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Love (or laugh) fest at Monday's school board meeting

The praise lavished on the departing Doug Morgan and Vicki Phillips at Monday's meeting reached few ears, at least from my Channel 28 perspective.  There was no audience.  The seats were empty.  Members of Vicki's "senior leadership team" watched from the back of the auditorium. 

A cluster of Benson students, who would provide public comment later, were also in attendance, but hidden somewhere out of camera sight. 

So essentially, the board and Vicki were talking to each other, singing to their own choir.  Nevertheless, let me take issue with a few of the claims made in defense of Vicki's all too brief tenure as the "decisive" leader of Portland Public Schools. 

Doug Morgan, amidst some obscure mutterings about putting in place the necessary management structures and programs and whatever for success, lauded Vicki (and by extension himself) for closing schools, a step which Morgan claimed assured passage of the local option levy.   The closures were necessary, Morgan said, to convince voters that the district was indeed strapped. 

Vicki Phillips said the same thing in yesterday's Tribune article:

"The school closures came when the district faced a $50 million budget shortfall, and she said she had to take action so the community would support a local option levy."

Really?  What Phillips and Morgan should have said is that the local business community, not the voters, needed convincing in order to put up money to finance the levy campaign.  I'm unaware of any evidence that the voters were at any point unwilling to support the district's request for more operating money, closures or not.  Furthermore, where's the data about how much money was actually saved by shutting down the neighborhood programs?  Some argue that, factoring in lost enrollment, closures may have cost the district money, not to mention lots of goodwill.

Then there's Morgan's claim that the recently passed budget was the first since Measure 5 to avoid program cuts.  But minutes later, the hidden Benson students emerged to complain about cuts to the Occupational Health program at their school.  Apparently the message about a "no cuts" budget failed to reached the teachers and students at Benson Polytechnic.

Lastly, Morgan (his paean to Vicki was somewhat long-winded) praised the superintendent for the sterling leadership team she had assembled.  Morgan counted at least four --count 'em, four!-- potential school superintendents among them. 

Here's hoping that Cathy Mincberg --she of Rod Paige/Houston notoriety-- isn't among them.

NCLB targeted by Feingold --and others at Daily Kos

By others I mean Kenneth Bernstein --aka Teacher Ken at Daily Kos-- and a panel of educators who will gather in August at YearlyKos to discuss ridding the nation of the punitive  and ill-conceived No Child Left Behind along with other destructive tools of the educational accountability movement.   

Those of us here in Portland who have suffered three years of Vicki Phillips' "bold leadership" know well what "accountability" means for our schools --closures and consolidations, a narrow focus on test scores and a corresponding narrowing of curricular options, and the hiring of incompetent principals with supposed records of raising scores and closing the dreaded achievement gap.  Never mind actual learning.   It takes time away from test prepping.

A roundtable discussion at YearlyKos on Saturday, August 4, will focus exclusively on "Rethinking Educational Accountability":

"No Child Left Behind has shown the fallacy of basing accountability and assessment on state-wide high stakes tests. There are alternatives.  This panel will feature a discussion with Doug Christensen, Commissioner of Education of Nebraska, a state that does most of its accountability at the school level, and Sherman Dorn, educational historian and professor, who is author of the new book Accountability Frankenstein."

I like the sound of that.

Meanwhile, in the US Senate, Russ Feingold is fighting the Congressional reauthorization of NCLB without reform of several of its "key provisions":

“ 'NCLB has hamstrung state and local decision-making by establishing a federal accountability system that measures and punishes our students and our schools based on, among other things, annual high-stakes standardized testing,' Feingold said. 'This is the wrong approach, and the groundswell of opposition to the NCLB   – from parents, educators, and administrators alike –   shows just how flawed it is.' ”

I have written several posts in past months showing how you can add to the "groundswell" of opposition to NCLB by signing the petition urging Congress not to reauthorize Bush's flawed legislation.  The petition is spinning its wheels at 30,000 signatures, a number which, it may interest you to know, includes none of the current members of the Portland School Board. 

That will change tomorrow when Ruth Adkins is sworn in as a new board member.  Ruth was an early and eager petition signatory.   I urge you to follow her example.

Hamas and the media

Like clockwork, the Oregonian today offers its readers another skewed picture of the Hamas -Fatah conflict by publiishing the venom of Charles Krauthammer and the blanket condemnation of Palestinian leadership by Fouad Ajami.

To Krauthammer, Hamas is simply an extension of Iran --"Gaza now constitutes the farthest reach of the archipelago of Iranian proxies... ."-- and thereby an arm of the "global" terrorist threat that threatens not only peace in the Middle East but the security of the United States.  Ajami provides a more sophisticated analysis, but says nothing of the Israeli role in the plight of the Palestinians.

