An Important New Study On Special Ed Enrollment In Chicago Charters

Hot off the presses at UIC, a tremendously important study of the special education enrollment patterns in Chicago charter schools and neighborhood schools by Federico Waitoller, Josh Radinsky, Agata Trzaska, and Daniel M. Maggin, of the Collaborative For Equity and Justice in Education.

Read the whole thing.

People like me (there's a concept...) are always frustrated by the public data because it seems to hide more than it reveals. We can look up statistic after statistic, but in too many cases, the data is junk. IEP  enrollment data is like this; the only numbers available are the aggregate numbers of kids with IEPS. Talk about a near-to-useless number!

All IEPs are not the same. In fact, they're wildly different, and they require vastly different resources to implement.  That's what this research is about. We know that schools' test scores are impacted mostly by SES, students requiring special education, and English Language Learners (we have excellent local research); this new research is very, very helpful in fleshing out what is happening in special education enrollment patterns.

In the honored tradition of blogging, I'm going to clip a few of the summary statements here, just to encourage you to read the real data.

  I think this conclusion is nice to see, finally, in print, based on research. I live across from Sullivan HS, and I can tell you that some of the kids that Sullivan serves are not really included this "choice for the sake of choice" phenomenon; the charter schools don't want these kids, and that the "choice" phenomenon itself reduces the resources available for meeting these kids' needs. As well as everyone else's needs, when you think about it.

This observation, I hadn't even thought of. I work in a school where the extraordinarily impacted kids get to spend time with their typically developing peers. It's good for everyone.

There's no doubt in my mind about this phenomenon. I blame the poor quality of the data, in part.  The charter operators know that the data available to the public measures the presence of aggregate numbers of IEPs. So why wouldn't they go after the less intensive ones?

Again, read the whole thing. I need to read it again. And probably a third time. It's one of the benefits of being older; you can re-read endlessly without feeling like you're missing out on something fun going on somewhere. 

Two observations: First, during Byron Sigcho's series on the UNO schools,  we had real concerns about whether or not these kids with IEPs were actually being served. It's one thing to accept kids with IEPs, it's another to provide the services called for in those IEPs. Who watches that? It may be time to review the whole situation. Today's report doesn't deal with the question.

And this. This IEP enrollment study is critical and eye-opening. But is there a similar body of research in SES? The only data publicly available is the almost useless designation "low income," a term that doesn't come anywhere near what we need in a country with rampant poverty. We undoubtedly have all kinds of poverty; in fact, I'm pretty sure I can map it block-by-block in Rogers Park just from walking around.  Who are the experts in this field and why haven't I met them? In short, we need a smarter set of metrics for poverty beyond "low income" because it's more complicated than that.

I'm posting the whole study here if you want to flip through it. Give it a moment to load. If you want to download it, find it here, at the Collaborative.

Krashen on Bad Solutions, Wrong Problems

Just thought I'd steal from Stephen Krashen tonight.

 I agree that the debate about the common core must be rooted in the facts, and that the "propoganda machine on the right" has "polluted the debate" with outrageous accusations. There are, however, serious and legitimate arguments against the common core.

The stated reason for the common core is the supposedly poor performance of American students. But  when researchers control for the effect of poverty, American students' international test scores are at the top of the world.  Our  overall scores are unspectacular (but not terrible) because we have so much child poverty, 24%, the second highest among all economically advanced countries. 

Poverty means poor diet, inadequate health care, and little or no access to books. All of these have devastating effects on school performance.  The best teaching has little effect when children are hungry, ill and have nothing to read.

The common core not only ignores the real problem; it does nothing to protect children from the effects of poverty. It only offers us a an extremely expensive plan with no basis in the research: There is no research supporting "tough" standards or nonstop testing. Also, studies show that increasing testing does not improve school achievement.

The common core is a bad solution that is aimed at the wrong problem. 

Stephen Krashen

Please, read the whole thing, with sources.

This national standards thing (and the whole RTTT) is the exact same magic wand that NCLB was; it's being waved by a new magician.

I wrote about Mr. Krashen over at my previous blog, but let me just travel down memory lane again. I'm not sure people outside education understand the magnitude of this guy's scholarship; he's pretty much the Godfather of Soul Second Language Acquisition.  Anyone who's ever taken any training in ELL has had to study his work in the field. It's tough for me to think of another activist-scholar whose professional research has formed the underpinnings of an entire field, like Krashen's has. Oddly, the only other example I can think of is another linguist.

