Citizens Weigh-IN on Common Core

Parents, teachers rally against Common Core standards in Indiana schools Lawmakers, teachers and parents rallied Wednesday at the Statehouse for a bill that would withdraw Indiana from Common Core State Standards , a national set of academic standards adopted in dozens of states. People who oppose the Common Core initiative argue decisions about educating children need to be made locally and not in Washington.

smoke

The real horror, however, was on a one-page sheet – this was not on the agenda and was meant to be buried — titled, “Summary of January 2011 Regents.” The sheet had a very simple chart showing results of the Regents Exams — the tests taken by all New York State high schoolers, many of which have to be passed for graduation. Easy to read: Exam subject, number of students who took the exam, number of students who passed: 41 kids took Integrated Algebra and only 10 passed; 27 took Global History, 5 passed. Of the ten exams given that fateful January day, only 34 of the 129 students who took them (26%) passed. And this was before any budget crisis. “We’ll look into it,” said the Super.

Field Notes: Wake Up and Smell the Smoke - or Not
by Peter Meyer

shouts and murmurs

As I would learn in my five years on the board, there are no absolute victories and no deafening defeats in the land of education governance; just the constant hum of the bureaucracy trying to control the flow of information and—if you’re lucky—the shouts and murmurs of the “the people” complaining.

Five Lessons from Five Years on the School Board
by Peter Meyer

being there

At some low point in my tenure on the board of education in my small school district, a friend advised, “Don’t worry. You are like gravity. They always know that you are there.”

Five Lessons from Five Years on the School Board
Peter Meyer

super

The superintendent who fought back

Lewis M. Andrews on why suburban schools don't change

How is it that intelligent and motivated parents, many sacrificing financially to afford homes in the most expensive suburbs, end up as uncritical supporters of a public school system...?

IN THEIR HEARTS, says University of Missouri political science professor J. Martin Rochester, many suburban parents know something is wrong. When he interviewed 250 executives of leading corporations for his book on suburban education (Class Warfare: Besieged Schools, Bewildered Parents, Betrayed Kids and the Attack on Excellence), most believed their local schools suffered from programs that are "diluted, distracted, and diffused from the basic mission of education."

The problem, he concluded, is that over decades suburban schools have developed effective techniques for promoting ideas that support the convenience of teachers and administrators, while excluding information and research that would require a change in policies, practices, and personnel.

It starts at the top with boards of education composed largely of busy volunteers, who over-rely on the guidance of superintendents, and goes all the way down to the interactions between teachers and individual parents. When suburbanites join school curriculum committees, for example, they are rarely presented with all sides of an issue and seldom informed of all the relevant research. Critical parents, Professor Rochester found, "end up being demonized as right-wingers or troublemakers."

Other writers who have studied the academic deficiencies of suburban schools reach a similar conclusion. When EducationNews.org columnist Barry Garelick examined the inability of three Maryland districts to successfully incorporate a superior math curriculum from Singapore, he found that teachers skillfully used vague technical jargon and inflexible rules to discredit aspects of the program that required them to learn new skills.

As suggested by the title of his book Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom, Stanford professor emeritus Larry Cuban finds suburban educators eager to spend public money on the latest technology to create a "leading edge" aura, yet rarely willing to take advantage of its academic potential. "Curricula, teaching methods, and schedules [could] all be customized to meet the learning styles and life situations of individual students," says Cuban, and "coursework from the most remedial to the most advanced can be made available to everyone...(but educators take) action to prevent technology from transforming American education."

Dr. Armand Fusco, a retired Branford, Connecticut school superintendent who has written and lectured widely on the deficiencies of suburban districts, sees similar problems: "It's one thing for parents to intuit a problem, quite another to do anything about it when educators with advanced degrees flash their credentials and have glib answers for every question."

Superintendents, for example, will always brag that their local public school students perform just as well on state mastery tests as students in neighboring affluent suburbs. What they neglect to mention is that any mediocre suburban school will appear successful, just so long as it is surrounded by other mediocre suburban schools and their average test scores are higher than those of nearby urban districts.

