Posts Tagged → arne duncan

Renaissance As Our 21st Century Miracle

You should probably be careful anytime you include a date in the name of a big reform project.

That date will eventually arrive and it’s likely people will check to see if your reforms actually happened.

Case in point is Renaissance 2010, the high profile attempt to overhaul the Chicago city school system, created by none other than our current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.

So, 2010 is here, how did they do?

Six years after Mayor Richard Daley launched a bold initiative to close down and remake failing schools, Renaissance 2010 has done little to improve the educational performance of the city’s school system, according to a Tribune analysis of 2009 state test data.

Scores from the elementary schools created under Renaissance 2010 are nearly identical to the city average, and scores at the remade high schools are below the already abysmal city average, the analysis found.

The moribund test scores follow other less than enthusiastic findings about Renaissance 2010 — that displaced students ended up mostly in other low-performing schools and that mass closings led to youth violence as rival gang members ended up in the same classrooms. Together, they suggest the initiative hasn’t lived up to its promise by this, its target year.

Oh, but it gets better.

Following in the footsteps of Bush’s Texas “miracle” that became No Child Left Behind, Duncan is now incorporating all his wonderfully successful ideas from Ren10 into Race to the Top, the latest meaningless, not to mention expensive, educational-buzz-term-based national school reform program.

Duncan is using an unprecedented $4.35 billion pot of money to lure states into building education systems that replicate key Ren10 strategies. The grant money will go to states that allow charter schools to flourish and to those that experiment with turning around failing schools — all part of the Chicago reform.

Just as the previous administration assigned magical powers to high-stakes standardized testing, the current group is putting it’s faith in charter schools as an all-purpose educational cure-all.

Actually, the charter concept is not a bad one: allow educators to adapt schools to fit the needs of students instead of the other way around.

The execution, on the other hand, in most places has been mediocre at best (criminally dismal in too many cases) largely mirroring that of the Chicago “renaissance”: throwing lots of cash at charters to achieve mixed results.

Of course, there is a middle ground between the all-stick-and-no-carrot philosophy of NCLB and the quiz-show-competition, scattershot approach that is at the core of RTTT.

But finding it is going to require far more complex thinking than most of our national education “leaders” seem to be willing to consider.

Iron Chef Education

I guess we have our official new education buzz phrase to replace “no child left behind”.

Race to the Top

Does anyone else think that sounds like the title of a game show?

Reading news reports from last week’s reveal of Obama’s new education reform proposal reminded me of one of those television cooking contests.

As near as I can tell, the federal government is going to divvy up a huge pot of money among contestants states who take the same secret ingredients and mix them together into an educational stew, one that will like be only slightly different from one plate to the next.

But the pieces of this new educational recipe really aren’t all that new.

On Friday, Obama will officially announce the “Race to the Top,” a competition for $4.35 billion in grants. He wants states to use funds to ease limits on charter schools, tie teacher pay to student achievement and move for the first time toward common academic standards.

Of course the primary method currently used to assess student learning will continue to be the corporate produced and scored multiple choice test, a vehicle which is cheap and easy but offers little or no real information.

Only now we’re going to have a national version of these “assessments”, with student scores linked to the pay of their teachers.

The Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan calls this plan Education reform’s moon shot.

It sounds more like a low-rent cooking show in which the cooks use third-rate ingredients to make the same minimally-acceptable meal.

Education is All About The Feng Shui

So, what’s the biggest problem with No Child Left Behind?

Exactly, it’s all about the name and a bad image.

The Obama administration has made clear that it is putting its own stamp on education reform. That will mean a new name and image for a law that has grown unpopular with many teachers and suburban parents, even though it was enacted with bipartisan support in Congress.

“It’s like the new Coke. This is a rebranding effort,” said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. “The feng shui people believe you need to take the roof off buildings to allow bad chi to escape. Let’s hope this helps.”

Bad feng shui? Really?

Ok, if there was a really crappy product on the shelves of your local store, and you knew it was really crappy, and the manufacturer gave it a new name and put it in different packaging, would that make the contents any less crappy?

NCLB is built on incredibly flawed concepts and the implementation was a mess from day one.

It needs to be torn down and trashed (just like the cheesy school house representing it at the DOE) instead of slapping on a new label.

More of the Same is Not Reform

This week Time Magazine has an interview with Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, calling him an Apostle of Reform.

Nice title. However, you won’t find much “reform” for American schools in what he has to say.

Duncan wants kids to spend more time in class, which makes very little sense without talking about what they will be doing with those extra minutes.

More of the same is not reform.

He likes charter schools and wants to give parents more choice.

Which is fine until you realize that most charters use the identical instructional model, curriculum, and materials as public schools.

More of the same is not reform.

And choice is wonderful as long as the people doing the choosing have a good understanding of their options.

If you plan to ask parents to select a school for their child, they first need understand the different educational philosophies being used by the charters.

As opposed picking the one with the slickest marking campaign.

Then we get to No Child Left Behind.

Duncan thinks the problem with this train-wreck of a law is that we need national goals instead of letting each state set their own.

That goal would be to have “common college-ready international benchmark standards”.

Roughly translated that means one standardized test that continues to focus American education on sending every child to college.

Whether or not that form of post-K12 training is the best fit with the interests and skills of the student.

In other words, more of the same.

Throwing Money

The morning Post tells me that our new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, gets $5 billion from the newly approved economic stimulus bill to support “educational innovation”.

What the article doesn’t do is offer a clear idea of what anyone in charge means by “innovation”.

However, I have a couple of ideas for where to start.

Kill off No Child Left Behind and go looking for classrooms that don’t look like they did fifty years ago, including those not in the US.

And don’t send a dime to KIPP or anyone pushing AP classes as their one and only solution.