Take Arne Duncan's phony school reform money and run--- fast!

The coast is clear school superintendents.  You can come out now; non-educator emeritus, Arne Duncan is in charge of your school district even though he has never taught a class or run a school in his life.  Once again people outside of education are calling the shots school superintendents haven’t got the guts to make.  Hire a good writer, cook up some irrelevant statistics, hook up with ACORN, submit your Race-to-the-Top grant, then take the money and run.  Your financially scrapped district can’t afford to ignore the $5 billion-dollar man’s bribe to hand over control of your community schools to the Washington D.C. Politburo.  But, after he hands you the money with all the strings attached, run as far and as fast as you can from quack school reform methods that could actually do more damage than good.

That is, if blowing up traditional schools and savaging the whole of your inadequate education staffs just to replace them with unproven charter schools and younger, cheaper inadequate teachers makes you nervous, then don’t do it.  Though you did not previously have the courage to step up and make decisions you knew were right, like firing teachers that couldn’t teach before they were legally protected by stupid tenure laws; administering fair and rational student discipline as your districts changed racial composition, and pushing back on stupid educational initiatives that had no basis in reality, take a walk on the wild side with that new pocket change and take control of your schools and the people in them.  Buy some books with the bribe money; that doesn’t take much courage and new textbooks won’t hurt anyone or get you fired.  Or opt to house the homeless, save a seal or two, but don’t fire everybody and build a new student warehouse just to call it a charter school because clueless Arne Duncan says you should.  If you don’t commit that money fast, agents from ACORN will be running your school district just the way they ran the banks after the Community Reinvestment Act was re-engineered to grant them access to Wall Street.  But that’s another story.   

The CHICAGO CATALYST (C-Cat) reported late last week, that Duncan’s ‘broadest and most significant effort, called High School Transformation, sputtered in implementation and has failed to spark significant improvement.’  C-Cat reporters Sarah Karp and John Meyers go on to say, ‘The evaluation (by SRI International and the Consortium on Chicago School Reform) blames poor teaching and student absenteeism, among other factors.  The report also criticizes two other district initiatives:  Renaissance 2010 and Autonomous Management and Performance Schools.  (Egad!)  C-Cat continued, ‘Bad teaching hurt the project.  More than half of the teachers observed by evaluators were rated as unsatisfactory or basic – the two lowest ratings.  The evaluators found that the vast majority of teachers had low expectations of students.  The evaluators also found that many teachers don’t know how to manage student behavior (BINGO!!) and created a classroom that was not conducive to learning.’ 

The CATALYST was amazed at one finding at Marshall High School on Chicago’s notorious West side.  Frankly, I’m even stunned by this, so let me get this down word-for-word:  ‘In our February 2000 issue, we reported that Marshall students missed a stunning average of fifty school days per year.’

Marshall High is a one-time Chicago icon.  It was not only the first black school to overcome racist referees and hostile small town Illinois crowds to win the state basketball championship in 1958; it was the FIRST CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOL TO EVER DO IT.  I did some substitute teaching there before Arne the Duncan launched his Chicago Ponzi scheme.  It was a mess then, and it is a mess now after seven years of Duncan’s phony school reform.   Though Chicago has over 100 high schools, this is the one Dorothy Gaters has coached at since 1976.  Who is she?  She, with a 900-126 won/lost record and eight state basketball titles, was enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame this year as possibly the best girls’ basketball coach on planet earth.  My point is that there is no way that ex-pro basketball player, Arne Duncan, could not have known about the problems at Marshall High School.  If he’s so bloody good at school reform, why didn’t he reform Marshall?  This historic school has a 50-day average student absence rate and he didn’t notice?  Is a charter school the answer for the families and children in the neighborhood surrounding Marshall?  

Leonie Haimson, on the Huffington Post’s website writes:  ‘Arne Duncan’s billion dollar slush fund is designed to reward school districts and states for implementing a narrow set of unproven strategies, based on the deregulatory biases of the corporate world.’

Haimson, regarding Duncan’s full-metal-jacket support of unproven charter schools says:  ‘In New York City, the rapid rise of charter schools has led to divisive battles in neighborhoods throughout the city, as a two-tier, inequitable system of education has taken hold, with traditional public schools losing classroom space and resources to favored charter schools – which enroll far fewer of our neediest students.’

Roger that.  Superintendents, I realize you don’t have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the President’s bagman, just make sure the mope you hire to write your Race-to-the-Top grant didn’t go to a public school in Arne Duncan’s Chicago.