Clay Burell's personal annotations on this page
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So, what disturbs me—and I was just thinking about that program right before this, and I think, oh, who can possibly care about schools when you see what’s happening in some places in the world? But there is a connection. And it’s the lack of good education about the world, my fellow citizens, that contributes to bad politics in America and a democracy that doesn’t come close to meeting its potential. And that’s the connection that I would love our Department of Education to be the bully pulpit on.
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there’s nothing particular about charter schools that gives schools either greater autonomy to make decisions, powerful decisions, close to the children—that’s what I think is wonderful about a small school, that you can know kids and their families, can all know each other well, and can have a conversation that impacts on the school.
But what we’re seeing instead is an enormous number of pilot schools that are really replicas of the worst parts of the public system, where decisions are made farther and farther away from children, and they’re made on the basis of people who don’t know the kids or that school well. So I pictured a lot of mom and pop stores. And there are some wonderful pilot—charter schools that I love around the country. But 90 percent of what the charter schools have become is not small schools, but just alternate private systems within the public sector.
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JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you have, for instance, chains that are developing—
DEBORAH MEIER: That’s what I mean.
JUAN GONZALEZ: —like the KIPP Academy and some of these others. But one of the things I’ve been noticing in my investigations is that a lot of these charter schools, especially the chain types, pay enormous salaries. I reported on one here in Harlem, Eva Moskowitz. She was making, for just running a school of 300 kids, making $370,000 a year. And the New York Post, last week, reported that a charter school in Brooklyn, the director, was making $700,000 a year. This is a non-profit.
DEBORAH MEIER: And I was making seventy. So, it is an idea cooked up. It was an idea that may have had marvelous origins. I’m really not sure how it started. We have something in Boston called pilot schools, that were an internal attempt to capture the best qualities of charters but to remain within the system and was supported and initiated by the union.
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So, what’s interesting to me is the lack of interest in our taking what we’ve learned and using it in the ordinary public system, rather than getting into this blame teacher, blame union fight and pulling schools out of the public sector. And there just isn’t any evidence. None of the studies. Here are these people who are big on test score data, but they are only interested in test score data when they can use it to attack normal public education, because there’s no—there is no consistent evidence that charter schools are getting better results, and there’s no consistent evidence that you can turn around 5,000 schools.
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You know, it’s not only that we shouldn’t be driven by data, but informed by data, which would require a much different kind of press coverage of education than we get, so that—we imagine that you can run schools on the basis of a distant—a lever from some distant place that looks at data and manipulates the system from that place. And there’s no data that works. There’s no suggestion—there’s not even, on their own terms, data that works.
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The mayor claims that mayoral control works, but, in fact, if you look at the data about which systems are doing best around this country, urban systems, in fact it’s the ones that don’t have mayoral control, not mayoral control. And even in this last round of test scores in New York City, in fact, the cities in New York State that don’t have mayoral control did better than New York City. So, what’s frustrating to me is I don’t like that definition of success, but that they don’t even believe it for themselves.
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AMY GOODMAN: Deborah Meier, this past week is the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate the schools of this country. Where are we today with this?
DEBORAH MEIER: We’re not [inaudible]—not anywhere. I mean, when I came to New York City in the mid-’60s and taught in Central Harlem—actually, by the way, it’s closer to five decades that I’ve been working in the public schools. But when I came to New York City and worked in Central Harlem in kindergarten and was telling the kids about desegregation, it was hard to convince them, because they looked around the room, and what did I—when I said, “It’s only in the South that we have segregation.”
So, segregation has been with us a very long time, but it hasn’t changed. And you can send your kid, if you’re an upper-middle-class New Yorker, you can send your kids, for example, to schools in New York City from kindergarten through twelfth grade that have fewer black and Latino kids in it than most private schools. I know this personally.
And we have not—we’re so interested in the best and the brightest, by our very narrow definition of what we’re looking for in this country, what we mean by merit and what we mean by leadership. So I’m also just stunned by the Department of Education that includes virtually no educators, whose definition of being well-educated is that you graduated from Harvard.
