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Chicago Libraries And The Battle Between Rahm Emanuel, Unions
When the Chicago Public Library announced via Facebook that nearly all branches would be closed Monday, it raised a few eyebrows. After all, there was a big, public battle before Mayor Rahm Emanuel's budget was passed about changing library hours rather than closing branches on certain days... and wasn't this resolved already? Apparently, it was not. And Emanuel wants angry aldermen and residents to know that it's not his fault. On Monday, the mayor told the Chicago Sun-Times that the union representing library employees has blocked the schedule change -- forcing Emanuel to play "hardball," the paper reports.

“It doesn’t have to be this way … and it shouldn’t be," Emanuel said Monday, according to the Sun-Times. "... We have a plan for making sure our neighborhood libraries are open six-days-a-week. ... What it simply needs is a partner who’s ready to see that’s the goal and not try to use the libraries as a bargaining chip for something else. ... I’m looking forward to that partnership. The good news is, discussions are ongoing. The bad news is we have a Monday [closing and] this was all avoidable.” Emanuel's office sent a statement to the media Friday, explaining that the change in library hours was contingent upon a deal with AFSCME. Even though some aldermen seemed shocked by the closures, Emanuel's office said they have been up front about the union deal from the start. Chicagoist explains: > They cited Emanuel's City Council budget address from Oct. 12, Oct. 19 testimony from Budget Director Alex Holt to the City Council Budget Committee and testimony from CPL Commissioner Mary Dempsey on Oct. 21. Each are on message in stating the city can save nearly $7 million if unions agree to close library branches on Monday mornings and Friday mornings, allowing the library to be open six days a week. “I don’t understand how a plan to close libraries eight hours a week on two days serves the public any better than a plan to close the libraries eight hours a week on one day,” Anders Lindall, a spokesman for AFSCME Council 31, told the Sun-Times Friday. “Our members and the people of the city want a solution that doesn’t close the libraries at all.” Lindall told the Chicago Tribune that, while the union has not rejected the mayor's plan outright, they believe the city has money to reinstate the 176 union members that were laid off and not cut any library hours. Unions and some aldermen wanted Emanuel to increase the size of his tax-increment funding (TIF) surplus -- from 20 percent to 40 percent -- to free up another $12 million in order to sustain the city library system. Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd) told the Sun-Times that whether the mayor or the unions are to blame -- the Monday library closures are unacceptable. "That’s not what was proposed or voted on. It’s completely contrary. We need to sit down quickly and get back to the original agreement, which was keep those libraries open” every day, he told the paper.

