Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
Vicki Cobb's Blog
  • Vicki Cobb's Blog
  • About
  • Contact

What’s a New School Superintendent to Do?

30/7/2018

 
Picture
Picture
The “School Reform” movement is characterized by a top-down, disruptive administrative process bent on privatizing public education.  It includes charter schools (start-up schools using public funds with little or no financial oversight thus becoming ripe for corruption and other forms of failure) and voucher programs (where public funding is siphoned off so that students can go to private schools). It has had a great deal of criticism from Diane Ravitch, who aggregates reports of successes and failures in support of public education, a necessary institution for our democracy.

Last week I attended a conference sponsored by November Learning (BLC2018) which is focused on children and how to help them learn effectively.  Jonathan P. Raymond was one of the speakers.  His new book Wildflowers: A School Superintendent’s Challenge to America got my attention.  As an author, I don’t know much about school administration.  Raymond followed Rudy Crew as the superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) in August of 2009 to December of 2013 with 46,000 students of which 75% had family incomes below the federal poverty line and spoke more than forty different languages.  It was also the period where the State of California was in its sixth straight year of budget cuts to school districts.

Raymond moved to Sacramento with his family and entered his three children in the public schools.   Then he spent the first hundred days visiting every school in his district, sometimes as many as three a day.  He came armed with a vision of educating the Whole Child— “head, heart, and hands”—a philosophy that looks at children as individuals and addresses issues of readiness to learn (like good nutrition), and reaches out to the parents and community as partners in this vision.  He identified the six worst schools and decided to make them a priority.  He hired insiders, with proven value, to become part of his team. He is anti-standardized testing and is profoundly influenced by John Dewey and the contemporary formidable educator Linda Darling-Hammond.  All of these things made me sympathetic to his journey.

There was one aspect of Jonathan P. Raymond’s preparation for this job, however, that gave me pause.  Raymond briefly summed up his early career as a lawyer and politician who became a Broad Fellow at the Broad Academy for ten months in preparation for an administrative job in education.  Diane Ravitch offers this post on some of what the Broad Academy has done and what it stands for.  His belief in educating the Whole Child and his experience of the Waldorf school progressive education overrides some of what he learned from Broad.   Here’s what Raymond says about “school reform” and teachers:

“It’s no secret that some people in the so-called “school reform” movement are at war with teachers’ unions, and whether they intend it or not, are perceived as being at war with teachers themselves.  What I learned in Sacramento and keep learning as I move forward personally and professionally, is that no effort to transform a school or a district can succeed without recognizing the dignity and worth of teachers [italics, his] through appropriate compensation, opportunities for professional development and positive collaborative working conditions.”

He also said:

“The Broad Academy did me no favors with it came to union relations.  ‘People who come from outside education are more used to working in performance culture versus entitlement culture,’ Broad’s director told The Sacramento Bee when my appointment was first announced.  Disparaging hard-working educators by calling them ‘entitled’ is not how I would have set the table. “

His last chapter, “Solutions: Five Keys to Reimagine Schools,” puts leadership in the center with input from students, teachers, and community resulting in compromise in which all factions have buy-in.  He is at odds with the entrenched top-down organization that is a tradition in most districts.
​
Jonathan P. Raymond’s title Wildflowers is a metaphor for the potential of all children to find a way to bloom when they encounter the proper nurturing environment for the special idiosyncratic germ within them.  This is a passionate, thoughtful book that can bring vision and hope to our public schools.  




When School "Choice" Is a Bad Choice

12/3/2018

 
Picture
"Backpack Full of Cash” is a new feature-length documentary, directed by Sarah Mondale, a daughter of two teachers and a former teacher-come-filmmaker. It is her answer to the education “reform” movement –the privatizing of education that is fueled by the profit motive by very wealthy people who call themselves education “reformers.” The American public-school system is one of the pillars of our democracy, which depends on an educated electorate. It is funded by taxpayers—state, local and, for the past 15 years, federal governments. The money is allocated according to the number of children in each district that it is mandated to educate. Thus, each child enrolled in a public school is worth an assigned amount of cash. If parents opt to send a child to a private school, that’s fine, their taxes still go towards public education because public education is also seen as a public good. Its mission is to provide education for all children, including children with English as a second language, children with learning challenges, and children with physical disabilities. It is also supposed to level the playing field between rich and poor, thus putting the American dream within everyone’s grasp.

“Backpack Full of Cash” documents what happened to the public-school system of Philadelphia during the school year of 2014. At a time when public schools were hit by a fiscal crisis, “reformers” in Philly offered a menu of alternative choices to parents, with some charter schools employing aggressive marketing, using the word “choice” as a euphemism for “better” and underplaying the ramifications of parents’ decisions on both their child’s education and the public schools. The outcome was not what was promised. And Philadelphia is not an atypical example of other parts of the country where privatizing of public schools has a grip.