There’s something basically missing about what we want from our schools. And if we don’t get that right, and even discuss it, so that the only meaning of achievement now is improving test scores.
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JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, and when you mentioned the people who are running the system that aren’t even educators, increasingly now, especially with this charter school movement, even the principals have no experience as teachers.
DEBORAH MEIER: There is no respect for—now, it’s not the only place we do this. I‘m a little stunned that you send in people on the basis of some general brightness category to fix automobile industries, who know nothing about manufacturing and industry. We’ve gotten—you know, this decade of interest in finance has made us think that only people who know how to manipulate money know how to change the world for the better.
And I think that’s unfortunately the lesson we’re teaching in schools, by the way we view the schools and by the way we want teachers to view their students. We want them to look at their students as products, and that the way they can tell whether their product is good is whether its scores are higher, and then they’ll get paid more money.
And that whole bonus assumption corrupts the work itself. You know, there’s a principle, Campbell’s Principle, I think it’s called, that the more you focus on a particular indicator, the more corrupt that indicator becomes itself. And I think we have under—a corrupt educational system, not in the sense, really, that so many people are making money off it—too many are—but mostly in the sense that we’ve corrupted the purposes.
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JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, in New York City, they took it one step further, starting to offer children money for getting higher test scores, right? The mayor wants—has a plan to cash bonuses for students who get higher test scores.
DEBORAH MEIER: Yeah, it’s a fundamental corruption of the definition that I have of being well-educated. And the purpose of small schools and the purpose of a strong and powerful faculty was because you can’t pass on to kids what it means to be part of a powerful community if you’re not part of a powerful community. And teachers whom we don’t respect enough to make judgments of importance can’t teach the fundamental underlying principle of democracy, which is the exercise of judgment.
This link has been bookmarked by 11 people . It was first bookmarked on 22 May 2009, by Elisabeth Golub.
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But
there’s nothing particular about charter schools that gives schools
either
greater
autonomy to make decisions, powerful decisions, close to the
children—that’s
what I think is wonderful about a small school, that you can
know
kids and their families, can all know each other well, and can have a
conversation
that impacts on the school. -
But
there’s nothing particular about charter schools that
gives schools
either
greater
autonomy to make
decisions, powerful decisions, close to the
children—that’s
what I think is wonderful about a small school, that you
can
know
kids and their
families, can all know each other well, and can have a
conversation
that impacts on the school. - 2 more annotations...
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And everyone in this room knows that when children drop out today, they are
basically condemned to poverty and to social failure. There are no good jobs out
there for a high school dropout. And we have to act now to make sure we do
something better for those children in those communities.
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I think it’s missing the heart of what’s the problem and looking at this from
the eyes of—there’s a wonderful book called Seeing Like a State, which I
urge people to read, because there’s a way of looking at what’s wrong with
schools that I think the business eye sees, which is different than the teacher,
child and parent eye, what’s wrong with our schools. And so, to look for the
answer increasingly in distant from where the action takes place, the cutting
out of teachers’, parents’ and children’s voices in making decisions about
schools, as we escalate the penalties if they don’t meet test scores. The
incredible obsession with test scores, particularly in two particular areas,
that hardly define what it means to be a well-educated person. -
The mayor claims that mayoral control works, but, in fact, if you look at the
data about which systems are doing best around this country, urban systems, in
fact it’s the ones that don’t have mayoral control, not mayoral control. And
even in this last round of test scores in New York City, in fact, the cities in
New York State that don’t have mayoral control did better than New York City. - 1 more annotations...
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The mayor claims that mayoral control works, but, in fact, if you look at the
data about which systems are doing best around this country, urban systems, in
fact it’s the ones that don’t have mayoral control, not mayoral control. And
even in this last round of test scores in New York City, in fact, the cities in
New York State that don’t have mayoral control did better than New York City.