Dr. Fusco believes that the federal No Child Left Behind law had it right when it sought to measure the performance of individual schools, but it was aimed at demographic groups least able to do anything about the results. "What's needed is data that makes it clear to suburbanites just how badly served their own children really are."
Meet the Suburban Parents

help desk - questions for management

A friend of ours who sits on the board of a private school watched the Terc Investigations video a couple of weeks ago. Until he saw it, he believed boards should leave curriculum decisions up to school administration. Now he wants to write him a list of questions to ask "management" about the school's math curriculum.

Suggestions?

Trench Warfare on the Board of Ed

Peter Meyer at Education Next:

I couldn’t believe it.

John, the new board of education president, had just proposed that we move “Old Business” to the beginning of our meetings.

I had spent roughly a year-and-a-half arguing that it made no sense to put Old Business at the end of each school board meeting, which usually arrived about 10pm, the third hour of these star chambers of modern public education. By then, most people, including the lone reporter, had gone home.  That, of course, was the point: Old Business was dirty laundry, things not done. Why flaunt it?

I had gotten nowhere with my arguments because my colleagues on the school board thought I was the devil.  I was the infamous “rogue” board member, the person that school board associations give seminars about. Not a team player. The local paper wrote an editorial about me that prompted a friend, after church, to remark, “I’ve seen kinder things said about murderers.”

[snip]

Needless to say, my new colleagues were not looking forward to the prospect of sharing executive sessions with me. And, after being sworn in, they went out of their way to keep me in the dark. If the superintendent recommended hiring a new teacher and I asked to see the candidate’s resume, a motion was quickly made that school board did not want to see said resume. It passed, 6 to 1. When a special board meeting was called to approve $25 million in construction contracts, I asked to see the contracts. “I make a motion that the board does not look at the contracts,” said one of my colleagues. “I second that, said another.” Another defeat, 6 to 1.

One of my favorites was Board Policy #2510. It was titled NEW BOARD MEMBER-ELECT ORIENTATION and it said, in part, that “Each Board member-elect shall, as soon as possible, … be given selected materials of the previous year covering the function of the Board and the school district, including (a) policy manual, (b) copies of key reports prepared during the previous year by school Board committees and/or the administration, (c) the School Law handbook prepared by the New York State School Boards Association, (d) access to minutes of Board meetings of the previous year, (e) latest financial report of the district, and (f) copies of pertinent materials developed by the New York State School Boards Association….”

My orientation consisted of the board president and superintendent sitting me down and saying, “You’re not getting anything.” And so it went.

I once read the board’s orientation policy, out loud, at a public meeting, to the regional superintendent, a lawyer. “Aren’t school boards supposed to follow their own policies?” I asked. “The board can do whatever it wants,” he said. I was shocked, because board policies are, in fact, laws and have to be followed–or changed.

He might have said, “whatever it can get away with.” But his comment reminded me of a fundamental truth about public school systems: the buck stops with the people.

administration spends $50K without board vote
"it's just about statistically impossible that a bid would come in at exactly $50K"
fields exchange at BOE meeting
school boards behaving badly
board member FOILs district docs
trench warfare on the board of ed

trench warfare on the board of ed

Peter Meyer:

Re: [irvingtonparentsforum] Re: Is the Board violating the law?

To answer the question as straightforwardly as possible, as I read "the law," no individual board member has a right to do much of anything, including look at documents. Thus, you have to force the issue at a board meeting by getting the board to request the documents or, as an individual, file a FOIL request. (I am not a lawyer, so this is my opinion based on years, on and off the board, of fighting these battles.)

There is something which says any board member can ask for and see personnel records if a good reason is given (I'm sorry I'm not at my desk and can't quote chapter and verse), but when I tried that (we had teachers up for tenure), they claimed my reason wasn't good enough! This is real trench warfare up here, where most board members are afraid of their own shadow and being "a rogue" or a boat-rocker is considered a danger to the school. Thus, on some issues I have to shoot each arrow in the quiver -- demand the board vote, FOIL, and a letter to the editor. It's time consuming, of course, but if you're consistent about it (and civil), you won't need so many arrows for the next battle/request.

