NYC parents: the best and the wisest, but utterly ignored

See Diane Ravitch’s latest and superb column in EdWeek:

John Dewey wrote that what the best and wisest parent wants for his own child is what the community should want for all its children. That's a good starting point. What does the best and wisest parent want for his or her own child? Certainly, that parent would want a school with small classes, which guarantees that her child would get personal attention.

Class size is a pretty good indicator of what most people mean by quality. If you visit the most elite private schools, you can bet that they don't have 32 students in a class. On the Web sites of such schools, one learns that classes are typically 12 to 15 students to a teacher. Such luxury is unheard of in most public schools, with the possible exception of schools in tony suburbs. Many of those who pronounce that class size doesn't matter send their own children to schools with small classes.Another indicator of quality is the presence of the arts. The best and wisest parent would not want his child to go to a school with no teachers of music, art, dance, or other arts. Yet we know that in most of our public schools today, the arts have been sacrificed to make more time for test-prepping.

In this case, the majority of NYC parents are “the best and the wisest.” Over and over again, in the DOE own annual surveys, public school parents say their top priority for their children’s schools is smaller classes, followed by more enrichment. And yet they are completely ignored by an administration whose own children attend schools with just these attributes.

One might add, what private school has merit pay tied to standardized test scores? Or spends millions to create teams of teachers and bureaucrats to engage in “data analysis” supposedly to help “differentiate” instruction, while doing nothing to reduce class size?

What private school has adopted what is likely to be the next priority of the administration, according to Chris Cerf, which is to further “individualize” learning through online computer instruction, rather than give students an opportunity to receive more feedback from actual human beings? As Joel Klein has said, if he gets his way, he will cut the teaching force by another 30 percent.

Not a single private school that I know of would stand for such priorities, and certainly none of the elite schools where the officials determining educational policy for our public schools sent their own children to school.

Mayor Bloomberg: Spence (average class size: 16-18); Chancellor Klein: Miss Porter’s (average class size: 11); Photo Agnostopoulos (DOE’s Chief Operating Officer) Dalton (average class size: 15)

Obama: Sidwell Friends (average class size: 15).

Instead of taking heed of the DOE's own parent surveys, the mayor continually tells parents to butt out when it comes to issues like school overcrowding, and only involve themselves "in the micro issues of their child’s education, like the child’s attendance, behavior and grades."

While supposedly favoring parental "choice" he also has said that parents should have no say in "setting educational policy."

This paternalism also imbues the US Department of Education under Obama, as Diane points out:

Are these the priorities of President Obama's Race to the Top Fund? Absolutely not! The president's Department of Education will dispense nearly $5 billion, not to reduce class sizes, not to expand access to the arts, and not to improve the beauty and functionality of our public schools, but to incentivize the workforce with merit pay; to increase the privatization of struggling schools; and to compel teachers to teach to admittedly poor tests by tying teacher pay to students' test scores. Let's get back to the new federal education agenda. Seeing how little has changed from Bush to Obama in education policy, I want my share of that $5 billion back.

Inez Barron gives it to us, straight

At the rally at City Hall today on school governance, Assemblymember Inez Barron, a former principal, denounces the Senate deal on governance and offers a blistering critique of the Bloomberg/Klein education record. (For more on the outlines of the deal, see GothamSchools, Daily News, Times, Post.)

From class size and "creative confusion" to the NAEPs, Barron tells the real story behind the Bloomberg myth. She even quotes John Dewey and Martin Luther King Jr. on the meaning and purpose of education. Inez Barron for Schools Chancellor!

(video thanks to David B.)

"Super-mugging" at Tweed?

See today's discussion on the Juice Analytics website between information and data professionals, about the huge waste of money that the DOE purchase of ARIS appears to be, described as the result of "consulting companies ...preying on clients’ lack of expertise".

Another professional in the field writes: "It amazes me the price tag on this “super” computer. I mean, this could probably be done with MS Access…"

Visioactive has more commentary, agreeing that the whole thing is a “super-mugging” and then makes the following observations:

"...the real key to success is more relative to the investment in people who can turn that meaning into actionable insights. Beyond that, success is also dependent of investing in the infrastructure to act on the insights. I don’t see where the NYC school system is buying much more than custom software and perhaps a little maintenance training. If Mayor Michael Bloomberg means it when he says, “Every child in this city deserves a quality education and we will spare no expense“, I wonder how much they will really spend on the people side of the equation."

I guess we know the answer to that question. When most middle and high school teachers in NYC have five to six classes of 28 or more students a day, very little if any of this information will be "actionable." Most testing experts believe that the results of the standardized interim assessments are inherently so unreliable as to be useless in any case.

Teachers tell me that in most instances, they know all too well their kids' weaknesses, but simply don't have the opportunity to spend the individual time with them that would be necessary in order to address their needs. Nothing in this system will make this any easier to achieve.

As I've said before, anyone who's helped their own kid with their homework knows that teaching is a very time-consuming, labor-intensive process.

Someone just sent me this great quotation from John Dewey's The School and Society, written in 1907:

Individual attention. This is secured by small groupings -- eight or ten in a class -- and a large number of teachers supervising systematically the intellectual needs and attainments and physical well-being and growth of the child. ....It requires but a few words to make this statement about attention to individual powers and needs, and yet the whole of the school's aims and methods, moral, physical, intellectual, are bound up in it.

Too bad no one over at Tweed appears to understand these words, written a century ago. Until we can make robots into teachers no amount of machinery will help.

The question remains who is getting mugged here -- the officials at Tweed who have bought into this wrongheaded notion of education, the NYC taxpayer, or our kids?