=// We read the Star Teacher article by Martin Haberman last term and here is a copy of his obituary... He passed away on January 1, 2012. //= Haberman championed education for children in poverty Martin Haberman, distinguished professor emeritus in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) School of Education, died Sunday, Jan. 1 in Milwaukee at the age of 79. A memorial service is set for Sunday, Jan. 15 at Goodman-Bensman Funeral Home, 4750 N. Santa Monica Blvd. Whitefish Bay. Visitation will begin at 11 a.m. and the service will begin at 1 p.m. Haberman, who taught at UWM for 43 years, was a nationally known expert on preparing teachers, particularly teachers who worked with children living in poverty. Friends and colleagues remembered him for his fierce dedication to that work. “His passion for preparing quality teachers for children in urban poverty is his legacy to each of us,” wrote Haberman’s UWM faculty colleagues Hope Longwell-Grice and Linda Post in an email to School of Education faculty and staff. Since retiring from UWM in 2005, Haberman had continued his work on teacher preparation and selection with the Haberman Educational Foundation. The foundation’s national training staff travels to school districts all across the country and trains school leaders in the research-based Haberman Star Teacher/ Principal Selection protocols. These protocols help them select teachers and principals who will be most likely be able to work effectively with diverse students from poverty backgrounds. “The number of cities that use my teacher interviews bring in about 30,000 mature adults who will be effective with diverse children in poverty every year,” Haberman said in a 2005 interview. “If you estimate the number of children those teachers will reach, I’ m touching the lives of millions of kids in positive ways…and that’s a very, very warm feeling.” In the same interview, Haberman said his passion for teacher education grew out of his own experiences standing in a draft line in New York City during the Korean War. The key to remaining in college and out of the Army was scoring well on a 30-word test. While he was successful, he said, he saw many African-American, Puerto Rican and poor white men who couldn’t pass the test. “That experience changed my life.” He realized, he said, that “the fundamental inequities in the American public education system are life-threatening.” His goal became to change the education system for the children in poverty in urban schools. He went into teacher education, he said “because I felt I could have more influence there than as a teacher with no voice or ability to influence policies in highly bureaucratic urban schools or state departments of education.” Haberman, who earned his master’s and doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University, before coming to UWM in 1962, was the author of several books and numerous articles on teacher preparation. He was frequently cited in the national news media on teacher training and the factors contributing to teacher success. Early in his career in Milwaukee he developed an innovative internship program for liberal arts graduates which caught the attention of the late Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson and Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. This became the model for the National Teacher Corps, which eventually prepared 100,000 teachers. “It was a notable failure,” Haberman said with his typically blunt honesty in the 2005 interview, “but I learned a lot about what doesn’t work and it made me famous.” He saw the Teacher Corps, which ran from 1963-72, as a learning experience. “I’m a firm believer in experimenting with teacher education models. We learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t work.” Building on that early experience and the years of research that followed, Haberman developed a significant body of knowledge on the ideology and behavior of effective teachers for diverse children and youth in urban poverty. “The surest and best way to improve the schooling and the lives of the approximately 15 million children and youth in poverty is to get them better teachers,” he said. At UWM and in Milwaukee and Wisconsin, Haberman said in the 2005 article, he found such a wonderful laboratory for experimenting with ideas to improve education that he never was tempted to go elsewhere. “I was very fortunate to be at UWM and in Milwaukee. They have also given me the opportunity to try anything I’ve ever wanted. I couldn’t have found a better place. UWM has been an absolute, perfect laboratory.” A tribute posted on Education News by Delia Stafford, executive director of the Haberman Educational Foundation, drew comments from educators all over the country. A former colleague, Wanda Blanchett, now dean of the School of Education at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, posted: “We can only hope to live our lives as dedicated to the plight of this country’s most underserved children as Marty did – what a legacy of an unwavering commitment to social justice! ” “I loved him for his unyielding commitment, caustic sense of humor, truth telling, and keen insight,” Mark Larson, an assistant professor at National-Louis University, posted. “He told me once: ‘I’m a pragmatist doing the best I can with the world as it exists.’ He did damn well. He will be sorely missed, but the impact of his work will be felt for generations.” Haberman is survived by a daughter, Jill Eannelli; grandson Nicholas Eannelli and nephew Daniel Haberman His wife, Florence Haberman, preceded him in death.

NCLB: The Death Star of American Education (Posted in Education Week) //This is part of the on-going blog conversation that Diane Ravitch has been having with Deborah Meier...//
By [|Diane Ravitch] on January 10, 2012 8:48 AM