In a nutshell, the film graphically shows how the “reformers” siphoned off taxpayer resources from public education. “Backpack Full of Cash” exposes the “reformers” erroneous propaganda by following the money.
​
  • · In 2002, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind law that introduced extensive testing into every grade of the public school. Federal money was supposed to fund this. Ka-ching! Test -creating companies make a bonanza. Teachers are now to be evaluated by how their students perform on the tests. Teaching to the tests becomes entrenched in public-school classrooms, creating school days of skill and drill, narrowing the curriculum and decreasing the morale and increasing the attrition of good teachers.

  • · Race to the Top was the Obama administration’s compounding of the aims of the “reformers” by using money as a carrot for states to implement “reformers” missions: Standardized curriculum, standardized testing, more technology to cut costs (mostly teachers) and closing neighborhood public schools deemed to be “failing.”

  • · The founding of charter schools with no accountability to the taxpayer but promising all kinds of goodies to enrollees (by lottery) except for children with disabilities (not enough money to provide for them) prompted an exodus from the public schools and the backpacks of cash that went with it. While there are some charter schools that fulfill a mission of high achievement, most don’t do any better than public school and some do worse. Plus, the lack of accountability as to the allocation of funding offered an opportunity for corruption. Every time money changes hands, there an opportunity for someone’s pockets to get lined.

  • · A voucher system that allows the money for a child to follow the child to a private school, including religious schools. Thus, public money is now sent to religious institutions—a clear violation of the separation of church and state. In many places, these vouchers are euphemistically called “scholarships.”​


The goal of the “reformers” and our current Secretary of Education is the privatizing of public schools where the data (as for most privately held businesses) is the bottom line. The evaluation of the quality of education cannot be reduced to simplistic numbers, including the testing. I, particularly, resented the “reformers” calling public schools a government “monopoly.” Public schools are run by local boards of education, elected officials accountable to their local public. At a time when the future of work will demand innovators, highly-skilled medical workers, and, yes, teachers with knowledge of best practices in education and humanity, the “reformers” are looking to “standardize” education to their own world views. Children are NOT widgets.

“Backpack Full of Cash” is tough to take, even when you know the story, because film shows how real people are affected by these policies. Thus, it has real impact. But I found a new ray of hope in the film with their documented success of the Union City school district of Union City, NJ. Here, parents didn’t buy “choice” but bought into making their public schools better. It is a model for hope.
​

The producers of “Backpack Full of Cash” are launching a community screening campaign. If you care about investing in this country, it’s a must-see.  And now, our clueless Secretary of Education wants to spend money training teachers, who so desire, how to use guns to protect their charges.  Thus giving the halls of learning increased opportunities for tragic mistakes.  Can you imagine children killed by "friendly" fire?

     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.

    RSS Feed

    ​Archives

    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018

    Categories

    All
    Abuse
    Achievement Gap
    Adkins Jan
    Albee Sarah
    Anti Bullying
    Anti-bullying
    Art
    Authors On Call
    Biology
    Birds
    Black History
    BLC2018
    Book Review
    Child Abuse
    Children As Political Pawns
    Citizenship
    Civics
    Civil Rights
    Climate Change
    Clinton Chelsea
    Collard III Sneed B.
    Common Core State Standards
    Costaldo Nancy F.
    Critical Thinking
    Data-driven
    Definition
    Democracy
    Dewey John
    Dogs
    Ecology
    Education
    Educational Standards
    Empowerment For Children
    Endangered Species
    Excellence
    Extinction
    Fact-checking
    "flow"
    Galileo
    Girls' Education
    Global Warming
    Greenberg Jan
    Grit
    Gun Violence
    History
    History Of "school Reform"
    Hurricanes
    INK Database
    Isaac Sally
    Learning
    Lesser Carolyn
    Leveled Reading
    Lexiles
    Listening
    Literature
    Liu Eric
    March For Our Lives
    Montgomery Heather L.
    Montgomery Sy
    Motivated Reasoning
    Motivation
    Munro Roxie
    Nonfiction
    Nonfiction Minute
    Primary Source
    Reading
    Rules
    Rusch Elizabeth
    School Choice
    Science Experiments You Can Eat
    Semple Heidi E.Y.
    Social Skills
    Socrates
    Speaking
    Spring Fling
    Standardized Testing
    STEM
    Studies On Education
    Swanson Jennifer
    Teaching
    Trump
    Truth
    Weatherford Carole Boston
    Writing

    RSS Feed

Links

The Nonfiction Minute
​

​iNK Think Tank website

​Vicki Cobb's Kids' Fun Page

We Dare You Videos


Company

iNK Think Tank, Inc. is a nonprofit with the mission of using nonfiction children's literature in classrooms

Contact

vicki@inkthinktank.org
​

© 2019


© COPYRIGHT 2019. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.