Morning Shots

On Thursday, July 13th, a group of New Jersey parents filed a class action lawsuit against the New Jersey Commissioner of Education, 25 Boards of Education, and numerous other public officials.  The lawsuit, Crawford v. Davy, identifies a class of students attending the state’s 96 worst schools: those where more than 50% of tested students have failed both their language arts and math assessments for the past two years, or 75% of them have failed one of these assessments during the same time.  A little more than 60,000 students attend these schools. Just under 6% of the state’s k-12 population.

The lawsuit has caused quite a stir in the state’s education circles.  The New Jersey Education Association thinks it’s a “PR” stunt, quite possibly because their members are in front of these children in these educational deserts.  The school board president in Camden thinks the lawsuit is “outrageous.”  He doesn’t, however, believe it’s outrageous that there are nine schools under his leadership that meet the lawsuit’s criteria.  Not to mention so much dysfunction overall that Camden has become a case study in exactly how not to run a school district.  The Superintendent of one of the districts named recently said she doesn’t think the answer is to take away money from the public schools.  Another school board member in another district believes we all need to work together and make the public schools better, not abandon them.  A professor at a local university believes that neighboring districts won’t take these kids anyway.

Notice something about all of these assertions–something missing, perhaps?

If anything, Crawford v. Davy has given all the institutional players a chance to show just where their interests lie: with the institution.  The “something missing” to which I refer is any substantive reply to the complaint being brought to

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Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

And indeed, there’s nothing new about education professionals drinking the Jonestown kool-aid. But it does seem that there has been more kool-aid recently, as the lumbering circus elephant destroys everything in the room, and education folks all pretend the elephant isn’t there.

Our first example comes to us thanks to Casting Out Nines. The author of this article dances around the central issue of education schools, trying to ignore the central problem:

• Teachers are not well-versed in their subject matter and waste time in courses on theory, pedogogy, and methodology.
• Teachers are stupid; most of the time, education majors are at the bottom in terms of SAT scores. They also score poorly on other assessments designed to measure intelligence or competence.
• Restrictions, such as teacher certification and licensure, keep out good candidates.
• Even poor teachers get tenure and sit back, coasting on their mediocrity until they retire with fat pensions. There isn’t much that can be done about mediocre teaching under our current systems

None of these points is central; all are relatively trivial. The central problem with education schools is that they have nothing to do with education, and spend their time indoctrinating their students in PC, anti-American, political tripe and touchy-feely self-esteem nonsense (don’t believe me? See for yourself.). This all by itself makes them academically non-rigorous (and that’s the nice way to put it). Even when education schools attempt to apply actual academic research (and that’s a rare thing, given that education folks are post-modernists, and post-modernism is the antithesis of research and intellect), they misapply it — because they don’t understand it. Consider the failure of applying constructivism to math, and using connectionist research to justify it; the one thing,

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Millions of students are trapped in persistently failing public schools. On Tuesday, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings joined congressional Republicans to unveil the America’s Opportunity Scholarships initiative-a plan to give thousands of these at-risk children a chance to receive a quality education.

The Opportunity Scholarships initiative would provide $100 million in grants to local organizations that would grant scholarships to low-income public school students to attend private school or to receive intensive after-school tutoring. To be eligible, a child must be enrolled in a public school that has missed state benchmarks for six or more years under No Child Left Behind. According to the Department of Education, more than a thousand schools qualified in 2005, and another thousand could join this list in the fall.

Hundreds of thousands of children are trapped in low-performing public schools, including many in our nation’s largest school districts. In New York, 125,000 students are enrolled in public schools that have failed for six or more years. In Los Angeles, 170,000 students attend persistently failing schools. In cities like Chicago (121,000), Philadelphia (63,000), Detroit (26,000), and Baltimore (22,000), tens of thousands of children are enrolled in persistently failing public schools and are missing the chance to receive a quality education.

The America’s Opportunity Scholarships for Kids initiative would help rescue about 28,000 students from bad schools. The legislation would enable the Department of Education to award grants to create scholarship programs-like those in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C.-in ten cities. Research on existing tuition scholarship programs has found that school choice boosts parents’ satisfaction and improves participating students’ test scores.

In a speech on Capitol Hill, Secretary Spellings explained that the Opportunity Scholarship initiative was designed to hold public schools accountable to parents for performance. “Accountability is hollow without real options for parents,” she said. “President Bush and I

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