Showing posts with label no excuses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label no excuses. Show all posts

Friday, August 22, 2008

No Excuses for Schools...


....but for the rest of government, A-OK!


Accountability? Go find it

UPDATED 12:30 PM

See NYC Educator's excellent related post on conditions No Excuses BloomKlein allow to exist in schools. Readers of Pissed off teacher's blog know all about her lovely trailor. (I hope NYC doesn't mind that I stole his picture.)

An item in today's NY Times "Emergency Radio Network Fails Tests" is a prime example why I reject the No Excuses theme applied to schools. You know the mantra - "Since there's no funding for education, we have to fix schools the best we can and not use things like kids' lives, high class size, etc. as an excuse."

Gotham Schools' Phylissa Cramer likes the "no excuses schools" expression in a reasoned piece on what KIPP offers. But I disagree with the one-way accountability argument.

Here are just a few points on how this emergency radio failure strikes a chord. Like the $2 billion in the contract Gov. Pataki gave to M/A-COM (a subsidiary of Tyco Electronics) whose credentials were questioned at the time. But Pataki's close ally former Senator Alfonse D'Amato represented the company, so why quibble over potential lost lives because the emergency radio network doesn't work?

In my narrow reasoning, multiply this deal by hundreds. Thousands? Millions? Billions of dollars that no one is held accountable for.

So don't talk accountability and no excuses for underfunded schools.

No excuses allow the acceptance of this crap and allows politicians and the business community off the hook while defusing the struggle to do what's right for the urban school children of this nation.

One of the biggest failures of the UFT/AFT has been the acceptance of the accountability trap which has distracted the prime force that should be out there fighting for full funding into defending an increasingly narrowing turf.

That's the real civil rights struggle of our time.

UPDATE: An article on medicare fraud in the NY Times on Aug. 20 was pointed out to me as another example of No Accountability. But when you choose auditors who are themselves part of the game, what do you expect? I expect they all should be taken out of their offices with bags on their heads.

Medicare’s top officials said in 2006 that they had reduced the number of fraudulent and improper claims paid by the agency, keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of people trying to game the system.

But according to a confidential draft of a federal inspector general’s report, those claims of success, which earned Medicare wide praise from lawmakers, were misleading.

In calculating the agency’s rate of improper payments, Medicare officials told outside auditors to ignore government policies that would have accurately measured fraud, according to the report. For example, auditors were told not to compare invoices from salespeople against doctors’ records, as required by law, to make sure that medical equipment went to actual patients.

As a result, Medicare did not detect that more than one-third of spending for wheelchairs, oxygen supplies and other medical equipment in its 2006 fiscal year was improper, according to the report. Based on data in other Medicare reports, that would be about $2.8 billion in improper spending.


“This report doesn’t surprise me,” said Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California and a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee. He has pushed to cut improper Medicare spending. “To look better to the public, you cook the books,” he said. “This agency is incompetent.”

Think $3 billion would help close the class size gap? If the agency were a school they would close it.


Sunday, December 9, 2007

NY Times Buries Winerip

Mike, we miss ya

Mike Winerip, one of our favorite commentators on education, is back in the NY Times today laying waste to the No Excuses argument, something anyone who spends 10 minutes in the classroom understands.

Does that mean we stop teaching? No. But we understand that we must fight for the resources necessary to close the achievement gap, not do ed reform on the cheap or throw money at data management rather than classroom management.

But guess where what should be a front page piece because it exposes the sham of NCLB and the entire business-based ed reform movement and, in particular, the entire program of BloomKlein, is buried? In the regional "parenting" section which most people in the city environs do not even receive. Another shameful sucking up to BloomKlein by the paper of illicit record. Winerip starts his piece with:

THE federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 rates schools based on how students perform on state standardized tests, and if too many children score poorly, the school is judged as failing.

But how much is really the school’s fault?


A new study by the Educational Testing Service — which develops and administers more than 50 million standardized tests annually, including the SAT — concludes that an awful lot of those low scores can be explained by factors that have nothing to do with schools. The study, “The Family: America’s Smallest School,” suggests that a lot of the failure has to do with what takes place in the home, the level of poverty and government’s inadequate support for programs that could make a difference, like high-quality day care and paid maternity leave.


The E.T.S. researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools: The percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily, and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. Using just those four variables, the researchers were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy.


I want to reiterate that even with these issues, I have a firm belief they all can be overcome. Give us the resources. I kid in pre-k is already 2 years behind? What would it take? A one-on-one person every day for a year? Then do it. Did you see Jim Liebman say that it would take 15 in a class, the level of private schools, for class size reduction to make a difference and that is too expensive. When this country suddenly needs trillions to fight wars the money magically appears?


Don't come saying it can be done by changing low expectations. Educators who want to reform the system the right way do have low expectations: about the ability of the system to give them the tools they can really use to close the achievement gap.


The entire article is posted at Norms Notes at this link.


The last time I saw Winerip was at the Monday Night Massacre on the Ides of March, 2004 when Bloomberg fired members of the PEP who were against the 3rd grade retention policy. His voice at this crucial time has been missed.

It seems the NY Times education agenda will keep it that way.


Ed Note:
Eduwonkette has done some great work with good links and some interesting comments at this link.