Group items tagged

I noted in my blog last week that the visionaries of the charter school idea-Raymond Budde of the University of Massachusetts and Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers-never intended that charter schools would compete with public schools. Budde saw charters as a way to reorganize public school districts and to provide more freedom for teachers. He envisioned teams of teachers asking for a charter for three to five years, during which time they would operate with full autonomy over curriculum and instruction, with no interference from the superintendent or the principal. Shanker thought that charter schools should be created by teams of teachers who would explore new ways to reach unmotivated students. He envisioned charter schools as self-governing, as schools that encouraged faculty decisionmaking and participatory governance. He imagined schools that taught by coaching rather than lecturing, that strived for creativity and problem-solving rather than mastery of standardized tests or regurgitation of facts. He never thought of charters as non-union schools where teachers would work 70-hour weeks and be subject to dismissal based on the scores of their students. Today, charter schools are very far from the original visions of Budde and Shanker.

"Last month, a NewsWorks New Jersey post from public education blogger Laura Waters raised the ire of the daughter of the late Albert Shanker, the fiery education reformer and teachers union president. Waters thinks Shanker, whom she praised repeatedly in her piece, would support today's charter school movement. Not so, replied Jennie Shanker, a local artist and the union leader's daughter"

Al Shanker was very concerned about the need to identify and replace incompetent teachers. The first time he wrote a column about it, his wife was one of the many people who warned him that the union's teachers would be up in arms (see here). Shanker wasn't worried, replying that "All of my members will read that, and they'll all agree, because not one of them will think that they are one of the bad teachers that I'm talking about."

"In a 1988 address, Mr. Shanker outlined an idea for a new kind of public school where teachers could experiment with fresh and innovative ways of reaching students. Mr. Shanker estimated that only one-fifth of American students were well served by traditional classrooms. In charter schools, teachers would be given the opportunity to draw upon their expertise to create high-performing educational laboratories from which the traditional public schools could learn."

The question today is whether a democratic society needs public schools subject to democratic governance. Why not turn public dollars over to private corporations to run schools as they see fit? Isn't the private sector better and smarter than the public sector? The rise of charter schools has been nothing short of meteoric. They were first proposed in 1988 by Raymond Budde, a Massachusetts education professor, and Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Budde dreamed of chartering programs or teams of teachers, not schools. Shanker thought of charters as small schools, staffed by union teachers, created to recruit the toughest-to-educate students and to develop fresh ideas to help their colleagues in the public schools. Their originators saw charters as collaborators, not competitors, with the public schools. Now the charter industry has become a means of privatizing public education. They tout the virtues of competition, not collaboration. The sector has many for-profit corporations, eagerly trolling for new business opportunities and larger enrollments. Some charters skim the top students in the poorest neighborhoods; some accept very small proportions of students who have disabilities or don't speak English; some quietly push out those with low scores or behavior problems (the Indianapolis public schools recently complained about this practice by local charters).

Are charter schools the answer for public education? If what you know about charters comes from last year's ballyhooed film "Waiting for Superman," you probably think so. But the answer is, in fact, much more complex. My late husband, Albert Shanker, was one of the first education leaders to advocate for the concept in 1988, as president of the American Federation of Teachers. Al envisioned charter schools as teacher-led laboratories for reform within public schooling, tasked with developing innovative strategies to "produce more learning for more students." He saw them operating with a high level of autonomy from bureaucracy, yet remaining an integral part of our public education system.

ACTING NJ Education Commissioner Chris Cerf recently invoked Albert Shanker, the legendary teachers union leader, in supporting Cerf's expansion of charter schools

It all started a few days ago when Edison scoundrel and Broadyte Chris Cerf published a fact-free diatribe extolling the charter school solution to a non-existent problem. To say that Cerf plays fast and loose with facts would be the understatement of the summer, but his most mendacious statements (and a grievous factual error) occur in regards to the venerable Albert Shanker. The incorrigible Cerf isn't the first corporate snake oil salesman to try and misrepresent the late President of the American Federation of Teachers' views, or for that matter, spin the original purpose of charters to be a gateway drug to vouchers. The latter argument is usual spun as "charter schools were created to be schools of choice." Anyone familiar with actual history knows that Shanker intended charters to supplement public schools by serving the most difficult to educate students (the ones current charters avoid like the plague), he never supported the core segregationist tenet of "school choice." In fact, most high profile corporate education privatizers have perpetuated these outrageous lies at one time or another.

"One of the more interesting characteristics of the recent curriculum counter-manifesto was its lead sentence, which had this lovely turn of phrase: we "oppose the call for a nationalized curriculum." Interesting, I thought, since I don't believe anyone at the Shanker Institute called for a nationalized curriculum; they called for a national or common curriculum. Was this a distinction without a difference? Was Shanker just being "sneaky"?"

"This week, in an Atlantic article, former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein dropped an incendiary Albert Shanker quote that you've probably heard before: When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children. The negative implications of this statement are obvious, which is why it is so frequently quoted by (mostly) conservative pundits and journalists."

