by the “reformers”, in this case beginning with Steven Brill’s new book, Class Warfare. I haven’t read the book, but I have read reviews in blog posts. Brill would be viewed as one in the “reformer” camp pushing for charters, rigorous teacher evaluation models that use student achievement data, common core, common assessments . . .

Sirota sees Brill and others as contributing to a simplistic view of the education issue today with greedy teachers on one side and “reformers” including very wealthy corporations and foundations working for the kids on the other side.

The dominant narrative, in other words, explains the fight for the future of education as a battle between the evil forces of myopic selfishness (teachers) and the altruistic benevolence of noblesse oblige (Wall Street). Such subjective framing has resulted in reporters, pundits and politicians typically casting the "reformers'" arguments as free of self-interest, and therefore more objective and credible than teachers' counterarguments.


The truth, of course, is that for all the denialist agitprop to the contrary, corporate education "reformers" are motivated by self-interest, too.

Sirota identifies three of those areas of self-interest that I share below. He makes some interesting arguments that I will let you read by going to the post.

Self-Interest 1: Pure Profit

Self-Interest 2: Changing the Subject From Poverty to Inequality

Self-Interest 3: New Front in the War on Unions

I believe that the following excerpt from the post captures the essence of Sirota’s feelings on the issue of profit.

Corporate education "reformers'" self-interest, by contrast, means advocating for policies that help private corporations profit off of public schools, diverting public attention from an anti-poverty economic agenda, and busting unions that prevent total oligarchical control of America's political system. In short, it's about the profit, stupid.


Neither side's self-interest is perfectly aligned with the goal of bettering our education system. But one side is clearly far more aligned with that goal than the other.

I find myself agreeing with the premise that education writers and “reformers” have been successful at creating a simplistic view of our current reality in public education with teachers and unions on one side and “reformers” and rich individuals and foundations on the other. I would add, however, that included in the “reformer” camp would be governors and other state leaders pushing to weaken union influence and the Obama administration embracing many of the same reform strategies being pushed by these individuals and groups. They are not pushing reform for a personal or corporate profit.

I also don’t agree that the primary motivation of corporate “reformers”, education writers, and foundations is about profit. Certainly, those from the corporate world are concerned with profit and that there is money to be made as public education continues to be pushed towards necessary reforms. But, I also believe that there is a genuine concern in the level of knowledge and skills possessed by our high school graduates and the impact that this has on the future work force. Perhaps I just want to have a positive presupposition because of all the conflict, but I struggle to see profit as the primary motivation for the majority of those in the “reformer” camp.

Putting the blame on teachers and teacher unions frankly makes me mad. Teachers care and work hard to support young people and unions were introduced at a time when changes and advocacy were needed. Of course, my frame of reference is from our system and the manner in which we approach our work. If I were in Tacoma right now facing a strike over a transfer policy needing to change I would think differently. But, it is possible to form productive partnerships with teacher associations led by officers who balance advocacy with a focus on the needs of young people in our schools.

Once again, reading this post is upsetting when I think of the wasted energy devoted to this “fight” and to the influence people outside our profession have through control of millions of dollars given to anyone willing to agree with their positions. This would include schools and school systems and those in elected positions seeking support for reelection.

Though not labeled as such, I consider our school system and myself as reformers. We learn from the research and are focused on success for all students. We use nontraditional delivery models and see the need for including online and blended learning opportunities. We acknowledge the need for change and are open to influence by those that have experienced success. We are one of those systems trying hard and getting positive results. I believe that our culture and the relations that we have with both bargaining units contributes to our success. A foundation might want to study us as a possible “reform strategy”, it might go further than weakening the union, or all kids moving to charters. Oh well, I can at least dream.

Thanks, Amy for sharing this. Much of what I read in the blogs I follow gives me the other side, it is important to hear from teachers and teacher unions. I think much of our problem is because of all the voices out there on both sides. There is far too much “interpersonal mush” controlling our experiences and behavior.