Dear Deborah, I know you are touring schools in Japan and soaking up lessons for us as you travel. Since you have Internet access, I'd like to share some thoughts about a momentous occasion: the 10th anniversary of No Child Left Behind, which occurred on January 8. After 10 years of NCLB, we should have seen dramatic progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, but we have not. By now, we should be able to point to sharp reductions of the achievement gaps between children of different racial and ethnic groups and children from different income groups, but we cannot. As I said in a recent speech, many children continue to be left behind, and we know who those children are: They are[| the same children who were left behind]10 years ago. In my travels over the past two years, I have seen the wreckage caused by NCLB. It has become the Death Star of American education. It is a law that inflicts damage on students, teachers, schools, and communities. When I spoke at Stanford University, a teacher stood up in the question period and said: "I teach the lettuce-pickers' children in Salinas. They are closing our school because our scores are too low." She couldn't finish her question because she started crying. When I spoke at UCLA, a group of about 20 young teachers approached me afterwards and told me that their school, Fremont High School, was slated for closure. They asked me to tell Ray Cortines, who was then chancellor of the Los Angeles Unified School District, not to close their school because they were working together as a community to improve it. I took their message to Ray, who is a good friend, but the school was closed anyway. The [|dispersed teachers of Fremont are still communicating with one another], still mourning the loss of their school. When I spoke to Citizens for Public Schools in Boston, a young man who works as a chef at a local hotel got up to ask what he could do to stop "them" from closing his children's school. It was the neighborhood school, he said. It was the school he wanted his children to attend. And they were closing it. In city after city, across the nation, I have heard similar stories from teachers and parents. Why are they closing our school? What can we do about it? How can we stop them? I wish I had better answers. I know that as long as NCLB stays on the books, there is no stopping the destruction of local community institutions. And now with the active support of the Obama administration, the NCLB wrecking ball has become a means of promoting privatization and community fragmentation. I have often wondered whether there is any other national legislature that has passed a law that had the effect of stigmatizing the nation's public education system. Last year, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that 82 percent of our nation's schools would fail to make "adequate yearly progress." A few weeks ago, the [|Center for Education Policy reported that the secretary's estimate was overstated], and that it was "only" half the nation's schools that would be considered failing as of this year. Secretary Duncan's judgment may have been off the mark this year, but NCLB guarantees that the number of failing schools will grow every year. If the law remains intact, we can reasonably expect that nearly every public school in the United States will be labeled as a failing school by 2014. If you take a closer look at the CEP study, you can see how absurd the law is. In Massachusetts, the nation's highest-performing state by far on NAEP, 81 percent of the schools failed to make AYP. But in lower-performing Louisiana, only 22 percent of the schools did not make AYP. Yet, when you compare the same two states on NAEP, 51 percent of 4th graders in Massachusetts are rated proficient, compared with 23 percent in Louisiana. In 8th grade, again, twice as many students in Massachusetts are proficient compared with Louisiana, yet Massachusetts has nearly four times as many allegedly "failing" schools! This is crazy. More evidence of the invalidity of NCLB. The top-rated high school in the state of Illinois, New Trier High School, failed to make AYP. Its special education students did not make enough progress. When outstanding schools fail, you have to conclude that something is wrong with the measure. The best round-up to date of the catastrophe that we call NCLB was published by FairTest in its report, "[|The Lost Decade]." I know you have read it, as this is an organization dear to your heart. I recommend this report to our readers. It shows in clear detail that progress on NAEP was far more significant before the passage of NCLB. Congress, in its wisdom, will eventually reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. I hope that in doing so, they recognize the negative consequences of NCLB and abandon the strategies that have borne such bitter fruit for our nation's education system. NCLB cannot be fixed. It has failed. It has imposed a sterile and mean-spirited regime on the schools. It represents the dead hand of conformity and regulation from afar. It is time to abandon the status quo of test-based accountability and seek fresh and innovative thinking to support and strengthen our nation's schools.

Diane

// From Education Week, January 12, 2012 // Linda Darling-Hammond After 10 years of missed opportunity under No Child Left Behind, we must learn from our experience to accelerate academic progress and improve the quality of learning in American schools. Meanwhile, federal efforts to prescribe top-down reforms have often wreaked havoc in the field. From the dismantling of many successful local reading programs under [|Reading First] to more recent requirements for turnaround models that research has found ineffective, federal overreach can leave students further behind. Finally, the federal government should learn from high-achieving nations and encourage the use of more thoughtful performance-based assessments. Used to inform curriculum improvements and teacher development, rather than to punish students, teachers, or schools, such assessments would support higher-quality instruction and more engaged learning. //Linda Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun professor of education at Stanford University. She is the author of The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future (Teachers College Press, 2010).//
 * LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND on NCLB**
 * Lesson #1: Don’t overreach.** The federal role should not be to micromanage educational decisions, but to enable strategic investments that will increase opportunity. The quest for 100 percent proficiency has focused attention on boosting scores, but it has also narrowed the curriculum, encouraged exclusions of struggling students, and undermined confidence in federal initiatives.
 * Lesson #2: Focus on genuine equity.** NCLB helped us understand the severity of achievement gaps between different student groups, but it has not provided sufficient resources in strategic ways to address the sources of those gaps. The small federal allocation makes hardly a dent in our huge state and local funding disparities, and is not being spent in high-leverage ways. National education policy must expect states to be transparent about the availability of resources to students and to pursue funding equity.
 * Lesson #3: Invest strategically.** The Title I formula should better target low-income states and communities and support investments known to improve student achievement: quality preschool, high-quality preparation and professional development for teachers and school leaders, wraparound services and community schools, and summer learning opportunities.

