June Atkinson on Wake's shift away from the diversity policy

Nothing earth-shattering in this interview and little substance. Either the General Assy is re-visiting having the Superintendent as an appointed person, or Dr. June has conveniently forgotten how she was fed to the wolves last year by the Governor, who favored Dr. Bill to run the Department of Public Instruction.

Maybe the Wake Co Taxpayers Assn will invite her for a second whining session, since she was running around in search of friends before hiring a Republican lawyer to plead her cause in court last year.

The following is from Chris Fitzsimon's blog page describing the rally to take place on the 20th.

"Opponents of the re-segregation of the Wake County schools have announced plans to hold a public rally on July 20, the date of the next Wake County Board of Education meeting."

Segregation is illegal Mr. Fitzsimons. If  WCPSS is doing what you describe, where is the lawsuit. It would be a slam dunk. If not, why the reference to re-segregation? Unless it is a lie.

U.S. Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Michael B. Enzi, R-Wyo., the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, have asked for comments on a draft of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, known in its current form as the No Child Left Behind Act. Here are my comments.

I began teaching in 1976, and taught high school as well as middle school. I later became a curriculum coordinator, an assistant superintendent, and a program director for two federal Teaching American History grants. I am deeply concerned with the future of public education.

I read the Obama administration’s Blueprint for Reform;carefully, and the good news is that the proposal’s main body is strong, full of powerful suggestions and remedies for failing schools. In the document’s introductory section, however, we find proof that every writer of educational blueprints should be made to read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (1946). If they did this, they would not use the kind of jargon that plagues the field and stands in the way of clear thinking.

Many of the specifics of the blueprint are remarkably good: involving state universities in the discussion about remedial courses; granting funds for professional development of teachers; defining measures of accountability and measurement other than tests. But I have some areas of concern:

Students as Passive Learners. The blueprint doesn’t deal with students’ control of their own education, nor does it hold them accountable. How do we encourage students to be independent and enthusiastic learners if they are merely the object of assessments, treatments, and other instruments?

Evaluating Effective Teachers. The blueprint calls for identifying (and rewarding) “effective and highly effective teachers … on the basis of student growth and other factors.” I can’t imagine how you will do this. The following vignette from my own career points out this difficulty.

I ran into one of my former 8th grade students, now a published writer and poet, who told me, “Mr. Young, you’re the reason I became a writer.” When I started to demur, she said, “No, really.” We talked about how she had battled me that year over how she felt that I was “stifling her creativity,” but that this had led to her understanding that she could control different levels of discourse, that almost all good expository and narrative writing and even most good poetry have form and structure.

I doubt that I would have been identified in the blueprint’s assessment process as a “highly effective” teacher. How could you measure the effectiveness of all of this particular student’s teachers previous to the test?

Professional Development. Grant funds would support “evidence of improvements in student learning.” I think this is important, but it ignores what numerous studies have shown: The most important point in the development of a good teacher and in improvement of student learning is that the teacher feels expert in his or her discipline.

The U.S. Department of Education has a good model for how to do this in its Teaching American History grant program. In Boston, the Teachers as Scholars program does it exactly right, offering content seminars with expert professors in a range of fields, including science, mathematics, literature, history, and music theory. Other groups offer high-quality content courses as well. I believe that the ESEA bill should mandate that at least 75 percent of federal funds for professional development be offered in content-specific seminars.

The Consultant-Expertise Industry. I greatly fear the consequence of the plan’s emphasis on improving instructional practices “through effective, ongoing, job-embedded professional development.” This sounds good but inevitably will lead to exacerbating a great problem with our current system: the industry of educational consultants who travel the country, offering expensive “one and done” workshops, or who will work extensively with school systems that buy their expensive materials.

They offer pedagogical fixes, coming up with a dizzying variety of “assessment based” plans to direct multicultural or anti-bullying initiatives, and gimmicks such as “critical friends,” “multiple intelligences,” and “planning backwards.” Many of these programs seem legitimate because they are hatched at major colleges of education and have the imprimatur of those universities. Are they effective? If so, after 20 or 30 years of this roadshow our public school system would not need a blueprint. But what they have been successful at is making a great deal of money at the public expense. “Job-embedded professional development” simply gives them another bite of the apple. Public education needs to be protected from consultants who, by now, have been revealed as providing little more than a traveling medicine show.

Teacher Retention. Although the document acknowledges good practice in mentoring and retaining excellent teachers, this needs more attention in the reauthorization blueprint. It is absolutely critical that young teachers be paired with master teachers—people who can help new teachers know what they have been doing right and what they need to improve. This gets down to the basics: How to establish classroom procedures. How to equip a classroom before a lesson. How to move your students from one place to another.

The federal law should include funds for mentors. My suggestion for this is to allow school systems to rehire recent retirees to come in one day a week to work with specific teachers. We have allowed those teachers to leave the field with a wealth of experience, lesson plans, and even materials, and with little opportunity to share their expertise.

Using the Data. The plan needs to acknowledge districts that are currently performing at a high level. They can’t possibly keep “improving,” as the blueprint envisions, in the way that a bottom 5 percent school can “improve.” They should maintain their performance and improve where they can, but the unrealistic expectation of constant improvement might sink this reform. It would be a little bit like cutting Ted Williams’ salary after he hit .406 because he did not hit .420 the following year.

Finally, what happens when, as the blueprint proposes, all “data [are] disaggregated by race, gender, ethnicity, disability status, English-learner status, and family income”? In the original No Child Left Behind legislation, this became a straitjacket that saw good districts transformed into failing districts if one of the disaggregated populations did not perform up to “standards.”

Programs That Work. To that end, the blueprint includes very little about programs that do work. We need to study, and perhaps replicate, organizations such as Teach For America. The plan’s authors may need to think about funding a similar organization that would bring more teachers of color into the classrooms. As our student population has changed, our teaching force has not.

Senators Harkin and Enzi, you and other members of Congress are undertaking a noble, important, and difficult task. Thank you providing a forum to comment on these ideas. All of us look forward to hearing from you as the blueprint for reauthorizing the ESEA continues to respond to the on-the-ground reality of public education today.

Liberals really are a Hoot.  Always wailing and squawking that THEY know what's best for me and everybody else.  I would never presume to tell anyone else what "is best" for them.

One of many reasons I oppose liberals at every opportunity.  Opposing liberals IS "best for me" by my own conclusion.

Missed the point of the policy - it was not just so white kids could be exposed to poverty. It was to prevent  high poverty schools for which the district was not equipped financially or otherwise to deal with. We all know that high poverty schools are failures unless inordinate amount of resources are applied. Let's not confuse the concept/strategy of the old policy of considering SES with the seemingly poor execution in instances where it created a hardship on 2% (1,100) of the elementary school kids that where assigned to a school > 10 miles from their residence.  In the quest to develop a better model - we have started off with "neighborhood" schools (parent choice) to "Community" schools (parent choice) to "Controlled Choice" where by assignment is based on an algorithim that includes elements of income status (parent education, house value..ect) - clearly an attempt to identify poverty.   So while "diversity" was eliminated from the policy it is being introduced through the algorithim.  Clearly there are valid assignment issues to be addressed - but to place all of the blame to the policy vs poor execution or subjectivity of a few individuals has been misleading.  As I have said before - correcting the inequities of assignments could have been handled in a different manner. This has been my beef with the board all along, not the broad ideas but the approach.

And again!!!  Why are we hearing from all of these people, all of a sudden?  Why don't they speak out on the other counties in this state that do not bus for diversity?  Why is it only with WCPSS?