"The recent, breathless opposition to the idea of common curricular content led us to reflect on just how long educators have been asking for this practical tool for better schooling - only to be rebuffed by those more interested in playing politics. It's been generations. More than 20 years ago, Al Shanker waded into the fray. The following, entitled "An American Revolution in Education: Developing a Common Core," was published by Al in his weekly Where We Stand column on Feb. 24, 1991."

Journalists play an essential role in our society. They are charged with informing the public, a vital function in a representative democracy. Yet, year after year, large pockets of the electorate remain poorly-informed on both foreign and domestic affairs. For a long time, commentators have blamed any number of different culprits for this problem, including poverty, education, increasing work hours and the rapid proliferation of entertainment media. There is no doubt that these and other factors matter a great deal. Recently, however, there is growing evidence that the factors shaping the degree to which people are informed about current events include not only social and economic conditions, but journalist quality as well. Put simply, better journalists produce better stories, which in turn attract more readers. On the whole, the U.S. journalist community is world class. But there is, as always, a tremendous amount of underlying variation. It's likely that improving the overall quality of reporters would not only result in higher quality information, but it would also bring in more readers. Both outcomes would contribute to a better-informed, more active electorate. We at the Shanker Institute feel that it is time to start a public conversation about this issue. We have requested and received datasets documenting the story-by-story readership of the websites of U.S. newspapers, large and small. We are using these data in statistical models that we call "Readers-Added Models," or "RAMs."

Our guest author today is Dr. Clifford B. Janey, former superintendent for the Newark Public Schools, District of Columbia Public Schools, and Rochester City School District. He is currently a Senior Weismann Fellow at the Bankstreet College of Education in New York City, and a Shanker Institute board member. For too many students, families, and communities, the high school diploma represents either a dream deferred or a broken contract between citizens and the stewards of America's modern democracy. With the reform movement's unrelenting focus on testing and its win/lose consequences for students and staff, the high school diploma, which should signify college and work readiness, has lost its value. Not including the over seven thousand students who drop out of high school daily, the gap between the percentage of those who graduate and their readiness for college success will continue to worsen the social and income inequalities in life.

Early in the life of No Child Left Behind, one amateur but insightful futurist on the Shanker Institute Board remarked to me: "Well, if you tie teacher pay, labeling failing schools, and evaluations of teachers and principals all to student test results-guess what?-you'll get student test results. But some 20, years down the road when these kids get out of high school, we may discover they don't know anything." 

The nation has just celebrated Labor Day, yet few Americans have any idea why. As high school students, most were taught little about unions-their role, their accomplishments, and how and why they came to exist. This is one of the conclusions of a new report, released today by the Albert Shanker Institute in cooperation with the American Labor Studies Center. The report, "American Labor in U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor's Story Is Distorted in High School History Textbooks," consists of a review of some of the nation's most frequently used high school U.S. history textbooks for their treatment of unions in American history. The authors paint a disturbing picture, concluding that the history of the U.S. labor movement and its many contributions to the American way of life are "misrepresented, downplayed or ignored." Students-and all Americans-deserve better.

Our guest author today is David K. Cohen, John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education and professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, and a member of the Shanker Institute's board of directors. This is a response to Michael Petrilli, who recently published a post on the Fordham Institute's blog that referred to Cohen's new book.

At a recent Shanker Institute conference, a guest presenter from the United Kingdom was discussing the historical relationship between public spending and democracy. I don't remember the exact context, but at some point, he noted, in a perfectly calm, matter-of-fact tone, that one U.S. political party spends a great deal of effort and resources trying to suppress electoral turnout.

"School reformers this year had something of a banner year, moving ahead with key initiatives such as using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers, expanding charter schools and establishing voucher programs that permitted the use of public funds to be used to pay religious school tuition. But is any of this grounded in research? Here's a look at the year in ed research from Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute, located in Washington, D.C. This post originally appeared on the institute's blog."

"Initially, charter schools were embraced as a strategy to enrich what many viewed as an increasingly sterile public school landscape. Early promoters included most famously Albert Shanker, President of both the United Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers. The first charter school opened in Minnesota, one of the nation's most liberal states. "Groups of teachers and administrators who wanted to innovate and try new things would band together and little laboratories of education would emerge," Dr. Gary Miron Professor of Evaluation, Management and Research at Western Michigan University recalls, "The idea was simple: anything valuable culled from these experiments could be copied by the district…" Within a decade the goals of experimentation and innovation were replaced by a focus on kudzu-like growth. Charter schools were less and less viewed as a way of improving public schools and more and more seen as a direct competitor and eventual replacement for them."

Talk K-12 education for more than five minutes, and inevitably, the conversation turns to charter schools-those publicly funded, privately administered institutions that now educate more than 2 million American children. Parents wonder if they are better than the neighborhood public school. Politicians tout them as a silver-bullet solution to the education crisis. Education technology companies promote them for their profit potential. Opponents of organized labor like the Walton family embrace them for their ability to crush teachers unions. But amid all the buzz, the single most important question is being ignored: Are charter schools living up to their original mission as experimental schools pioneering better education outcomes and reducing segregation? That was the vision of the late American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker when he proposed charters a quarter-century ago-and according to new data, it looks like those objectives are not being realized.