Morning Shots

Illinois’ education blob is giving themselves a pat on the back. Their “collaboration” helped pass a bill, almost unanimously, that institutes some form of teacher evaluations based on “multiple measures” yet to be defined, and changes tenure rules, slightly. There are longer school days, strike rules requiring 75 percent of teachers to agree, but not much more. There’s not much here that helps students immediately, or parents, but makes it look like it does. Indeed, the back patting seems to be more about how it was done, not what was done.

Says the press propaganda:

“Unlike our neighbors in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states, stakeholders here worked together to craft an aggressive bill that makes our state the leader in education reform. At a time when many teachers understandably feel under attack, this bill celebrates effective teachers, recognizes their accomplishments and helps keep them in classrooms.”

We’re so glad that no one had to flee a state to keep from voting on major changes to education. Maybe that’s because there was nothing really to flee about, no controversy, no major changes. Time will tell, but a rose by any other name is not a rose. And this bill is not reform.

I usually like this term. It means we might as well bend some rules, if the need justifies it, and normally, this term is associated with good deeds. But, Secretary Arne Duncan’s attempt to start creatively non-complying with NCLB may not be about good deeds, as much as he suggests it is. Throughout the weekend, news reports screamed that Duncan will be granting waivers to a law carefully and painfully put in place to guard against the kind of data abuses and lack of transparency that plagued the nation prior to NCLB’s enactment.

Sure, NCLB is not perfect, and Congress and the past president made lots of mistakes. But the fact is that without NCLB, we simply don’t have a clue how schools or students are performing. We can argue some bars are lower and some higher, that some schools that get labeled do so unfairly. For the most part, however, it works. It shines sun on the dirty little secret of even the best schools that neglect their neediest students. And it captured our attention and put the establishment on the defensive. Most important, it gave parents a tool to use as a lever for change.

I’m not sure 82 percent of schools are really failing or that Duncan believes that. I think he wants his own lever, and Congress isn’t playing. Duncan wants to give well-meaning states and districts flexibility away from NCLB mandates. It’s too punitive, not flexible enough, he says. This from the man that wants national standards, which are hardly flexible!

Perhaps this is just a way to fulfill pre-election promises. The president did tell the unions that he’d fix NCLB.

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There is a bill moving through the New Jersey Assembly that is particularly lousy, in part due to its specious language, but mainly because it facilitates the status quo by hampering the incentive for charter schools to do what they do best: innovate.

The piece of legislation (A 3852) seeks to put any and all charter school applications to local referendum, thereby transferring all duties of application evaluation –a process that traditionally requires weeks if not months of thorough scrutiny and targeted inquiry by education professionals– to a swift popular vote. Operating on the pretense of democratic principle, the bill’s sponsors would like for you to believe that the backwards operation of New Jersey’s Office of Charters has all along been the result of too little input from education stakeholders at the local level, e.g. principles, board members, and parents. This argument is populist positioning and little more: a guileful use of the symbolic American prerogative– the ballot box. It acknowledges neither the root of the problem with the state’s current authorizer or the need for a certain level of expertise and objectivity when it comes to deciding which applications do and which do not merit consideration for a charter. Instead, it tosses the application process into the arena of popularity– where a charter is measured not by its expressed, detailed need in the community but by its popularity, or attractiveness to the majority.

Innovation is risky, daring, and creative.  How can charter schools explore innovative means to educating children if they must combat well organized, union-funded anti-reform forces impugning their worth?  Creative ways of educating children better will always be met with structural resistance in the public system– it threatens business as usual.  Thus, if approval by referendum is successful, public charter schools, by their

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