As I wrote yesterday, one needs to look beyond the local newspaper to understand what is happening in the Middle East.  This editorial from the Nation, for example, is one antidote to the pap served up by the O (and many other mainstream purveyors of the news.)  The Nation's editorial characterizes the Palestinian "civil war" like this:

"This disaster has many fathers. The steady growth of the Islamist movement cannot be understood apart from the long-term US and Israeli strategy of undermining the secular Palestinian leadership. ...

"The more direct cause of the Gaza mini-war lies in the Bush Administration's cynical manipulation of 'democracy promotion.' This scheme has its origins in the attempts, five years ago, to push Arafat aside in favor of more pliable leaders, hence the steady calls from the Administration for 'reform' and elections."

Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent, asks the important question: 

"Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership."

Our allies  in the Middle East, those with whom we feel comfortable talking, are mainly Arab dictators and autocrats, like Egypt's Hosni Mubarek, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, Jordan's King Abdullah and

"...all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister... ."

The bottom line is that Hamas came to power via democratic elections.  But despite the Bush Administration's lip service to the democratic process  and the creation of free societies as key to combating terrorism, the American reaction to Hamas has stifled any immediate prospect for peace in the Middle East.  And probably ensured our military presence there for years to come.

Hamas

From the bowels of the State Department in Washington D.C., my older brother urges me to write something of national or international import.  So here goes.

If you have misgivings about the use of military force as an instrument of foreign policy, if you oppose the war in Iraq and worry that Iran may be the next American preemptive military target, then you need to pay close attention to what's happening in the state of Israel, particularly the U.S. role in undermining any possible peace agreement between the Palestinians and the Likudniks who now run the Israeli government.  I believe the Likud government of Israel is more interested in war with Iran than peace with the Palestinians.

Therefore, until we change our policy toward Israel, the only unacknowledged nuclear power in the Middle East to whom we provide $4 billion in foreign aid annually, the probability of a war with Iran will loom ever greater. 

That brings us to Hamas, the U.S.-labeled terrorist organization, which won control of the Palestinian Authority legislature in 2006 in democratically held elections.  As a "terrorist" group, the Bush Administration refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Hamas victory.  It then provoked a "civil war" in Gaza by arming Hamas' Palestinian rival, Fatah, and, after Fatah's defeat, brokered a deal with Israel to fund Fatah in the Israeli occupied West Bank and to negotiate with Fatah alone for a Palestinian -Israeli peace agreement. 

That strategy has absolutely no chance of succeeding.

Fortunately, the American press has woken to the issue.  The same two newspapers which beat the drums for war in Iraq have published near simultaneous op-ed pieces to help set the record straight.  The New York Times offered this piece by Hamas spokesman Ahmed Yousef on Wednesday (a must read account), preceded by the Washington Post's op-ed explanation of why the West Bank/Fatah approach won't work:

"Since Hamas's electoral victory, U.S. policy has helped strengthen radical forces, debilitate Palestinian institutions, undermine faith in democracy, weaken Abbas and set back the peace process. Why ask for more of the same?"

There's more in the blogosphere.  Time.com editor Tony Karon posted this remarkably lucid piece, "The 8 Fallacies of Bush's Abbastan Plan," on his website, The Rootless Cosmopolitan.  Of note are the second fallacy --Hamas staged a "coup" against the legitimate government in Gaza-- and the eighth --Hamas is an extreme "jihadist" group with which it is impossible to negotiate. 

About the second fallacy, Karon points out that Hamas is the legitimate government in Gaza, and that it's attacks were not against the Fatah organization but against

"...a political-military faction within Fatah headed by the warlord Mohammed Dahlan, the Palestinian Pinochet figure backed to the hilt by the U.S."

Karon calls the notion that Hamas is too extreme to negotiate with "another self-serving myth of the neocons and Likudniks... ."

"Hamas is offering talks, based on calming the situation and pursuing a long-term truce (which is, by the way, exactly what Sharon always said was the best Israel could hope for). To refuse that offer is the height of folly."

You won't find any of this in the Oregonian, nor will you told that all the leading candidates for president, both Republican and Democrat, blindly support Israel and the possibility of armed conflict with Iran.  In the next "debate", listen carefully to what the candidates say, should the issue come up,  about the role of Hamas in Middle East peace negotiations.

I've written about this before, most recently here, here, here, and here.  Read them if you wish, but please don't write back and call me an anti-semite.  I'm not.  Nor, to my knowledge, are the many critics of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.

And if you have the time, read this account from the excellent website, The Electronic Intifada.

Vicki and her principals

A Portland Tribune editorial yesterday called Vicki Phillips a superintendent with a "can do leadership style."  Perhaps.  But there is one thing Phillips proved absolutely incapable of doing:

Hiring competent principals. Or firing those who are clearly incompetent.

