Re: moratorium on sanctions?

[aburke5054@aol.com]

It's hard to argue that a device that is seen my tens of thousands of 
children and hundreds and thousands of adults is "secret." It's equally 
implausible to argue that making it easier for kids to transfer, or 
giving them tutoring or other kinds of extra help are "sanctioning" 
schools.  There are plenty of things that schools could and should be 
doing better - many, if not most parents know this and Schmidt's 
argument that teachers and principals are doing everything right and 
the problems are all outside school fails the test of common sense.  
Dark conspiracies everywhere in the Schmidtian universe and only he 
sees the light.

Art


-----Original Message-----
From: Csubstance@aol.com
To: kber@earthlink.net; arn-l@interversity.org
Sent: Tue, 14 Aug 2007 3:28 am
Subject: Re: [arn-l] moratorium on sanctions?


In a message dated 8/9/07 9:07:23 PM, kber@earthlink.net writes:

<< no chance the president would sign a bill that had a moratorium on
sanctions.  And not clear you even get a majority of Dems to vote that 
way -
afraid
of being demagogued as not willing to have strong standards for 
minority
children.  I am quite sure Miller would never let something like that 
out of
committee  >>

The raw and brutal facts out of Chicago are that sanctions hurt the 
children
more than anything else. This is what I mentioned at Kos and what we've 
been
publishing about since they began in the form of retention ("ending 
social
promotion") ten years ago and school closings (which began in Chicago 
five years

ago, in April 2002).

The sanctions against children, teachers, principals, and schools have 
failed
because, as we've all discussed here ad nauseum, they use the wrong
instrument (secret, multiple choice, computer scores so-called 
"standardized"
tests) to
diangnose a problem where it isn't a cause (i.e., in the schools) and 
then
blame victims.

Anybody who is interested in our bringing forward more and more of the 
data
from Ground Zero here should ask.

But nobody should claim that the sanctions have "helped" the poor and
minority children whom they are supposedly designed to help.

More than 20,000 Chicago children (all of them black, all poverty) have 
been
pushed around from the schools that have been closed here in Chicago 
since
Chicago's "Renaissance" began in 2002. And most of them have been hurt 
by the
experience. This is that same pattern we saw during the late 1990s, 
when the
primary form of sanction was against children (retention) and less so 
against
schools and teachers (a few "reconstitutions").

The only reason this evidence is ignored is that the people who have 
been
providing analysis have been paid to prop up each successive iteration 
of these
failed programs, from Reconstitution and Retention on, and have been 
promoted
to the media as the only interpretation of what has happened.

George Schmidt
Editor, Substance<BR><BR><BR>**************************************<BR> 
Get a
sneak peek of the all-new AOL at 
http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour
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