Welcome to Crazy Arne's Used Educational Bromide Emporium!

From the "Better Late Than Never Department": Last Sunday in the Forum section of the Sacramento Bee, they ran a rather extensive collection of articles about President Obama's Secretary of Education (and former head of the failing Chicago public school system) Arne Duncan. The collection of articles was entitled Education Chief Wants a Transformation.

I had a bit of difficulty wading my way through these articles as the author, SacBee editor Pia Lopez, lost me in the first two paragraphs when she wrote in the most sycophantic terms,

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a man in a hurry. Children, he says, have only one chance to get an education: "We cannot wait because our children cannot wait."

And he's a one-man whirlwind in a battle against stifling bureaucracy at all levels - whether at the Department of Education in Washington or in rules and regulations at the local level that get in the way of efforts to improve student achievement.

Oh yeah, he's a real reformer, that Arne Duncan. When he was "CEO" of the public school system in Chicago, black 4th graders in Illinois demonstrated a 32-point gap in math scores compared to the state's white students, when the national gap was 26 points. Similarly, black 8th graders in Illinois experienced a 31-point gap in math scores when the national average was 38 points. Since most black students in Illinois live in Chicago, one must take note of who was in charge of the Chicago schools at the time, and had been since 2001: Arne Duncan.

As NBC News in Chicago put it in an article just five days ago:

So much for the Arne Duncan era.

In what was supposed to be the first noteworthy evaluation of the Chicago Public Schools' High School Transformation project of better teacher training and a tougher curriculum, test scores went absolutely nowhere - and in some cases, down.

No wonder school offiicals didn't hold the usual press conference; they just posted the scores and slinked away.

This news follows earlier reports that the high test score claims Duncan and President Obama touted about were inflated.

In fact, a Civic Committee study concluded that Chicago Public Schools had made little progress since 2003.

While performances like this are not unusual, it goes to show that Arne Duncan is not some superhuman supe who is going to pull our educational system back from the edge of the abyss, like Pia Lopez makes it sound. Whatever Duncan was pushing in Chicago wasn't working, and now that he is CEO of our federal educational bureaucracy, he wants to bring his failed policies to a school near you.

The Pia Lopez article continues:

"In the months and years ahead," [Duncan] has said, "we will ask thousands of communities across America to close and reopen schools based on data showing that they are underperforming. That has never happened before and it will be as difficult as it is important."

That will require that we find 5,000 "high-energy, hero principals" to take over these struggling schools. It will require finding 250,000 "great teachers who are willing to do the toughest work in public education...."

Oh, is that all? And tell me genius, where are we going to miracle up these 5,000 hero principals and quarter-million tough-work teachers? If it were that easy, would we not have done it already? How are you going to find quality teachers to do this tough work when the teachers unions will not allow them to be paid more. Speaking as a teacher myself, which scenario would I choose?

1. Get paid a certain salary to work in a comfortable middle class suburban school where I can actually teach moderately to well-behaved, motivated students.

2. Get paid the same salary or a little less to work in an urban school with dangerous, insolent, profane, unmotivated, disruptive human seat warmers.

Hmmm. What to do? As long as teachers get paid the same salary for different levels of abuse, you are never going to be able to fill these "tough-work" positions that require "heroes" to effect a change. And even then, many teachers and administrators would not sign up for that kind of abuse no matter how much they were paid.

But Arne Duncan is not done. He then provides Pia Lopez with his four basic models for transforming broken schools. I will list them uninterrupted and hold my comments until the end:

1. The children stay and the staff leaves. Teachers can reapply for their jobs and some get rehired, but most go elsewhere. His view is that, "At least half of the staff and the leadership should be completely new if you really want a culture change."

2. Replace staff and leadership and create experimental public schools run by charter organizations, universities, or non-profit groups.

3. For smaller communities with fewer options for new staff, keep most of the existing staff, but change the culture by increasing the school day and school year; providing new flexibility around budgeting, staffing and the school calendar; changing curriculum.

4. Close underperforming schools and re-enroll the students in better schools.

In the interests of time and space, let us just analyze the first and last models. Model #1 assumes that teachers and administrators are the problem with education. While I will freely admit that there are plenty of these people who need to find another line of work (isn't this true of any profession?), the primary issue is deciding who is not cutting it, especially the teachers, who are to be evaluated based on the academic performance of their students. How do you compare apples and oranges? Just envision two scenarios:

Well Mr. Ritzy Suburban Teacher, I see that your students, who come from intact families with involved parents, have almost perfect attendance and they have overwhelmingly scored either Proficient or Advanced on their standardized tests. Good Work! Would you like to come back next year?

As for you Mr. Inner-City Teacher, your students, who come from totally broken and dysfunctional families, missed an average of 50 school days this year, their rates of suspension for on-campus misbehavior were atrociously high, they turned in little to no homework, and most of them scored Below Basic or Far Below Basic on their standardized tests. You are obviously a sub-standard teacher, and you do not belong in this profession.

Model #4 is equally ridiculous. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, where is Secretary Duncan going to miracle up these "better" schools in which to re-enroll students who are being relocated from closed underperforming schools? Let's imagine another scenario using the hypothetical ritzy suburban and inner-city schools I just mentioned. Obviously, the inner-city school would be closed down for underperformance. What happens to the students who attended there? Since all students are entitled under the law to a "free and appropriate public education," they have to be put somewhere. Let's say there is room available at the ritzy suburban school, which is obviously a "better school" of which Duncan spoke. Let's say students from the now closed-down inner-city school are sent to the "better" school in the ritzy suburbs. When that happens, just how long do you think that the ritzy suburban school is going to remain a "better school"? Just how long do you think it will take for the parents who send their kids to that "better school" to yank out their kids and send them to either private school or another "better school," leaving the previous "better school" to become another underperforming school? Imagine this scenario being played out thousands of times over, all across the nation.

Spreading failing students to other schools is not going to solve the problem. In this blogger's humble opinion, the only way to solve the problem is to make attendance in school a privilege again, rather than a right. As long as disruptive and ambivalent students are kept captive in our schools, nothing will improve. Let them go find out how fun the real world is without being coddled in the surreal world of our current educational system. Additionally, the social safety net that makes being kicked out of school or dropping out of school look more attractive needs to be seriously curtailed.

I am all for evaluating teacher performance, and merit pay, and paying teachers more for subjects that are hard to fill (math, special ed). The problem is when you take a private business model like that and then apply it to a public institution with all the inertia and bureaucratic nonsense that comes with it. If I were in charge, I would close down the public - read: government - school system tomorrow and privatize the whole dang thing, but I know that won't happen in the foreseeable future. The most frustrating thing for me is watching the deck chairs be arranged over and over again on our Titanic educational system. All I can do is sit helpless and watch.