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9486 in the collection
A covert war on schools
Ohanian Comment: They are fighting the same war in England. . . with Duncan helping out. To counter this corporate-politico attack on local schools a group in England has formed the Local Schools Network, a national campaign group that aims to gather testimonies from parents, teachers and students about the strengths of their local school, and to promote debate about the issues that affect them daily.
For a very different view of this, read the article from The Telegraph, posted below The Guardian article.
by Melissa Benn, The Guardian
Tomorrow's whirlwind visit to London by Arne Duncan, Barack Obama's education secretary, could not have come at a better time for Michael Gove. Last week the secretary of state was besieged by discomfiting revelations about £500,000 of public money granted to the New Schools Network, the charity and company set up by one of his former advisers, 25-year-old Rachel Wolf, during which it emerged that no other organisation was asked to tender for the job of advising groups who want to set up new and "free" schools.
This week, then, in place of answering questions about transparency and accountability, Gove will be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with one of Obama's lieutenants – at Hackney's Mossbourne Academy in London, no less; the jewel in the crown of New Labour's education policy – and talk about the need to tackle educational inequalities, root out bad teachers, ill discipline and so on.
In fact the funding of the New Schools Network and the expected razzmatazz around Duncan's visit are all part of the same strategy: central planks in the frequently disingenuous war now being fought over the future of our school system, in which a seductive language of cultural radicalism and a powerful invective against educational inequality will increasingly be used to promote a further fragmented and multi-tiered system of education. Existing state provision is in effect being undermined by a mix of instant celebrity critics, a growing number of private providers and behind-the-scenes lobbyists, with the full if not always fully publicised support of the government.
There are two crucial elements to this new schools agenda. The first is the relentless knocking of the comprehensive inheritance; the rational administrative reform introduced in this country from the 50s onwards that sought to end the pernicious and deeply unpopular grammar-secondary modern divide.
The New Schools Network website, for instance, features videos shot in close-up of agonised parents desperately seeking alternatives to their failing local school – although only a tiny percentage of the nation's schools are now deemed to be failing. Many parents, particularly in urban areas, are being encouraged to panic unnecessarily – as David Woods, London's chief schools adviser, pointed out so trenchantly earlier this year.
This scaremongering finds a ready echo in mainstream culture. From the tabloids to Waterloo Road to the bestselling fiction of Sebastian Faulks and Zoë Heller, local schools are too frequently portrayed as out-of-control hell holes, sustained by a jaded and self-interested teaching profession and a complacent liberal middle class.
Enter Katherine Birbalsingh, the teacher who became an overnight star at Tory party conference. Here is a fiery, attractive young teacher who invokes the spirit of Martin Luther King in order to declare that most local schools are in chaos. No wonder Gove rates her – like Toby Young, Birbalsingh, who has apparently been offered a free school headship, ticks every Tory box: blaming the liberal middle class, the trade unions and Ofsted for failings in the state system while praising private schools for their outstanding pupil quality rather than extraordinary material resources. She also made a recent appearance at the National Grammar Schools Association's parliamentary bash at which Gove hinted that he is thinking of reintroducing academic selection.
All this plays into the second key element of the new agenda, which is the praise it heaps on its own, as yet unrealised and already highly contested, version of the local school, based on the Swedish free school or the US zero tolerance "Knowledge is Power" charter model. Duncan's visit to Hackney will provide yet another bout of favourable publicity for the charter movement, but little for its critics – including those who argue convincingly that such schools do not always deliver and often intensify social and ethnic segregation.
Of course the people who really need regular and active support from Gove are the heads and teachers at the thousands of actually existing local schools that already do a good, and frequently outstanding, job, not just in educating our children but in holding together many disparate local communities.
That is why a group of us have now founded the Local Schools Network, a national campaign group that aims to gather testimonies from parents, teachers and students about the strengths of their local school, and to promote debate about the issues that affect them daily. On Thursday, once Duncan has departed, we will deliver a letter to Gove asking for a meeting to discuss how he and his government might wish to support us in our presumed common goal of further improving the nation's schools.
from The Telegraph
By Alex Spillius
America's lesson for British classrooms
Michael Gove’s plans for 'free schools’ will get a boost this week with a visit from the like-minded US education secretary.
As we all know by now, US President Barack Obama has not had a great first two years. His Republican critics have hammered him at every opportunity as an out-of-touch, anti-business, high-spending liberal. His greatest social mission – healthcare reform -- has backfired. Elected on a promise of uniting the country, the divisions between Left and Right -- or progressive and conservative, to use the American terminology -- have instead solidified.
Education, however, has been an exception to the relentless criticism. Even prominent Right-wingers such as Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, and Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, have praised the President's approach to reforming schools. The Obama administration's centrepiece initiative has been Race to the Top, which allocated $4.35 billion (£2.7 billion) -- nearly a tenth of annual federal spending on education -- for a competition among the 50 states to improve academic standards and teacher performance, turn around failing schools and encourage the establishment of what are known as charter schools.
"The idea here is simple: instead of rewarding failure, we only reward success. Instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform," said the President when introducing the scheme at the start of the year. Using language that could have come from his predecessor George W Bush, Mr Obama has consistently cited education as the country's greatest long-term challenge; and, indeed, decades of mediocrity and failure have led to a staggering decline that should make policy-makers in Britain thankful for small mercies.