Because "the law" is so strange and complicated -- and stacked in favor of the status quo and those "leaders" of the status quo -- this stuff gets to be very personal. So, it helps to smile a lot while fighting. (I now know why Senators call their enemies across the aisle, "My dear colleague" -- though I don't know why Boehner cries all the time.)

cheers,

--pm

administration spends $50K without board vote
"it's just about statistically impossible that a bid would come in at exactly $50K"
fields exchange at BOE meeting
school boards behaving badly
board member FOILs district docs
trench warfare on the board of ed

news from nowhere, part 3

the fields exchange at last Tuesday night's board meeting

school boards behaving badly

Peter Meyer responding to David Kaplan.

And here is Ed.

more fun with public schools

Peter Meyer weighs in

lgm on school board elections

Also take in to account that a large minority of potential voters are employees of the school district and that the union is actively ensuring that particular candidates be put up for election. An independent candidate has a lot of work to do to counteract the organization and get out the vote in my area.

This is one of the main reasons why we have mayoral control of the schools, right?

political season

Hey everyone -- the school board election is coming up and I'm going to be campaigning more and posting less for a few weeks.

Board candidates

small-d democracy and its discontents

communicating with the public

or not:

11/24/09 Board of Education Meeting Agenda 8E:
Protocol for Information Requests by Board Members

Recommended Motion: “RESOLVED, that the Board of Education of the Irvington School District, approve the protocol for Board functioning that all information requests made by Board members of any District employee must be made to the Board President. If he/she so deems the request might require a significant expenditure of time, the Board as a whole will vote as to whether the request will be approved or not.”


11/24/09 Board of Education Meeting Agenda 8F
Protocol for Request of Information (FOIL)

Recommended Motion: “RESOLVED, that the Board of Education of the Irvington School District approve the protocol for Board functioning, that it is the intention of the District to manage the effective use of District staff time. Thus, it is the intention of the Board of Education that any request from the community for information that requires collection of data, pulling a report, copying, or any work and time commitment should be requested through the FOIL process. To that end, it is the intention of the Board that no individual Board member should directly ignore this protocol by circumventing the FOIL request – by providing information to which a Board member has access directly to a community member without the requested FOIL request.”

On the agenda for December 22 vote.

COOG weighs in.

if you live in New York:
Committee on Open Government

Paul B on his short, happy career in politics

A long time ago I worked for a major computer manufacturer and lived in a very small town. The town was investigating their first computer purchase and I volunteered to be on the committee doing the investigating.

I managed to convince my company to donate every last bit of equipment just for the PR benefit but the deal fell apart after months of political warfare.

Long story short, the politicos could not agree on whose office would get the printer. It seems the analysis and critical thinking boiled down to this nugget...

The printer 'owner' would have all of the 'power' by virtue of seeing and distributing all the reports that it spit out. Absent an agreement on this nit, the whole deal went down and they continued without a computer system for years afterwards.

That was the beginning and end of my career in the world of politics.

Given what I am learning about the world of local school boards, I think these people were right.

The person who owns the printer owns the power.

What do you think?

More anon.

inside the other black box

school board member Peter Mayer:

I remember sitting in my first executive session as a school board member, in 1999, and thinking to myself, “This is like getting into Fort Knox.”

I had been a general-interest journalist for some 25 years at that point, and had always had the hardest time cracking institutions that took care of children. They almost always denied journalists access, arguing that it was not in the best interests of the child.

Now, here I was, on “the inside,” on the school board, discussing intimate details about children, parents, teachers, aides, maintenance workers—and I was seeing what I had always suspected. The organization’s leaders were not so much protecting (or caring for or even educating) children as they were caught up trying to manage a bumbling and relatively incompetent bureaucracy.

I am not much more than an interested student of school board history. But my sense of things, after two stints on my local school board—for six months in 1999-2000 and since 2007 to today—is that school boards have been overtaken by the “educatocracy,” by powerful trade unions, certified specialists, certification agencies, state and federal rule-makers and legislators, grants with strings, billion-dollar-contractor lobbyists, textbook mega-companies, professional associations, and lawyers—the list could go on.

Under these circumstances, it doesn’t surprise me that many people think school boards are irrelevant. They are. Boards do a lot of moving the chairs around on the deck, but they’re not really steering the boat. Ask board members anywhere what their biggest problems are and they are likely to say: state and federal regulation. Mandates.

I recall a Nigerian immigrant who had several children in our district trying to explain to someone who was complaining about a school why America was so great. “Here,” he said in halting English, “if you don’t like something, you vote no.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, in fact, a no vote on a school budget didn’t really mean no. Because of state law, if voters rejected a school budget, all that happened was the district had to operate with the same budget as the previous year, plus inflation.