I taught school in Arizona, and every once in a while, we had to take another ELL course to satisfy some requirement. I can't tell you how many classes I sat through where Krashen's language work was referenced. Mind you, it was all really, really dumbed down and isolated into the most recall-the-acronym bullshit, but I feel like during the course of my teaching years, Stephen Krashen was always hovering somewhere over my shoulder.

By the way, there's a little unwritten rule I've developed that whenever you blog about the CCSS,  nobody will read your post. And I don't blame them; the standards themselves are stultifying. How can a discussion about them not be? As a corollary to that rule, it also stands that if you are in a conversation about the CCSS, your interlocutor will not be able to cite a single one of the actual standards nor will she/he be able to explain how any new standard is better than the standard it replaced.

But  the word rigorous  will be used.

Religion On The March In Charter World

Way, way too busy to write--- and believe me, for a writer, that's painful---but I would like to point out that the Sun Times, as usual, is fearless in reporting about the various and sundry charternanigans that are so common, yet so counter-narrative and therefore not discussable in polite company.

First of all, Dan Mihalopoulous recently unearthed the fact that UNO paid a $150k settlement to the PE teacher who was arbitrarily fired by Juan Rangel. I'd say the teacher settled for way, way too little. This was the incident where the PE teacher was supposed to be monitoring both the gym, the boys' locker-room, and evidently also the girls' locker-room, as well as teaching PE, but found himself capable of being in only one place at a time. A boy was victimized in the boys' locker-room, and the teacher had the gall and temerity to report it.

This culture of being arbitrarily punished for doing the right thing? It's what Rahm Emanuel would refer to as the "secret sauce." Fred posted some observations on Rangel and the rest of this sad episode.

As an aside, I've been trying to pull together financials, but it's not easy in the charter world. So at this point it's conjecture, but I don't see how UNO survives financially beyond 2015-16 without some kind of manna from Springfield. We'll see. Maybe the Commercial Club will put out some new research about exactly how much taxpayer money is going to service very expensive private debt.

Second, Becky Schlickerman filed a story about the church and state issue with the new Moody Bible charter school group scheduled to open in Austin in 2015. Apparently, a DC group working on the church/state issue is indicating it might sue if the school actually comes online. The church group is taking the position that the bible stuff is after school and therefore they're not crossing a line. Here's the defense:

“I think it’s unfortunate that we are being singled out for this type of an action. I think everyone who starts a charter school has a belief system whether they are Muslim or Buddhist or agnostic or atheist,” said Michael Rogers, executive director of Chicago Education Partnership and a leader at By the Hand. “I don’t . . . recall this group attacking any other charter operators for their belief system.”

I call bullsh*t. It's an obvious blurring of a line that doesn't need to be blurred. If the Board and administration of the public school where I now work suddenly announced it was sponsoring a Christian Bible after-school program, I hope someone would sue.  Rogers' assertion that the group's objection is based on the fact that the charter operators have "a belief system" and that everyone has a belief system, is absurd and childish. It's a religious group running a religious program that wants to connect it to a public school.

There is a analogous assertion sometimes made in the Gulen-linked charter school world, which I have written extensively about. The Gulen-linked charter schools are connected directly to a religious movement, one that is not commonly known here in the States but which is rooted in a specific Islamic theology.  The people organizing these schools sometimes suggest that a few people connected to the schools might possibly have been somehow "influenced" by the Islamic cleric, Fethullah Gulen. But a closer examination, as we have made on these pages, reveals that the Gulen Movement is in fact indistinguishable from the Gulen-linked charter school network. It is in fact a network of people gathered around a specific religious sect, one that sees science and technology as an instrument of faith in Islam, and that with diligence, secrecy, and perseverance, a "Golden Generation" of youth can be molded to bring about "the Islamification of modernity" with a special emphasis on the critical importance of Turkey in the big picture.

More power to both of these groups; I'm a great fan of religious impulses; it's just that I think public education in the United State ought to be kept out of it. There are so many high quality, accredited private religious schools in our country; I think these charter operators ought to be playing by the same rules. 

For me personally, the religious aspect of the Moody-linked charter is my primary objection. In the Gulen-linked schools, the political aspect is my primary objection, although I think people need to be clear-minded about the religious aspect, as well.

