The Echo

Joel Klein, NYC Chancellor of Education, couldn't have said it better:

Because the kids with the greatest needs, in the greatest danger of falling below the line, can't afford political donations and don't belong to a union. So the adults win, and our children lose.

Thanks Joel, for the especially insightful comment in Sunday's New Journal.  I know: your piece was a plug for the Vision Network Conference scheduled for later this month.  And I know that you're real target was unions, teachers' unions.  I know what you said, but I also know what you meant.  My teachers' taught me inference as well as the ability to use my judgement...  And, if the latest crop of school reformers, like you and Arne, succeed; these are skills that may very well be lost entirely on the future workforce...

And lest anyone is confused, especially you, I'll clarify:  Because the kids with the greatest needs can't afford political donations, because their parents aren't voting with their feet, because you know that it will be hell or high water before education funding is truly reformed, because your own education department secretly dropped the cut scores to boost your graduation rates, because you have no one else to blame for failure and won't take the blame yourself, you are leading the assault on educators, the frontline interventionists for student of parents who are either too poor or too disconnected to afford to advocate for their children. 

Yep, I understand it clearly.  Yes, I'd like to see teachers rewarded for great work, but we know that incentive pay and signing bonuses don't actually work - read the research.  We know that charters are about equally successful when taken as a whole as regular 'ole public schools.  We know that the Race to the Top models are poorly researched and that longitudinal data is showing us that there are little long-term gains to be had by them. 

And we know that the adults in the know, the ones backed by the political donations of big business, will succeed in their agenda to reform education because money talks.  The way I see it, these great big grants from the feds, like RTTT, breed one thing and only one thing - educational consultants with even bigger invoices.  So let's cut the crap - just have the feds pony up the money directly to the consultants, many of which have little actual experience or expertise in "turnaround," and leave my schools out of it.  Because, until the feds put money where it needs to be, in the classroom, as in more classrooms with fewer students and hire more teachers to support learning ratios that allow teachers to teach, I'm not interested in the RTTT godsend.

I may have to implement RTTT models in my schools, because my board signed the MOU, which I voted nay to, and my state board amended the regulations to some scandalous rendition that is an affront to local control; but you better watch out because if the buzzword is bold, I'll give you bold.  And if we fail in four years time to create an educational utopia, I'll be sure my constituents know where the failure began - those secretly lowered cut scores in New York and a Delaware DOE that raced to the trough. 

In the meantime, thanks to you and your cronies for de-stabilizing students and schools that could have been on the right track. 

I will promise you this - Longitudinally-speaking IF Rttt works, I'll be the first to eat my words.  But, then, since the ed reformers have decided to neglect the scientific findings, because the data-driven have refused to become data-informed... ONLY TIME WILL TELL...

Sincerely,
Elizabeth  Scheinberg
Parent of two school-age children