Stand on Children's Exec. Dir. Responds to Critique of Memphis Debacle... Stand On Children pushes massive segregation plan for Memphis
Diane Ravitch mentioned an earlier post I did on the resegregation
> plan that the corporate ed boys have put together for the
> unsuspecting citizens of Memphis and Shelby County, TN; it has set
> off quite a storm of reaction, particularly from the local and
> national Standistas.
> With Stand on Children doing the back room political deals for Gates
> and Broad, the "players" in this Kabuki drama seem to think that
> their production is flawless and the audience is entranced. Even
> Michelle Rhee's ex, TN Commish of Ed Kevin Huffman, showed up in
> Memphis last week to tout the calmness and deliberate rationality in
> the Plan presented by what appears to be a Prozac-induced TPC merger
> commission.
>
> And of course, keeping everyone on the sunny side are the Standistas
> with endless amounts of positivity and missionary zeal. From the
> collected comments at the Ravitch blog by the loyal followers of
> Gates and Jonah Edelman, I am getting a sense that these are the
> Junior Leaguers (from Memphis to Ripley) with a clear social
> engineering mission to school the urban natives, using the best
> techniques that corporate America can offer, i. e., apartheid
> charter schools. Will Standista members' kids go to these total
> compliance corporate schools they are planning for urban poor
> children? Never.
>
> Here is the the intro to the letter posted by the Executive Director
> of Stand, Kenya Bradshaw, who is obviously doing a good job of
> making the middle class ladies of the area feel as if the Gates plan
> was something of their own design. Comments interspersed.
> July 3, 2012 at 10:00 amDear Mrs. Ravitch,
> My name is Kenya Bradshaw, I am the TN Executive Director of Stand
> For Children. First let me thank you and Jim Horn for your analysis
> of the Transition Plan that the Transition Planning Commission
> developed for the Merger of Memphis and Shelby County Schools
> although I disagree with your attempt to use one data point as an
> attempt to showcase the flaws in the plan. I believe that you both
> should highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the plan and let us
> know. But to call out one item lacks journalistic integrity and does
> not offer a fair prospective [sic] to the people who read your
> blogs. To do an in depth analysis of the process I would urge you to
> read the over 10,000 pages of documents every member poured through
> or read the transcripts of the over 400 hours worth of meetings. I
> would also ask that you research the history behind how this
> happened and read Professor Daniel Keil’s report on schools in
> Memphis and Dr. Marcus Polhman’s recent book on education in our
> county then come visit Memphis.
>
> Really, Ms. Bradshaw? 10,000 pages of documents every member read?
> Hmm.
>
> So I am wondering why my review of the strengths and weaknesses
> should be submitted for your review, even if I were to write one.
> The plan is done, as it has been done for some time, even as the TPC
> was going around the county doing one-time meetings in all those
> communities that are now trying desperately to create their own
> school systems so that they can keep them in public hands. So my
> writing a detailed review, and your reading it, would just be more
> wasted time.
> I did, indeed, check out Dr. Polhmann, whose book based his study of
> consolidations in TN is called Opportunity Lost: The Convergence of
> Race and Poverty in the Memphis City Schools. Most troubling about
> what I read by Dr. Pohlmann was this paragraph from his abstract of
> the book (my bolds):
> In his 1944 inaugural address, Franklin Roosevelt stated that his
> goal was “to make a country in which no one is left out.” That same
> general principle would appear to lie beneath the notion of “No
> Child Left Behind.” It is society’s duty to educate every child, not
> just provide education. It is hard to argue that this is not an
> amiable egalitarian goal. A sad truth, however, is that some
> children come to school in such a state of academic disrepair that
> there may be little the public schools can do for them by that point.
> Hmm. Could this explain why the TPC plan is more attuned to
> improving the standing of corporate ed reformers and their business
> interests than improving learning opportunities for kids who they
> believe to be destined for failure, regardless?
