Re: Will state school board stand tough?

[Peter Farruggio <pfarr@cal.berkeley.edu>]

Jill Stewart is the reliable media pundit, the right wing 
"hit-woman," for the standardistas.  She has no credentials or 
background in public education, as far as I know, but she obviously 
has connections with the mainstream media, else why would her ravings 
be published?  I'm sure that this column is the result of an extended 
phone conversation with the "reformer" Marion Joseph.  It was 
probably a conference call so that Joseph's Reading First bureaucrats 
could listen in.  I wonder if Joseph is still on the state payroll as 
a "consultant" who actually runs the Reading First program behind the 
scenes.  It would be nice to get public disclosure of her paid 
consultancy, since she has no education credentials and no degrees in 
reading.  A few years ago, I learned from some insiders that Joseph 
was appointed to a high paid consultancy position soon after she left 
her powerful position on the State Board of Education.  Of course, 
there was no public announcement about this appointment; at least 
nothing that trickled out of Sacramento.  And if there was such a 
phone conversation with Jill Stewart, I wonder if it was at taxpayers' expense.
By the way, the anti-democratic nature of Stewart's column is not 
apparent without some background.  The standardistas love to 
emphasize the "will of the voters" when it agrees with their 
positions, but not so when the reverse is true.  The opposition to 
the standardista regime, described below, is led by elected 
officials.  The main California proponents of high stakes, mandated 
curricula, anti-bilingual education, etc are all non-elected bureaucrats.


At 10:15 PM 3/5/2006, you wrote:
> In this column one of our opponents connects "tough" standards, Reid 
> Lyon, English-only, Open Court, and standardized testing. She's 
> afraid they are all at risk. (Actually, she doesn't say Lyon is at risk.)
>
> Will state school board stand tough?
> Jill Stewart
> Friday, March 3, 2006
> SF Chronicle
> Page B - 11
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/03/03/EDGU9GJEP11.DTL
>
>
> AS TOUGH AS I've been on former Gov. Gray Davis, I've taken pains to 
> single out his remarkable efforts to fix the public schools and 
> their disastrous teaching methods, even in the face of intense 
> opposition by labor unions and his own California Democratic Party.
>
> With Davis gone, leading Democrats in Sacramento are shamefully 
> gearing up for another major assault to roll back public-school 
> reform. And it's not at all clear that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is 
> as focused as Davis was on stopping them.
>
> Led by Assembly Education Committee Chairwoman Jackie Goldberg, an 
> undying apologist for the discredited fads that helped send 
> California to near the academic bottom among the 50 states, 
> Sacramento's far left has mounted another of its bizarre efforts to 
> lower standards and dumb-down kids.
>
> Their favorite target is, again, Latino kids, who many far-left 
> Democrats just cannot seem to see as equals in the classroom. 
> California's Latino kids have proved they are equal to it, showing 
> big academic gains in reading, writing, math and English in 
> statewide testing over the past five years.
>
> The gains by children now immersed in English, thanks to Proposition 
> 227 (a measure virulently opposed by the far-left), are historic. 
> It's a quiet miracle that poor immigrant children show sustained 
> gains on tough statewide tests that can't be gamed.
>
> But now, on March 9, the old anti-reformers will pressure the 
> California Board of Education to adopt a plan that dumbs down Latino 
> children. With Schwarzenegger's education-policy people snoozing, 
> the rollback has at least a chance of approval from the 
> Schwarzenegger-appointed state Board of Education and its confused 
> president, Glee Johnson.
>
> What an unmitigated tragedy, if the board caves.
>
> The dumbing down is being pushed by the usual suspects, including 
> Goldberg and state Sen. Martha Escutia, both Los Angeles Democrats, 
> and people who wrongly mourn the end of the "bilingual" disaster 
> they helped invent, including anti-Prop. 227 guru Shelly Spiegel-Coleman.
>
> Ever since they lost at the polls, this old "Spanish-first" crowd 
> has been trying to wrest control of California's big, well-funded 
> English-reading program away from the real reformers.
>
> Under a backroom plan pushed by Goldberg, California's excellent 2 
> 1/2 hours-a-day reading program for kids who are learning English 
> would be diluted and probably ruined, with lower standards that are 
> not research-based and with too-easy content that fails to keep a 
> child's learning at grade level.
>
> The dumbing down "garbage," as one reformer described it to me, is 
> contained in a smaller side program where it does less harm to kids. 
> Now, it would be incorporated into the hard-fought, Davis-backed, 
> successful reading program.
>
> Think about what is going on here: When kids show major gains at Los 
> Angeles' Ninth Street School on Skid Row, or in schools that serve 
> the poor in San Francisco, that puts the lie to long-standing 
> excuses by anti-reformers like Jackie Goldberg that "poverty" was to 
> blame for persistent low achievement.
>
> Poverty is a corollary, not a cause, of low achievement. Poverty 
> causes children to be warehoused in bad schools with the worst 
> teachers -- thanks to labor-union contracts that let senior teachers 
> pick the easiest schools and stick green teachers in the toughest schools.
>
> Today, we finally understand that disadvantaged students can thrive 
> at school, regardless of whether society ever beats poverty. If only 
> somebody would just teach them.
>
> That's precisely what the schools are doing -- finally. They have 
> miles to go, but what a contrast, today, to the previous two 
> decades, when California embraced "whole language," the 
> "self-esteem" movement, "fuzzy math" and other interesting-sounding 
> but horrifically failed fads.
>
> In the 1980s and '90s, teachers were desperate to stop downwardly 
> spiraling academic achievement. They grasped at the fads, and scores 
> spiraled down even more.
>
> Thankfully, along came gutsy experts -- like reading expert Alice 
> Furry of the Sacramento schools, reading and learning disabilities 
> researcher Reid Lyon of the National Institutes of Health, and 
> mathematician Jim Milgram of Stanford University. Jumping into the 
> education wars, some of these experts began to forcefully argue that 
> kids were failing to learn math or English because teachers' 
> abilities to impart basic skills had been lost in a fog of political 
> correctness.
>
> And more than anyone else, disadvantaged children were the guinea pigs.
>
> The pressure now being brought upon the state Board of Education by 
> Goldberg & Co. is a continuation of the guilt-ridden psychodrama 
> that has been unfolding ever since. One core mission of the 
> embarrassed far left is to regain power from sensible pragmatics who 
> created the (at last!) successful reading program.
>
> I can't predict what will happen when these adults turn their 
> politics loose on Latino kids on March 9 -- but how ironic if the 
> Schwarzenegger-appointed board of education caves and Davis goes 
> down in history as the guy with the guts.
>
> Jill Stewart is a print, radio and television commentator on 
> California politics. Her Web site is www.jillstewart.net.
>
>
>
> George Sheridan
>
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