Weekly Web Round-up 090208

by Clay Burell

Published February 08, 2009 @ 04:44AM PT

Maybe technology instead of classrooms is the future: Wisconsin psychology professor's online, self-paced  students do better than in-class students in the lecture hall.

Sounds familiar:  Did the creators of the current school privatization "reforms" steal the playbook of the conservatives who invented the Reagan myth? Another example of the Overton Window's rightward drift.

Need more arguments that grading students "squelches intellectual curiosity" and dumbs students down? Inside Higher Ed gives them to you here.

Now they scream about spending: Crooks and Liars reminds us of the 2001 Republican congress' Kumbaya embrace of Bush's $1.4 trillion in tax cuts, and the catastrophic effects of their fiscal policies in this inconvenient history lesson of the Republican Bush Congress.

Diane Ravitch throws a well-aimed match into the Hindenburg arguments of teacher union-bashers in "Unions are not the Problem":

The unions don't seem to cause low performance in the wealthy suburban districts that surround our city. They don't seem to be a problem for the nations that regularly register high scores on international tests. If getting rid of the unions was the solution to the problem of low performance, then why, I asked him, do the southern states—where unions are weak or non-existent—continue to perform worse than states with strong unions? And how can we explain the strong union presence in Massachusetts, which is the nation's highest performing state on NAEP? I suggested that low performance must be caused by something else other than teachers' unions.

--and Deborah Meier extends the conversation with Ravitch by asking, "How did we get into the position of letting “business” become the mentors to educators when it came to accountability?"

In part, because we had in mind the businessman on the corner, or businesses that produced good quality products, etc., etc.. They had to meet the “bottom line,” which we assumed made them experts on how to stay focused.

There are many things wrong with the analogy. A car is not a person and can be built to the kind of specs that don’t match human specs. But what’s more astounding is that we turned our schools over not to carmakers or the corner drugstore owner, but increasingly to money managers—who produce nothing! The best of the carmakers, in fact, have had a far better history of involving the actual producers in decision-making than schools. See H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Broms' book—"Profit Beyond Measure"—on Toyota and Scania.

But we live now, at least in the USA, among a power elite that have become experts at manipulating numbers that only they truly understand, assuming they do. It’s an economy increasingly built on exchanging chits, not building/making/inventing products of any sort, the stuff that can improve our lives. The bottom line is fictional—as a result even “they” didn’t quite know what they were doing and thus let it get out of hand. We are all the victims of a huge Ponzi-like scheme that had no real-life bottom line, and we’ve reproduced it now in schools. We rest our decisions on empty data.

Inimitable Science Teacher Michael Doyle schools Arne Duncan and Barack Obama on some inconvenient differences between the charter school they visited last week to uphold as "the model of what schools should be," and Michael's own public school. A snippet of his lesson:

The school that Mr. Obama uses as "an example of how all our schools should be" is the Capital City Public Charter School (CCPCS) in D.C.

Ahem.

Political folks will point out that public charter schools are open to everyone, with students picked by lottery independent of ability. And that's true.

Parents of children at the CCPCS must volunteer 20 hours per year at the school. That takes care of a few single parent families.

Political folks will point out that the CCPCS has demonstrated that children can succeed in their environment. And that's true.

There are only 25 sixth graders, 25 seventh graders, and 25 eighth graders. The student-teacher ratio is 12: 1, which is wonderful. It is also very expensive.

How do they do it?

Gates Foundation.
Walton Foundation.
Bruhn-Morris Family Foundation.
Capital One
Cartier
City First Bank
Comcast Cable
Donatelli & Klein
Graham Fund
Hattie M. Strong Foundation
Marpat Foundation
National Geographic
National Home Library Foundation
Payless ShoeSource Foundation
Radio One
The Sallie Mae Fund
Susan W. Agger Family Fund of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region
Target Stores
The Washington Post Educational Foundation

....The CCPCS sounds like a wonderful place to send your children. Money can buy a decent education. Involved parents have a tremendous influence over their children's success.

Mr. President, we already know that. What about the rest of us? Why not pay a visit to a truly public school in your neighborhood. Then we can talk. (Full post)

Connect Michael's post, above, with:   Alexander Russo notes that non-profits are also tightening belts and shuttering storefronts during this Recession. When we remember that non-profits are the white knights of the Business Roundtable agenda for school reform privatization, this question begs to be asked: What happens to private education funding when corporate profits go south? And the people we ask this to: the ones who say the stimulus spending for education is a bad idea, because the same money may not be there in future years. What will CCPCS do if their donors dry up?

Finally, an oldie but a goodie: Anne Foster, of Parents for Public Schools, smacks down the National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg for arguing that public schools should be abolished:

Mr. Goldberg says our government doesn't run supermarkets, so why should it run our schools?

Heck, even the most conservative people I know believe in public schools. Conservatives and liberals may not always agree on how to run schools, but get rid of them? Is he really suggesting the chaos that such a thing would cause? Whatever his goal, he may as well get his facts straight.

Where does he think more than 49 million American students are suddenly going to go without public schools? Perhaps to for-profit schools that would crop up overnight, with no credentials? Or maybe parents will stay home from their jobs to educate their kids themselves?

....The assertion that "government-run" schools get terrible results and private schools get better results is erroneous. (Her arguments in the full post here, with h/t to Michael Klonsky.)

What about you? Any links to share from the interwebs? Drop 'em below.

Image by williac on Flickr.