My child's school, in our district, the parents have a voice. It does not mean that they are the ones making the decisions, but their voices are respected and heard. I am sure the parents of Dalton, FIeldston, Horace Mann, etc.. have a major role. Why are not the parents of inner city schools afforded the same?
I have to address one of Robert Jackson's main arguments for watering down mayoral control: that parents need to have a major role in how schools are run.
This is sort of like motherhood and apple pie -- who could possibly be against parental involvement? -- but let me take the other side of the argument.You left out baseball and Chevrolet.
First, let's clarify what we're talking about: everyone is in favor of parental involvement when it comes to getting their children to school on time, checking their homework, coming to parent-teacher conferences, working with the school to deal with discipline problems, etc.
Oh Whitney, it is so much more than that. It is about building a community within a community. Parents talking with one another, children talking to their parents, having parents and children having ownership of their education.
The debate isn't over these things; rather, it's about MANAGEMENT issues:
Ah, yes, control. That is what it all boils down to in the end, right?
what reading curriculum should be used; is the principal doing a good job and, if not, what should be done; which teachers should be hired and fired; should a school be shut down; etc.?So Whitney which reading program to you favor? Voyager? I am sure you do. Let's ask Senator Landrieu. No one is saying that parents should unilaterally make these decisions, but should be at the table, to have a voice when these decisions are made.
Or is it that you feel that inner city parents of color are not capable of making such decisions? You really have never hung out in the 'hood, have you?
When it comes to these key decisions, I think involving parents will result in WORSE, not better, outcomes.Let me change that for you. "I think involving inner city parents of color from da hood will result in WORSE, not better outcomes."
I know for sure that I don't try to tell the head of my daughters' school how to run her businessRoad apples!!! Bullocks!!! Of course you do. You can't help yourself but to. You seem to have no problem telling teachers, and anyone else that gives you attention how to run schools. Do your children even attend NYC schools?
nor does she tell me how to run mine.Of course not. Teachers are not that pretentious to think they can tell someone in international finance to run their business.
Nobody thinks parents should have a say in how inner-city hospitals are run, so why on earth should they have a say in how inner-city schools are run?!
Oh please. This is comparing apples and oranges. Whitney where is your blog on how to run inner city hospitals? But you see there is a difference. Medical people and people with the knowledge of medicine are making decisions at the hospitals. Lawyers are making education decisions. See the difference? But you yourself are the one who is screaming on how to run schools. Funny, are you a parent of color and/or a minority? Of course not. Not with a name like Whitney Tilson.
There are few things harder than running a school or school system, esp. an inner-city one, filled with the most difficult-to-educate students,Dude, that is the challenge. That is why we do what we do. Just out of curiosity please share any and all schools that you have run.
But there again is that your assumption between inner city, which I believe is code for "children of color/minority", and difficult to educate. Are we dipping a toe into some bigoted thoughts here Whitney?
the lowest-caliber teachers,And you know this how? Please give first hand knowledge that all teachers of the inner city are low caliber.
the most militant unionsYeah, you better watch out for the brown shirts of the UFT. Jeez!
and other entrenched interests, and the most corrupt (or bought-off) politicians.**cough** TWEED **cough**Joel Klein**cough**
The people who can make any difference at all in improving this system (which can best be described at a Mad Hatter's Tea Party) are a rare breed.And you are one of them right. Here comes Mr White Guilt Liberal to save the day.
Why on earth would anyone think that a group of parents (often disorganized
Translation: "Why on earth would those dumb asses in the projects or on Section 8, on food stamps, or not of my color and upbringing....."
So who has been organizing those charter school parents?
-- or worse yet, organized by the unions
-- and often made up of the most militant, extremists with axes to grind) would help these great leaders do their jobs better???
Why do you think you can do it? Or why do you think you know it all?
3 comments:
I am a veteran teacher in Houston seeking a dialogue with Teach for America teachers nationally regarding policy positions taken by former Teach for American staffers who have become leaders in school district administrations and on school boards. I first became aware of a pattern when an ex-TFA staffer, now a school board member for Houston ISD, recommended improving student performance by firing teachers whose students did poorly on standardized tests. Then the same board member led opposition to allowing us to select, by majority vote, a single union to represent us.
Having won school board elections in several cities, and securing the Washington D.C Superintendent's job for Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp's friends are pursuing an approach to school reform based on a false premise: that teachers, not student habits, nor lack of parent commitment or social inequality, is the main cause of sub-par academic performance. The TFA reform agenda appeals to big corporations who see our public institutions as inefficient leeches. This keeps big money flowing into TFA coffers.