Jefferson's Leon Dudley, who just announced his resignation, is only one glaring example of Phillips's poor judgment.  It's still shocking to me that she refuses to admit her mistake.  She blames instead the "challenging" situation he faced, one that Phillips herself created, but one that she was cocksure Dudley could handle despite a record that indicated otherwise. 

Vicki, it seems, is besotted with test scores.  It clouds her judgment.  A principal with a knack for alienating staff and students is unlikely to achieve anything at the school he leads.

But enough with Dudley.  Consider that in 2005-06, Jefferson had three different principals. Or look at Madison High School, the next poor school undergoing the Gates Foundation small school transformation treatment that Vicki and her team are so enamored of.   Like Jefferson, Roosevelt and Marshall, Madison has suffered from poor test scores and a declining enrollment.  Why?  I can blame student demographics for "poor" test scores.  And I can blame the district's lax transfer policy for the enrollment decline.  But there may be another factor in play at Madison --its principal, Patricia Thompson. 

Here's part of a story comment from a Madison parent speculating about why Ms Thompson refused to return repeated phone calls to Trib reporter, Jennifer Anderson:

"Since Ms. Thompson's arrival, Madison has declined every single year. She came from St. Mary's - a private, well-funded, elite school, and was not prepared nor interested in the richly diverse culture of Madison, nor capable of handling the large staff, student needs, or funding crises of the past few years. ... PPS has allowed the poor management of this school to contribute to the 35% decline in enrollment. Instead of addressing these issues, Madison will now be turned into a mini-Microsoft experiment."

Now I don't know when Patricia Thompson was hired.  Maybe Vicki had nothing to do with it. But a superintendent with a "can do" attitude should be able to rid the schools of non-performing principals just as easily --perhaps more easily-- than closing or  reconfiguring non-performing schools.   

Don't you think?

Portland Schools Foundation sets a bad precedent in 'choosing' a charter school advocate

Since the Portland Schools Foundation is a big fish in Portland's educational pond, it's big news when PSF picks a high powered charter school proponent from Chicago as its new executive director.

Big news, but not necessarily good news. 

The choice of Connie Van Brunt sets a disturbing precedent --the apparent need to look nationally for educational leaders.  Don't think that the Portland School Board won't be influenced by PSF's decision.  David Wynde, remember, was a PSF  board member before his school board stint, and PSF has been a staunch supporter of Vicki Phillips and school closures. 

As an outsider, Connie Van Brunt mistakenly believes that there are strong demographic similarities between Portland and the ethnically defined metropolis of Chicago.  She therefore believes that the charter school movement she has promoted in Chicago to close the "achievement gap" will work equally well in Portland.

Well, Van Brunt is wrong, both about Portland and about charter schools.  Portland and Chicago have little in common.  Chicago Public Schools is about six times the size of Portland Public Schools.  And unlike Portland, the Chicago district is truly segregated along racial lines:

"By the 1990s, two-thirds of Chicago's white students attended private schools. The city's school-age population had become substantially divided between two types of schools, a majority black public system (with growing numbers of Hispanics) and a mainly white system of parochial and other private schools."

Only one of Portland's ten high schools has a majority black enrollment.  And so far, few white students in Portland have abandoned public schools entirely.

Then there's the charter school issue.  Van Brunt believes that charters are the educational salvation of the floundering public school experiment.  She's wrong.  Not only do charters fail to raise academic achievement any more than traditional public schools, they also encourage cheating on the very tests that supposedly measure that achievement.    So says the Dallas Morning News in a series of investigative reports  about cheating on standardized tests in Texas, the state largely responsible for the nation's charter school fervor. 

According to the News, the worst offenders in Texas are charter schools:

"Of the 50 most egregious cases of cheating The News' study found, 37 took place in charter schools. ...     

"That's despite the fact that charter schools make up only 2 percent of        the state's campuses." 

As I said, the hiring of Connie Van Brunt sets a bad precedent.  Van Brunt is an outsider who understands neither Portland nor, apparently, the disappointing record of charter schools as part of the public school mix.  I'd be interested to know precisely what agenda the Portland Schools Foundation board is pursuing in the hiring of Van Brunt.  And what it means for the future of Portland Public Schools.   

Ironically, one of the 'locals' rumored to be in the running for Vicki Phillips' old job as PPS superintendent is Cathy Mincberg.  Mincberg is no more local than Van Brunt.  She's a recent transplant from Houston, Texas, where she helped former Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, transform his Texas testing scam into No Child Left Behind.

I haven't heard any school board member speak out publicly in the last four years against the punitive and counter-productive NCLB, a law that promotes, as one of its school reform options, the conversion of "failing" public schools into charters. 

Maybe that's the hidden agenda of both PSF and PPS.