The US has one of the worst high-school drop-out rates in the world, and, where once it led, it now trails well behind other countries in producing college graduates. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, pupils in the US rank 21st for science in the world, compared with Britain's ninth place. In urban black spots such as Washington DC, only half of children finish high school and one in eight students has been threatened with a weapon.
Mr Obama's ally and enforcer is his education secretary Arne Duncan, a 6ft 5in former professional basketball player (in Australia), who has the giant task of turning around American schools. Together they have delivered a stern message to the Democratic Party and the teachers’ unions that the status quo of failing schools and job-for-life teachers is unacceptable, and that, in Mr Bush’s memorable phrase, the "soft bigotry of low expectations" will have to end. Repeatedly, the President has warned that, if American schools don't succeed, then neither will the country.
It is against that backdrop that Mr Duncan arrives in London this week to support Michael Gove's plans to set up "free schools".
In advance of his trip, Mr Duncan issued a resounding endorsement of the Coalition’s plans. "I just have tremendous respect for the educational work and the leadership that I've seen coming from the UK, and we’re all working on the same issues and have the same challenges," he said. "I think one-size-fits-all is part of what hasn't worked in education, frankly. The more we can create a series of great choices, the better."
For Mr Gove, the visit, which will include a visit to Mossbourne Academy in London on Wednesday, is a chance to show doubters that across the pond their kindred spirits in the Democratic Party and the White House strongly favour the sort of reform that the Conservative Education Secretary is proposing. As director of education in his home state of Illinois from 2001 to 2008, Mr Duncan vigorously supported charter schools.
"It is interesting that in England the charter school movement is being called 'free schools', because that is what it is all about here," says Collin Hitt, director of education policy at the Illinois Policy Institute. "It's about the freedom to choose and to innovate. The basic value of charter schools is they provide a choice for parents to gain something better than what they have been getting. Schools can create vastly different paths, in terms of things like instruction, the organising of the school day and discipline, but are nonetheless aimed at the same end of an improved education."
Charter schools are typically set up by parents, teachers, non-governmental organisations and universities, or a combination thereof, who apply to the state for a charter -- a contract -- and for funding. They operate outside the control of local school boards or districts.
The first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1991, and there are now about 5,000 across the country, serving 1.5 million out of a total of 50 million school-age children. Defenders of the schools reject the criticism that they are elitist and exacerbate the segregation of the poor and the middle class. In suburban parts of Mr Duncan's home state, charters allow parents to express cultural preferences that go beyond any debate about class privilege. The Prairie Crossing Charter School in Grayslake, for example, offers a curriculum based on the environment. Children do some learning every day in the open, school meals are strictly "farm to table" and student trips are taken to "environmental learning centres" -- lakes and state parks.
The school's mission statement may be teeth-grindingly worthy in places ("Students, staff, and parents are compassionate, just, caring, and health-conscious individuals"), but the point is that the statement is the school's and not the bland imprimatur of the state education department. As appears to be the case in Britain, the most heated battle over charter schools has been fought in inner cities, where the arguments also used against Mr Gove's free schools -- that public funds will be siphoned off for the benefit of pushy middle-class parents -- have not been borne out.
"The notion that the middle classes and the well-to-do are the only ones, or even the main community, setting up these schools in urban areas would be patently false for the experience in the US," said Mr Hitt. In Chicago, plagued by familiar urban problems of drugs and unemployment, parents in poor and ethnic minority communities were getting involved, he says. "They are monitoring the lunch room and after-school activities and volunteering on school trips. It takes some time, but, after a while, parents develop a faith in schools that wasn't there before, and a partnership is created between communities and schools that wasn't there before."
In the inner cities, charter schools have been set up mostly by local welfare groups that have often worked in deprived communities for decades, teachers who have been yearning to put their ideas and experience into practice, and the University of Chicago, which wanted to put the lessons of years of research into failing schools into practice. Charter schools are now so popular in the inner cities -- and elsewhere -- that the majority are heavily oversubscribed.
A riveting new documentary, Waiting for Superman, follows five children going through the agonising application process. Anthony is in the fifth grade (year six) in Washington, one of the worst-performing school districts in the country. He never knew his mother, and he lost his father to drugs. He is taken in by his grandparents, who instill discipline and a desire to learn but fear that when he enters secondary school the drug gangs and mean streets will drag him down. He applies for a place at a charter boarding school and the results of this brave child's quest to better himself have been bringing a tear to audience's eyes.
Critics of charter schools claim that results are not that good, that the likes of Anthony would not be any better off in the mainstream system. A recent study of charter school students aged 12 to 15 found that they performed no better in maths and reading than other state school students. However, urban areas were an exception: students did better in tests by four to five per cent, and were generally more satisfied with their schools.
Jennifer Marshall, director of domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, views the criticism as misplaced. "Policy-makers tend to over-rely on test scores, which are not the only issues that concern parents. They are interested in the culture of a school and a calm learning environment that has good peer pressure not bad peer pressure," she says. "The idea is that every child can learn. It is unconscionable that we would tolerate public [state] schools that, decade after decade, fail students. Charter schools operate outside the inertia of the bureaucracy and the intransigence of the teachers' unions. They are a very important innovation."
— Melissa Benn & By Alex Spillius
The Guardian & The Telegraph
2010-11-01
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/01/a-covert-war-on-schools
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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