>
>
> From what I can tell, Pohlmann, a political scientist, bases many of
> his social and educational assumptions a limited reading of
> Christopher Jenck's interpretation of James Coleman's research of
> 1966, without ever reading Coleman. What both Pohlmann and Jencks
> missed was the core finding by Coleman related to the power of
> social capital that is created and shared when poor kids go to
> school and have classes with middle class kids. Poor kids'
> achievement goes way up, and middle class kids are not negatively
> affected. Coleman spent the rest of his life trying to get people
> to understand that what matters most to student achievement is SES
> and who you go to school with.
>
>
> Pohlmann, following Jencks, focuses almost exclusively on the part
> of Coleman's finding that focused on the powerful effects of home
> life and poverty. If Pohlmann had looked at another consolidated
> school system on the other side of the mountain from Knoxville, he
> would have found Wake County, which consciously integrated their
> county and city schools starting in 2000 based on socioeconomic
> status and achievement levels. That story is documented in Gerald
> Grant's book, Hope and despair in the American city: Why there are
> no bad schools in Raleigh. Shelby Co./Memphis could do the same
> thing if they had not been hijacked by the charter industry and the
> Billionaire Boys Club.
>
> Pohlmann does have the following recommendations in his abstract,
> most of which the Standistas and the Gates Boys have ignored:
> We can, however, begin to address those conditions which contribute
> to severe educational disadvantage, many of which appear to be
> poverty-related. For Horatio Alger’s Ragged Janes and Tattered Toms
> to have equal opportunity in 21st century Memphis, there will need
> to be a multi-faceted approach that focuses on the earliest possible
> intervention in poor children’s lives, while at the same time both
> directly and indirectly reducing inter-generational poverty. Such
> conclusions are not new. The Memphis branch of the National
> Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
> recommended many of these reforms in a 1988 report to Judge Robert
> McCrae. Their recommendations included early childhood programs,
> smaller classes, year-round schooling, enhanced teacher preparation,
> school consolidation, and using school buildings for child care,
> social services, and adult education. Such an approach will come
> with a considerable national, state, and local price tag.
> Nonetheless, each element we adopt, however small, will move us in
> the direction supported by the best available research.
> I also had a look at the work of Daniel Keil, a legal scholar who
> has written in glowing terms on the charterizing of NOLA Schools in
> the wake of Katrina:
> The progress of public education in New Orleans is important beyond
> the boundaries of Orleans Parish. Post-Katrina New Orleans serves as
> the pivotal proving ground for the use of increased choice and
> charter schools to provide more equitable access to quality
> education. With 61% of New Orleans public school students enrolled
> in 51 charter schools (both numbers by far the highest in the
> nation), post-Katrina New Orleans represents an opportunity for the
> choice movement to demonstrate success on a large scale. Success in
> New Orleans will lead to broader choice in struggling urban
> districts across the country. Conversely, failure to deliver
> improved access to quality education will reverse the current upward
> trajectory of the choice movement.
> ....
> If reformers in New Orleans are able to focus on the goal of
> increasing access to quality educational opportunities, then the
> chance created out of the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina will not be
> wasted. It would be beautifully ironic if, thanks in part to a
> hurricane, the schools in the city whose segregated railcars gave us
> Plessy v. Ferguson could finally deliver on that elusive promise of
> Brown to provide more equitable access to quality educational
> opportunities.
> Got it. So did you all down there use any educational research,
> scholarship, or educational experience to provide data for this
> plan? So far as I can see, the two academic sources you cite are
> not educators or ed researchers and likely have never been in a
> public school of Memphis or Shelby County?
>
> In terms of your invitation, I would love to interview you the next
> time I come to Memphis, which will be in the Fall. Thank you for
> the invitation.
>
> Jim Horn
>
>
>
>
> --
> Posted By Jim Horn to Schools Matter at 7/04/2012 10:05:00 PM