markgarrison.net » poverty and education

Veteran Chicago Teacher & Former Director of Safety Speaks Out on the Impact of the Recession, Ducan Policies

Mark Garrison — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:14:55 +0000

“My speculation is that the damage this recession will do to kids’ education prospects is far more than the positive good most changes in educational policies can produce.” – EDDRA email listserv participant.*

Since the research basis for our sharings here requires some credentialing, allow me to post the following as (now retired) “Director of School Security and Safety” for the 35,000-member (at the time) Chicago Teachers Union as well as my current work as editor of Substance.

During those years I worked in that capacity, I organized a great many programs and events to further the union’s objective of neutralizing the impact of Chicago’s massive drug gangs on the city’s public schools. Therefore, you can assume my expertise in these matters I speak of below, since our work almost always overlapped poverty and drug gang problems.

Some “educational policies” furthered over the past decade and likely to grow under Arne Duncan will do much, much more harm against these backgrounds of poverty and the destruction of the so-called “safety nets” over the past two decades. One will be hunger. The other will be the expanded impact of drug gangs within our cities (and in some cases, our more impoverished suburbs). Let me suggest two that may be going national out of Chicago now that Arne Duncan is CEO of the Education Department (in Chicago, the chief of the schools has not been a “superintendent” since 1995, when mayoral control became law; we have a “Chief Executive Officer”).

1. School closings for “failure” (“underperformance,” “underutilization”, etc.). Duncan has already suggested that he will be pushing the Chicago model of school closings for “underperformance” nationally. In Chicago, that has generally meant that schools described as “underperforming” (they stopped using “failing” here about five years ago) are closed and (usually, but not always) privatized. Invariably, those schools are (no surprise here, I’m sure) serving the most impoverished children (often schools with a 100 percent “free and reduced lunch” rate) in completely (in Chicago, that means 90 percent to 100 percent black and/or “minority”) in the ghettos and barrios. For many of these children, the closing of their schools is the last straw, the destruction of the final stability in their lives. At one of the schools that Duncan proposed to close for “underperformance” this school year (Holmes Elementary, the closing of which was rescinded by Duncan’s successor), teachers who organized against the closing (it was slated to be a “turnaround” which is Chicago for “reconstitution”), teachers now report that homeless families of their children await the disposal of the garbage from (free and reduced price) school breakfasts and lunches. As a result, the school’s staff has asked that the food be separated before being placed in the dumpsters, so that the families that are waiting to salvage the uneaten food don’t have to sort, say, cartons of cereal from a spoonful of milk-and-cereal.

2. Massive increase in gang violence. Once the final prop of stability is removed from these children’s lives (i.e., the now privatized public school where all the teachers who knew the community have been fired), the remaining locus of stability in many of these communities is the drug gang. In Chicago, which has the largest drug gangs in the USA (organized into two “nations” called the “People” — five-pointed star as main symbol — and “Folks” — six-pointed star as main symbol), the expansion of these drug gangs, and the highly publicized teenage body count that has followed from it, is partly caused by the school closings policies that Arne Duncan will soon be trying to bring to a school district near you. Five years ago (June 12, 2004) I was still working as “Director of School Security and Safety” for the 35,000-member Chicago Teachers Union. My job at the time was to organize and train teachers to utilize union resources to counter the drug gangs in the schools here. In June 2004, Arne Duncan proposed the first “closing” of public high schools (later to be flipped into charter school hands) against Calumet and Austin high schools. I organized the testimony in opposition to those closing, and everyone who testified about the proposal said that one of the main results would be an increase in gang violence. The reason? In Chicago, gang members identify young people as being members of one gang or the other by virtue of their neighborhood. Therefore, any student who goes to another general high school after having attended Calumet High School would be identified as being a Black Stone (“People”, five-pointed star) and an enemy (if the other schools was “Folks” — six pointed star). That is precisely what happened. One of the main causes of the huge increase in the number of gang shootings of young people has been the policy of CPS in closing (and usually charterizing) traditional public schools, excluding the kids who had gone there and forcing them, if they want to attend public school at all, to attend a school outside their community. (Charters in Chicago utilize and elaborate application, lottery and elimination process to get rid of undesirables, with KIPP just being the most well known nationally).

That’s enough sharing for one morning. The impacts of poverty will go well beyond the disruption or destruction of once stable families. When corporate “school reform” polices such as those practiced by Arne Duncan in Chicago are added to the mix of the economic downturn, the results can be not only more suffering for children (hunger, dental and medical neglect, etc.), but actual death from the increase in drug gang violence. If you have seen The Wire (HBO) you have a sort of sense of what Chicago has been facing with the drug gangs that I once organized against. But Baltimore is child’s play compared with the fully developed drug gang empires of Chicago and Illinois. If you are interested in more details, you can get “The Gang Book” from the Chicago Crime Commission. Note only that those vast maps showing areas of Chicago’s South Side as being controlled by the Gangster Disciples or Latin King street gangs are realities in the lives of thousands of black and Hispanic children and families. And Chicago has let those realities proliferate as a matter of public policy neglect for more than 30 years.

George N. Schmidt Editor, Substance

http://www.substancenews.net/

* Copied from the Education Disinformation, Detection and Reporting Agency email listserv managed by Gerald Bracey on April 30, 2009.

On Controlling for Family Influence on Achievement

Mark Garrison — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:06:56 +0000

As I review Berends’ and colleagues 2008 volume Charter School Outcomes (Lawrence Erlbaum), a key assumption of Anglo-American political theory, namely that just inequality is the result of “natural distinction” (as opposed to social distinction), undergirds the authors’ efforts to improve research methods for evaluating school choice policies.