Speaking of, we're working on a bunch of posts here, but just as a preview, here's a couple observations from a recent Gulen-linked charter school event (the rest of this pending post is waiting for legal review, believe it or not):

[excerpt]

 We're only a few weeks away from the Turkish Olympiad, during which event last year, Mr. Gulen appeared on the big screen to deliver his message to the assembled contestants from throughout the worldwide network of Gulen-linked schools, including the American charter schools; it's an event that I have written about at length in attempt to sketch out the religious context in which all of this is taking place.

Locally, our Concept charter students recently participated in one of the qualifying competitions for this Olympiad, and some of the videos of that event are now posted. They're in a bit of a catch-22 situation; they've learned not to include the names of the charter schools in the videos because people tracking these things will point it out, and yet, leaving out the names seems evasive. I understand their dilemma. But it isn't difficult to figure out which performance groups are from the charter schools, and which are from the private religious schools. So for now, enjoy one of the performances from these CMSA kids, who do a very fine job, even if they didn't win. Folk dancing is fun, I openly admit it.


x

The CMSA kids have no idea about the political and religious context of the event that all this is leading to; they're just kids at a school event, dancing up a Turkish storm. On the other hand, some of the school's employees have a different understanding of the larger audience; one in particular (a veteran of a number of Gulen-linked schools) was eager the next day to share pictures on Twitter, sending a tweet to the Washington correspondent of the Gulenist media flagship, Zaman.   As I've written before, the Turkish Olympiad and its preceding events are one of the central elements in the worldwide campaign to burnish the image of the Movement and its leader,* which is probably why one of the CMSA's coaches was reaching out to the Gulen Movement's media arm rather than, say, The Pioneer Press, or whatever they have in Rosemont.

I've written time and time again about the connections between the Gulen Movement and these charter schools, and I'll be writing more about this particular festival, but case you missed the point, it's this: even one of the school's employees at the event was out on social media trying to get the attention of Fethullah Gulen's media arm during the event. Nothing wrong with that, but really? There's no connection between the schools and the Movement?

Incidentally, there was an odd moment during the month before the competition when the organizers send out this rather odd tweet, quoting Marcus Garvey.

I can see an organic connection between Garvey's observation and the circumstances the Turkish children attending private religious schools might find themselves, but for most of the Concept charter school kids, Turkish folk dancing isn't about connecting people to their past, unless you have a very, very expanded idea of what Turkishness is, or secret knowledge of  what's in the kids' hearts and minds. 

Once you start looking long and hard at the theology, you start to see how it fits.

I'm working on a post about the two separate Turkish expat communities--- one which is essentially secular, promoting Turkish folk arts and Turkish cultural awareness through a Saturday school program;  and the other one, this one, which is run by the politically savvy, highly secretive transnational social/religious/political Gulen Movement and which includes the charter schools as well as the political operation that has successfully reeled in so many Illinois policymakers, including at least four we didn't know about until recently.

Much more later.

*There's an excellent chapter on this topic in Joshua Hendrick's Gülen: The Ambiguous Politics of Market Islam in Turkey and the World (See p. 197.)

New to the topic? Please see some of my previous posts.

Gulenist Soft-Lobbying In Illinois: Add Four More Names
Extradition Request Coming
Meet Your New Board of Education
Gulen On The March In Wisconsin
More Thoughts on Religion (and Politics) In The Gulen-Linked Charter Schools
Taking a Good, Long Look at the Concept Charter Schools
Chicago Charter Schools and the Turkish Elections
Religion and the Gulen Schools
The Gulen Money Train

We Fund Turkish Turmoil With Our Schools

The Grooming of Illinois Policymakers: Toni Berrios

Today's Gulen Charter School News

Gulen 101: Session One, With Sharon Higgins.
The Tribune And The Gulen Movement
When Does This Gulen Mess In Illinois Become A Scandal?
Eyes Wide Shut In Illinois
About That BBC Gulen Interview
Think About This For A Moment
The Tribune Is So Full Of It
About That Unauthorized Invitation
How Does It All Start?
The Movement, As Seen By Our Own Foreign Service
Fellowship Joins With The Movement
The Grooming Of Illinois Policymakers: Susana Mendoza
What Is Going On In These Schools?
The Phone Call That Won't Be Happening Any Time Soon
What This Gulen Mess Is Really All About

The House Is In Session

HB 6005 is on the docket for third reading in the House. It's the Charter Accountability Act, and we need it. The short debate should be available on the video stream.

More later; there are a lot of updates on all of the charter bills.

10:00 AM.. Looks like they adjourned until Tuesday. I'll try to write a summary of the charter bills this weekend.