And if state and federal regulation ties one hand behind your back, the unions take care of the other by protecting teachers who really should be dismissed.

Then there’s the mind-numbing minutiae. At least twice a month, just before a school board meeting, I receive a packet from the superintendent. It contains the agenda—usually three to four pages long, each item numbered, with subcategories with numbers like 13.1.7—and sometimes hundreds of pages of documentation to go with them. At any given meeting, there also can be several dozen detailed resolutions.

It’s no wonder that “experts” have to be called in to explain it to us board members. “A superintendent’s primary job,” I was once told by one of them, “is to manage the board.” And that’s the problem. School boards have been taught impotence in the face of information, a problem that causes them to act—and fight—like children. I recall one evening being called in to a special meeting to approve $25 million in construction contracts. “I’d like to see the contracts,” I said. My colleagues, so lacking in confidence in their own responsibility, voted 6-1 notto see the contracts.

One year, I had a debate with a board member in a newspaper’s letters column on the question of whether the board should have a curriculum committee. He was certain that it was the school board’s only job to hire a superintendent and then sit back and let him or her run the district. The board shouldn’t be “meddling” with curriculum. It was a view shared by the five other board members, even after someone unearthed for me Board Policy #4200, which clearly stated the “board is committed to establishing and maintaining a coordinated curriculum management process.”

[snip]

For Better Schools and for Civic Life, Schools Must Assert Power
by Peter Meyer
Education Wee
Vol. 29, Issue 07, Page s15

Peter Meyer is a former news editor for Life magazine and a contributing editor at Education Next. He is a member of the school board in the Hudson City School District in Hudson, N.Y.
A special report funded by The Wallace Foundation.

Hudson is a 2-hour drive from here.

status quo la-la-la

....This makes sense when one considers the basic motive people have to defend and justify the status quo. People have a need to believe in a ‘‘just world’’ that is orderly and predictable and in which people get what they deserve (Lerner, 1980). According to system justification theory, people are motivated to view existing social arrangements as legitimate, even when this justifies their own disadvantaged position (e.g., Jost et al., 2004; Jost & Hunyady, 2002). In fact, those with the least power in a system are sometimes the most likely to support and defend that system (Henry & Saul, 2006; Jost et al., 2003). Research reveals that people actively perform their own cognitive and ideological work to preserve their sense that the status quo is desirable and just (e.g., Haines & Jost, 2000; Kay, Jimenez, & Jost, 2002).

There are psychological benefits to accepting the status quo. System-justifying beliefs and ideologies are palliative in that they decrease negative affect and increase positive affect as well as satisfaction with one’s situation (Jost & Hunyady, 2002; Jost et al., 2003). Wakslak and colleagues (2007) demonstrated that system justification leads to a significant reduction in emotional distress, both in general and with regard to moral outrage, guilt, and frustration.
Legitimacy Crisis? Behavioral Approach and Inhibition When Power Differences are Left Unexplained
Pamela K. Smith Æ John T. Jost Æ Ranjini Vijay
Soc Just Res (2008) 21:358–376

These researchers are looking at blacks and women, etc. I'm curious whether they would find similar phenomena in parents whose children are attending public schools.


tactics used to maintain the status quo
Diagnosis Diagnosed by Galen Alessi
on a certain arrogance
inputs & outputs
a rare victory
code of silence
code of silence, part 2

which picture doesn't belong?

and why?

Now that the School District has admitted that they have no copyright on the information and pictures posted on their website, we are again able to take this public information, gathered, processed, and presented with public funds and post them on the Valhalla Voice.

Here are six pictures from Valhalla's website. Today's question is:

"Which doesn't belong and why?"

The answer is the cow of course. Not because there is no cow in Valhalla, but because there was a cow in Valhalla.

Is it getting to be time to put the public school system out of its misery?

Prince William County , Virginia votes to keep Investigations

Sad news from PWC, VA. The school board voted to keep Investigations, though that's not how they phrased it. They voted for a "blended approach". Which means Investigations. An excellent summary of the night's events can be found here.

The parents have not given up, however, and school board elections are not far away. There are many disgruntled parents there.