Before addressing the political basis of this methodological project, it is important to note that the authors make the mistkae that Robert Yin suggests is all too common: research on school performance confounds schools as the proper unit of analysis with individuals; this is especially common with those obsessively turning to randomized field trials. (See Yin, R. K. (2009). Case study research: design and methods (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.)

I think exposing their position as emanating from political theory — rather than an thoughtless imports from the natural and sciences — might prove helpful in both evaluating the book and articulating the political significance of school choice policy more generally.

Random Trials as Opportunity Science

Of note is the book’s adoption of U.S. Department of Education, and in particular the Institute of Educational Sciences, insistence on the “gold standard” of experimental design: the “random assignment of units to experimental and control or contrast conditions (2).”

“Randomized field trials” are thus adopted as the key method for studying school choice. By studying the measurable outcomes of applicants who were lotteried into an oversubscribed charter school or voucher program to those who were lotteried out and attended a traditional public school, the influence of family background can be separated out from that of the school itself (but again, this promotes confusion regarding the unit of analysis).

According to the authors, the strength of this method and other efforts such as over time measures of “value added,” is that they help “take into account the powerful influence of families” and help “establish the separate and distinct contribution of the school to a student’s achievement.”

The postulate that experimental design is equally the gold standard for the social sciences as it is for the natural sciences is taken for granted. It presents itself as a solution to a perennial problem in school evaluation research predating even the “Coleman Report”: controlling for the influence of family characteristics on school outcomes. It seems as a rational way out of that conundrum — but only if certain things are ignored or forgotten.

What is the assumption behind the presupposition that students must be separated from their historical position, their social circumstance, in order to assess the quality of their school and the degree to which they have learned what is required of them? How does this premise inform the cultural meaning of “achievement” as distinct from student learning?

What is the political significance of the fact that this kind of “controlling” for social circumstance was largely impossible under a traditional public school model where place of residence determined school assignment for all but a tiny minority of public school students?

Irrespective of the logic justifying the “controlling” for social circumstance, is not such a project irrational? Can one “control” for social circumstances? Such efforts reveal a profound distortion and patently unscientific view of social reality. Does not the entire project of “controlling” for social circumstance — which includes everything from assumptions about “ethnicity” and parental “SES” to larger understandings of religion, culture and sub-cultures of neighborhoods — itself constitute a social circumstance and a patently normative project which serves the interests of some over others?

Political Logic of Random Selection

In beginning to answer my own question posed above (“What is the political significance…”) I am not arguing with the general logic of the controlled experiment, or the statistical reality of randomization and its utility for understanding cause and effect. What I am arguing is that this fetish of random trials pushed by the IES is derived from the following notion: that schools are successful to the degree they produce students who successfully compete in the academic marketplace (the exchange of grades and test scores for places of opportunity, praise and so on). Closing the achievement gap is an official effort to contend with the overgrowth of social inequality while simultaneously violently blocking any real effort or even discussion of reducing (let alone eliminating) social inequality. This pathology stems from the long-standing assumption of American political theory that replaces class struggle with the struggle for education. (Refer to classic quotes from Horace Mann for an elaboration, or even better, see Rush Welter’s (1962) Popular education and Democratic Thought in America.)

The underlying logic of this strand of charter school research (Berends et al.) is that charters should be promoted, not because they are necessarily proven to be better, but because they create competition — not only among schools, but among teachers, as researchers document a lower average salary, yet a larger spread in annual earnings for charter as compared to traditional public school teachers. Randomization is opportunity science speak for fair competition (e.g., no “selection bias”).

This competition is key because it allows for arrangements heretofore difficult to make, like linking student achievement with teacher pay, something the authors deem of obvious value and unproblematic. Teachers are evaluated on the degree to which they help students compete (e.g., note the language and real meaning of “high flying schools”), irrespective of the background and ability of the students. Good teachers are those whose students successfully compete in academic competitions (i.e., high stakes tests). Charter schools eschew the working class politics of union and solidarity and stand as institutions more firmly on the grounds of individual merit and competition. That is to say, good teachers are those that help liberate students from their social place through academic competition (again, there are other notions of “good teacher”) just as black and poor kids are supposed to “achieve” because in this “meritocracy,” race and class aren’t factors in determining ones place in the social order — charters are to replace public schools as the means for this liberation. Those that have a different view are deemed to have a bad attitude (“low expectations”).

The logic goes like this: pointing to realities of structural inequality and the impact “going without” has on child development (and thus “achievement”) introduces bias, just as introducing lotteries eliminates it. One could of course point out that it is quite biased to set up a social system which forces some more than others to be in positions where they need to “choose a good school.” This question has of course been forced off the agenda by advocates of “change” and “innovation”.

Randomization helps create, then, as a standardized norm-reference test does, a “fair playing field” — a free market, unencumbered by the realities of ones historical location, only “merit” rules. Like academic tests, charters, the logic goes, are the engine of a meritocracy for educational institutions, and the “best and brightest” will rise to the top, but could fall any moment, like a dot.com, if they don’t continually “strive” and “achieve”.

In this way, the research continues not because it is helping to answer questions of policy makers or the public (an admission that openly appears in the book) but because it is a mechanism for instituting more forcefully that arrangement of which charters are a part. The idea that one “lotteries” into a school not only suggests an open disregard for planning for the future of youth, a willingness to gamble on their future, but also a particular notion of fair play — rich and poor are equally selectable by the dice.

This entire view is antithetical to education as a right and signals an outright rejection of the notion that society has any responsibility to its members. Yet, successful schools are those that are not able to coach kids to the top of the heap, but prepare them for full participation in social life, in solving problems, etc.