Jack Jennings Imagine a world without the No Child Left Behind Act. • We would not know by school and school district the specific achievement gaps between various groups of students. • Educators and government would not have made as many efforts to reduce those gaps—for instance, between low-income students and more advantaged students. We would not have put a major emphasis on teaching limited-English-speaking children both English and subject-matter content. • Districts and states would not have focused as intensively on improving the lowest-performing schools. • Teachers would not have available extensive data on student academic performance. • Improving student achievement would not have been such an intense subject of public debate. • "The challenge for us is to weigh the good that came out of this controversial venture and preserve that, while we excise undesirable features." • The states would not have seen the downside of having 50 different sets of academic standards for reading and math and not have decided to develop high-quality common standards, which almost every state has adopted. • The states would not have moved to develop more sophisticated assessments for these common standards, making it possible to measure student progress across the states.
 * JACK JENNINGS on NCLB**

Many of the good results of NCLB can be forgotten as we dwell on the bad effects—namely, too much emphasis on test scores, unfair labeling of schools as failures, crude measures for accountability, a lack of adequate funds to comply, and mandates to set aside too much money for ineffective tutoring and school choice. The challenge for us is to weigh the good that came out of this controversial venture and preserve that, while we excise undesirable features. Lastly, we ought to remember that totally eliminating national and state efforts to improve education means going backwards. The United States will not have better schools if it is left to each of our 14,000 school districts.

We are one nation. //Jack Jennings is the president and chief executive officer of the Center on Education Policy, in Washington.//

Susan Ohanian Ten years of the No Child Left Behind Act has brought a steady erosion of the values that should be central to public education. The rise of standardized tests and “no excuses” accountability has forced students, teachers, administrators, and parents to enter circles of Hell even Dante never envisioned. Below, an NCLB timeline from those on the front lines:
 * SUSAN OHANIAN on NCLB**