Gulenist Soft-Lobbying In Illinois: Add Four More Names

We've got a couple new posts in the hopper having to with the Gulen-linked charter schools; be on the lookout for those. A couple of the things we've uncovered are pretty glaring and quite detailed, so I'm taking my time with the posts. For now, just remember the confident assurances of the executive director of the Illinois State Charter Commission:

In the same article, this individual asserts that the Charter Commission performed a "very detailed" investigation.

Let me assure you that we have questions for the Commission, and down the road we'll turn to  asking for the records of this detailed investigation. They must exist; that's what "detailed" means.  But that's for later.

For now let's return to Gulen Movement lobbying in general. Before I forget, please refresh your memory with Dan Mihalopoulos's fine work back in December of last year.  Talk about a detailed investigation! Dan's article was supplemented with a fabulous blog post by Max Rust, who made an interactive diagram of lots and lots of trips to Turkey, all sponsored by two Gulenist organizations in Chicago.

Click here to go all interactive with this thing.

There are 32 trips to Turkey listed on this graphic. Seems like a lot of outreach for one little state. Mind you, these trips are linked to a religious/political/social movement operating inside Turkey- a phenomenon that is well known in Turkey but is taboo here, except apparently in the Sun Times.

We've discovered that the graphic is incomplete. There were more junkets.

Actually, CASILIPS discovered it while doing a bit of research into the goings-on in Springfield back in 2008.  Looks like journalist Kurt Erickson was trying to get some Amtrak-related questions answered back then, but a bunch of pols were out of the country. Where were they?

You need to ask? Seriously?

After the governor announced he wants to cut funding for Amtrak, we thought of asking state Sen. Bill Brady of Bloomington for some reaction.

After all, Brady was a key player in getting the first subsidies for Amtrak approved back in the 1990s, when he was just a young pup in the House.

Alas, Brady was spending the week in Turkey on a legislative tour and isn't expected to return until Sunday.

Our next thought was to call state Rep. Elaine Nekritz, D-Northbrook. She's been a big advocate for Amtrak and serves as chairwoman of a committee that deals with passenger rail service.

Alas, she, too, was on the trip to Turkey.

With all this extra time on our hands, we decided to call state Rep. Shane Cultra, R-Onarga, for his reaction to the governor's decision to keep Pontiac Correctional Center from being closed.

Alas, Cultra was in Turkey too.

In all, there were 10 members of the General Assembly on the overseas voyage.

According to state Sen. Pam Althoff's office, which helped organize the trip, the group went to Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.

Members paid for their own airfare, but it wasn't clear whether they tapped into their campaign funds to go on the 10-day trip.

Others on the trip included state Reps. Dan Reitz, Suzanna Mendoza, Kathy Ryg, Sandra Pihos, Karen May and state Sen. Maggie Crotty.

I'm pointing this out because it's interesting that these names didn't show up in whatever search Max Rust did. I bet there are more. (And these are just the state legislators.) I don't know what became of Sen. Crotty, or Rep. Cultra, but it looks to me like the Movemenent had good instincts about the political juice of Bill Brady and of Sandra Pihos. The (Chicago) charter school people are still working (suburban) Representative Pihos, as we pointed out recently.  I wonder how many other city charter schools drive kids out to Glen Ellyn on a school day for a photo op.

Anyway, here's the point. We have on the one hand a known entity, secretive as it may be, connected to one of the most controversial religious/political/social-movement figures of our times, a man who is looking at a potential extradition for a range of behaviors that are clearly illegal and my opinion, politically repressive in nature. This entity is running a soft-lobbying campaign on a scale for which there is no comparison, ferrying dozens of our state policymakers hither and yon, while simultaneously running a network of charter schools back here in the state, a network impacted at every level by decisions made by these very policymakers. And on the other hand, what we have is an unwritten rule that this subject must never, ever be spoken of.

New to the topic? Please see some of my previous posts.

Extradition Request Coming
Meet Your New Board of Education
Gulen On The March In Wisconsin
More Thoughts on Religion (and Politics) In The Gulen-Linked Charter Schools
Taking a Good, Long Look at the Concept Charter Schools
Chicago Charter Schools and the Turkish Elections
Religion and the Gulen Schools
The Gulen Money Train

We Fund Turkish Turmoil With Our Schools

The Grooming of Illinois Policymakers: Toni Berrios

Today's Gulen Charter School News

Gulen 101: Session One, With Sharon Higgins.
The Tribune And The Gulen Movement
When Does This Gulen Mess In Illinois Become A Scandal?
Eyes Wide Shut In Illinois
About That BBC Gulen Interview
Think About This For A Moment
The Tribune Is So Full Of It
About That Unauthorized Invitation
How Does It All Start?
The Movement, As Seen By Our Own Foreign Service
Fellowship Joins With The Movement
The Grooming Of Illinois Policymakers: Susana Mendoza
What Is Going On In These Schools?
The Phone Call That Won't Be Happening Any Time Soon
What This Gulen Mess Is Really All About

Two Great Charter School Resources

A couple of things you may not have had time to digest.