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where decisions are made farther and farther away from children, and they’re
made on the basis of people who don’t know the kids or that school well. -
what’s interesting to me is the lack of interest in our taking what we’ve
learned and using it in the ordinary public system, rather than getting into
this blame teacher, blame union fight and pulling schools out of the public
sector. And there just isn’t any evidence. None of the studies. Here are these
people who are big on test score data, but they are only interested in test
score data when they can use it to attack normal public education, because
there’s no—there is no consistent evidence that charter schools are getting
better results, and there’s no consistent evidence that you can turn around
5,000 schools. - 1 more annotations...
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But there’s nothing particular about charter schools that gives schools
either greater autonomy to make decisions, powerful decisions, close to the
children—that’s what I think is wonderful about a small school, that you can
know kids and their families, can all know each other well, and can have a
conversation that impacts on the school. -
She was making, for just running a school of 300 kids, making $370,000 a year.
And the New York Post, last week, reported that a charter school in
Brooklyn, the director, was making $700,000 a year. This is a non-profit. - 1 more annotations...
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We think about only 2,000 schools in this country, producing 50 percent of our
nation’s dropouts and 75 percent of our minority children dropouts, we have a
real challenge there. -
But what we’re seeing instead is an enormous number of pilot schools that are
really replicas of the worst parts of the public system, where decisions are
made farther and farther away from children, and they’re made on the basis of
people who don’t know the kids or that school well. So I pictured a lot of mom
and pop stores. And there are some wonderful pilot—charter schools that I love
around the country. But 90 percent of what the charter schools have become is
not small schools, but just alternate private systems within the public sector.
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Sharon Elin(advance film to 35:30 to see Sec. of Ed. Arne Duncan followed by Deborah Meier's response)
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there’s a way of looking at what’s wrong with schools that I think the business eye sees, which is different than the teacher, child and parent eye, what’s wrong with our schools. And so, to look for the answer increasingly in distant from where the action takes place, the cutting out of teachers’, parents’ and children’s voices in making decisions about schools, as we escalate the penalties if they don’t meet test scores. The incredible obsession with test scores, particularly in two particular areas, that hardly define what it means to be a well-educated person.
I had a grandmother who probably couldn’t have passed them, but she was a well-educated woman. She had a mindfulness and thoughtfulness about the world around her. She knew how to read the world. And an enormous number of our children are not being educated to have that view of themselves.
So, the focus he has on that, if they don’t graduate high school, that they won’t get as good a job, you know, we have simply upped the scale. We have lots of people who have BAs and MAs who are not making decent wages. General Motors and Chrysler are planning to close plants and send workers overseas, who are less well-educated than the workers who are in those plants now.
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it’s the lack of good education about the world, my fellow citizens, that contributes to bad politics in America and a democracy that doesn’t come close to meeting its potential. And that’s the connection that I would love our Department of Education to be the bully pulpit on.
- 4 more annotations...
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Clay Burell
Meier is at her best in this interview.
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So, what disturbs me—and I was just thinking about that program right before this, and I think, oh, who can possibly care about schools when you see what’s happening in some places in the world? But there is a connection. And it’s the lack of good education about the world, my fellow citizens, that contributes to bad politics in America and a democracy that doesn’t come close to meeting its potential. And that’s the connection that I would love our Department of Education to be the bully pulpit on.
-
there’s nothing particular about charter schools that gives schools either greater autonomy to make decisions, powerful decisions, close to the children—that’s what I think is wonderful about a small school, that you can know kids and their families, can all know each other well, and can have a conversation that impacts on the school.
But what we’re seeing instead is an enormous number of pilot schools that are really replicas of the worst parts of the public system, where decisions are made farther and farther away from children, and they’re made on the basis of people who don’t know the kids or that school well. So I pictured a lot of mom and pop stores. And there are some wonderful pilot—charter schools that I love around the country. But 90 percent of what the charter schools have become is not small schools, but just alternate private systems within the public sector.
- 7 more annotations...
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