 * 2002:** "We are the State, which has brought students out of the wilderness of teacher-led classrooms and into the kingdom of test prep. Thou shalt have no other guidance before thee, and then it will follow as night follows day that No Child is Left Behind." — "[|The Ten Commandments of No Child Left Behind]," from my website.
 * 2003:** "My 3rd grader brings home 45 pages of multiple-choice, test-prep drill sheets." — Email to me, from a parent in Virginia
 * 2004:** "What’s putting me over the edge is there’s no joy in teaching." — California teacher "who talked openly on the condition her name not be used" in the newspaper article in which she was quoted, [|"Teacher’s Time Rarely Her Own/Federal Mandates Limit Classroom Ingenuity"] (//San Francisco Chronicle//, March 21, 2004).
 * 2005:** The stories of 12-year-old Paige in Chicago and 10-year-old Mariah in Palmetto, Fla., both of whom were assigned to 3rd grade for three years in a row. — [|"A Child Held Behind,"] (//The New York Times//, Jan. 16, 2005) and [|"Poor Schools Work Hard to Improve Scores on FCAT,"] (//Sarasota Herald-Tribune//, May 13, 2005)
 * 2006:** "BABY DIBELS Screening Tool—Individual Growth Development Indicators" (for 3-year-olds) — School bulletin on Baby DIBELS cited in [|"Attention Parents of Young Children"] (Feb. 7, 2006)
 * 2006:** "My son already hates school, and he’s just halfway through kindergarten." — L. J. Williamson in [|"My Kid, a Burnout at 5"] (//Los Angeles Times//, Feb. 27, 2006)
 * 2007:** "Highly qualified" means sticking to the script. — Email to me from a Buffalo, N.Y., teacher
 * 2008:** "The body count from No Child Left Behind grows daily and one wonders when the perpetrators will be called to account. In a decent nation, the larger society holds the government accountable. In a program like NCLB, the government holds the citizenry accountable." — Gerald Bracey, [|"Chew on This"] (//The Huffington Post//, April 21, 2008)
 * 2009:** "The Obama people—who promised revolutionary change—have no ideas other than to tighten the grip of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program on the teachers and children of the United States." — Diane Ravitch, [|"Obama Gives Bush a Third Term in Education"] (//The Huffington Post//, June 13, 2009)
 * 2010:** "When he heard my student vomited during The Test, THE first question the principal asks me is "Did anything hit the test booklet?" Evidently there is some major procedure involving Fort Knox and some security company trained by the CIA and FBI that needs to be followed when someone barfs on the book!" — Tina, "Neither Sleet Nor Hail Nor Vomit" (Teachers.Net, March 10, 2010)
 * 2011:** "I now have to give a total of more than 27,000 check marks or grades for my class of 25 kindergartners per year." — Nancy Creech, [|"Kindergarten Teacher Details ‘Lunacy’ of Standardized Tests for Kids"] (Washington Post Answer Sheet blog, washingtonpost.com, July 5, 2011)

— Signer #24,432, Educator Roundtable Petition to End NCLB
 * Summing Up:** "The consequences of NCLB are far more damaging to our National Security than Iraq ever was."

//Susan Ohanian is a longtime teacher and the author of 25 books on education policy and practice. She launched a website opposing the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002.//

Thelma Meléndez de Santa Ana Imagine sitting in a classroom where you cannot understand what the teacher says or what is written on the board. That is the challenge facing English-language learners in our public schools today, and it was the one I faced in 1963, two years before the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was originally adopted. Now, imagine a school that was not accountable for the success of its English-learner, racial, special education, and socioeconomic student subgroups.
 * THELMA MELÉNDEZ de SANTA ANA on NCLB**

In 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act, the latest version of the ESEA, finally promised to hold every school accountable for the success of each child. After a decade, NCLB still elicits strong reactions and mixed reviews. Whether viewed as an ill-fated federal sorting system or a well-intended national commitment to close the achievement gap, everyone agrees that the core promise of NCLB is still a work in progress.

Having served as a district superintendent and then as an assistant U.S. secretary of education, I recognize the power and the limits of the law. The key notion of accountability has not been defined similarly across the country, and measuring proficiency also varies drastically. But districts can no longer obscure individual student failure; they can employ student data to make needed changes. Most significantly, however, as a former English-language learner, I cherish the promise of a fully realized NCLB. This law successfully triggered a national conversation about closing the achievement gap.

Now that I once again am a superintendent in a diverse urban school district, I also appreciate how hard educators work to meet NCLB accountability requirements. I also see the value of accountability when the instructional practices harmonize with the needs of underperforming students. NCLB’s biggest failure was not giving credit to teachers and schools for individual student growth. But this limitation can be corrected.

As Congress moves to reauthorize the law, we should not forget the best that came from this groundbreaking NCLB legislation. Our future as a nation hinges on creating pathways to success for every child. Reauthorization will affirm the national belief that public education’s highest purpose is to ensure that every child, regardless of his or her background, has the opportunity to succeed, thrive, and serve our great nation.

//Thelma Meléndez de Santa Ana is the superintendent of the Santa Ana Unified School District in California. She served in the Obama administration as the U.S. Department of Education’s assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education. She previously was the superintendent of California’s Pomona Unified School District and a bilingual 1st grade teacher.//