First, Diane Ravitch's appearance on Bill Moyers' show, which I originally read about over at Fred's. I finally got to watch the whole thing, and it's excellent. There's nobody quite like Diane Ravitch; she's cranks out so many revelations about the privatization crisis that I can't keep up. We're living in quite a time--- there's a full-blown, deep-pocketed onslaught on democratic, public education in our country; and on the other side, there's a small army of extraordinary women fighting for the greater good.

Diane Ravitch saved me from being a tech blogger, so I have that to thank her for. When I started my previous blog, her first earlier book had just come out, and it completely transformed my priorities. When Diane talks about an attack on democracy, that's something I agree with. And it's much more interesting than blogging about the wonders of online mind-mapping services, or the problems with PowerPoint, or the importance of focusing on learning, not technology. You know, the canon.

Here's the whole segment. It's a great conversation.




Second, you might have missed this report, authored by the Center for Popular Democracy and Education in Integrity. It uses information from the DOE Inspector General, and it's sort of a here-what-you-get when you set up an unsupervised, opaque outsourcing of a public institution. Charter schools need to be audited, comprehensively, in every state. Why is this so controversial?

I myself was looking last night at an unpublished audit of one the Gulen-linked schools, and jaded as I am, even I was semi-flabbergasted.  I'll probably be posting portions of that audit soon.  Meanwhile, here's the charter report--- and keep in mind that this is the tip of the iceberg.  It's not even the tip. It's more like a group of little samples from the tip.

Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

Help Some Chicago Kids Right Now

Two things you can do to help kids in Rogers Park and Uptown.

1. Karen Zaccor's students at Uplift have figured out a very simple, smart way to reduce the violence this summer: give more kids jobs! Please sign the petition.

2. Kyle Hillman has started a book/funding drive for Gale Academy, which is preparing to absorb another $300k in budget cuts. Gale kids need books, just like every other kid in America. And yet somehow the people running the system have figured out how to deprive them of books. Here's what Kyle posted:

THE STORY:

The 2014 Gale School Book Drive is a community program aimed to improve the reading materials available for students in the local public school elementary. Due to steep budget cuts in Chicago, materials available for in-classroom reading were one of the many items to be cut and subsequently not purchased. The 2014 book drive allows us to collect new or gently used books from the community coupled with donations to improve the school's selection and to help improve academic scores.

100% of all donations will be applied to the purchase of new books. There are no administration fees, and the drive is completely run by community members including local school council members, community leaders, parents, and supporters of the school.

Despite the need for additional funds to address the large percentage of transient students, CPS continues to cut funds for the school and divert costs (such as maintenance, supplies, etc.) to the general fund. The school has already cut non–core programs and reduced teachers to the required minimum and yet the LSC is being asked again to cut $300k from the next budget.
97% of Gale students are categorized as low income students on assistance. For 24% of the students, English is their second language. Another 18% are in special education.

We are collecting books at several donation spots in Rogers Park, (see below) specifically new or gently used books appropriate for PreK – 8th Grade. 

We also need additional monetary donations so that we can purchase hard-to-find books like dual-language early readers.

Your support is greatly needed and appreciated!

Drop off locations:
Heartland Cafe, 7000 Glenwood Avenue
Ellipsis Coffee, 1549 W Devon
Sol Cafe - 1615 W. Howard St.
 Towbar- 1500 w. Jarvis Ave
 Taste- 1516 W. Jarvis Ave.
 Common Cup- 1501 w Morse Avenue
 United Church of Rogers Park- 1545 W. Morse Avenue
 Growling Rabbit- 6981 W. Sheridan Road

Let me also add that Gale works with a mobility rate that was 36% at last measure, and it was even higher last year. Factor in 7.8% homeless, and a 50.7% truancy rate, and you see what the teachers of Gale are contending with, which is to say, a neighborhood in distress. In other words, the Gale community is fighting all the factors that determine academic success, as Jean Pierce demonstrated in this elegant bit of local research.

Please sign, and please donate.