The corporate-TFA nexus began when Union Carbide initially sponsored Wendy Kopp's efforts to create Teach for America. A few years before, Union Carbide's negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India. The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything possible to minimize its responsibility at the time it embraced Ms. Kopp. TFA recently started Teach for India. Are Teach for India enrollees aware of the TFA/Union Carbide connection?
When TFA encountered a financial crisis, Ms. Kopp nearly went to work for the Edison Project, and was all but saved by their managerial assistance. The Edison Project sought to replace public schools with for-profit corporate schools funded by our tax money. Ms. Kopp's husband, Richard Barth, was an Edison executive before taking over as CEO of KIPP's national foundation, where he has sought to decertify its New York City unions.
In 2000, two brilliant TFA alumni, the founders of KIPP Academy, joined the Bush's at the Republican National Convention in 2000. This was pivotal cover for Bush, since as Governor he had no genuine educational achievements, and he needed the education issue to campaign as a moderate and reach out to the female vote. KIPP charter schools provide a quality education, but they start with families committed to education. They claim to be improving public schools by offering competition in the education market-place, but they take the best and leave the rest.
D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee's school reform recipe includes three ingredients: close schools rather than improve them; fire teachers rather than inspire them; and sprinkle on a lot of hype. On the cover of Time, she sternly gripped a broom, which she presumably was using to sweep away the trash, which presumably represented my urban teacher colleagues. The image insulted people who take the toughest jobs in education.
TFA teachers do great work, but when TFA's leadership argue that schools, and not inequality and bad habits, are the cause of the achievement gap, they are not only wrong, they feed the forces that prevent the social change we need to grow and sustain our middle class.. Our society has failed schools by permitting the middle class to shrink. It's not the other way around. Economic inequality and insecurity produces ineffective public schools. It's not the other way around.
Ms. Kopp claims TFA carries the civil rights torch for today, but Martin Luther King was the voice of unions on strike, not the other way around. His last book, Where do we go from here?, argued for some measure of wealth distribution, because opportunity would never be enough in a survival of the fittest society to allow most of the under-privileged to enter the middle class.
Your hard work as a TFA teacher gives TFA executives credibility. It's not the other way around. Your hard work every day in the classrooms gives them the platform to espouse their peculiar one-sided prescriptions for school improvement. I would like a dialogue about what I have written here with TFA teachers. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com.
Whitney is both smarter and more caring than everyone else, didn't you know?
Whitney went to Harvard, both undergrad and grad (business school). Before that, he attended Northfield Mount Hermon School, a a ninth-twelfth grade private, college preparatory school in Mass. (Current tuition for NMH boarding students = $43,400).
His trajectory is very much like Duncan and Obama's.
Nowadays, his children attend the Nightingale-Bamford School (all-inclusive tuition for the 2009–2010 school year is $33,725 for grades K–IV and $34,350 for classes V–XII). The student to faculty ratio is 7:1. The kids at that school are very special.
This is one very privileged dude.
Doesn't all this personal experience tell us that a guy like Whitney knows everything about what public schools need, and how they should be run? From his point of view it certainly does, because it’s connected to controlling the lowly masses (= anyone w/income less than $100K or so).
BTW, here's a video about W.T.'s "passion" for social do-gooding. Joel Klein is featured and talks about having many meetings w/W.T.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWoawtRTkg4&feature=channel_page
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q6K1qq_HEg&feature=channel_page
It would be to no one's surprise that Jay Green praises him here: http://jaypgreene.com/2009/04/07/whitney-tilson-first-they-came-for-vouchers/
Whitney was highly involved with TFA and now he absolutely loves KIPP. He undoubtedly thinks that Ivy Leaguers are superior in every way, including that of teaching poor kids (something most of them can only stand to do for two years). A program like KIPP would be delightful to him because those brown-skinned kids are kept so tightly in line; if they act up, out they go. He would love to see this program become more wide spread, because whenever he gets a sense of the extreme alienation and the constantly simmering, nearly white-hot rage in the inner-cities, it doesn't make him feel so well.
It would be smart for elite people like Whitney to get off their high horse, and soon, to start addressing the real needs of the millions of chronically impoverished and chronically unemployed slave descendants in this country. Finagling for charters and vouchers, and working to destroy teachers unions, just won't cut it. He should drop his current educational projects, walk into one of those regular public schools, and invite those people to tell him what they actually need.
And I can guarantee that what The People will tell him is that they want their established public schools to be better supported and made stronger, NOT eliminated and then replaced with the current model that Whitney and his buddies think is cool.
What would W.T. think if the rest of us decided that we didn't like what was going on at his daughters' school, and decided it was time to have it shuttered?
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