Support Fair Funding for ALL Baltimore City Public School Students

Dear Readers of Re:education in Baltimore:

Nine charter school operators representing 14 of the more than 30 public charter schools in Baltimore City are suing for more money. We know they already get more. A new grassroots advocacy group of Baltimore City Public School parents and supporters called People for Public Schools compared a traditional and a charter of similar size and demographics. Charters have a clear advantage: more staff, more teachers, lower student-teacher ratios, more academic coaches and after-school activities – and they can carry surplus money over from year to year. If these charters win, they all will get more. And traditional schools will get even less. I think that’s wrong. I think fair and equitable funding is right. I think ensuring the sustainability of the public school system is right. I think decisions about budgets that have an impact on all our children should be made in public. If you agree, sign here:

Last Chance to Support #transformbmore EXTENDED

Twitpic of MD Delegate Maggie McIntosh of the 43rd Legislative District arguing for HB 860 on March 20, 2013

If you’ve been following the fate of the Baltimore City school construction bill, you were probably hoping for closure Wednesday night. The vote has been postponed to give legislators a chance to read the bill. Haven’t read the details yet yourself? Why wait? Download the PDF of HB0860 here. The bill returns to the floor March 21 at 10 a.m.

For national context on the state of the nation’s public school buildings, this article is also worth a look. It explains that a recent report estimates the cost of repairing America’s dilapidated school buildings at half a trillion dollars. Sounds like a whole lot. But in these days after the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it may be appropriate to note that Americans spent an estimated $1.7 trillion on that effort at nation building.

The time is ripe for nation building at home. Public school buildings are the right place to start.

Rally Tonight in Annapolis for Baltimore City Schools (Quick Links)

Wish every Baltimore City Public School could look something like this? Rally tonight at 6pm on Lawyer’s Mall in Annapolis.

For more about the issue, click around:

• Check out this site for all the legislative info you’ll need and ways to show your support: Transform Baltimore
• Preview of tonight’s event: Supporters predict large turnout for schools rally in Annapolis: Baltimore advocates seeking construction funds, Michael Dresser, Baltimore Sun, Feb. 25, 2013
• Yasmene Mumby and Elizabeth Reichelt of the Baltimore Education Coalition on Dan Rodricks: Download the mp3 and start listening around 32:45.
• Alonso: Chances good Baltimore will get block grant, WBAL-TV11 Feb. 22, 2013

Wanna get on a bus? Looks like limited seats are still available on buses leaving from Poly and Northwood Elementary: For emails and phone numbers of bus captains click here: http://www.becforourkids.org/

Organized Parents, Organized Teachers: A Video by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform

This is what parent empowerment looks like.

Organized Parents, Organized Teachers – Working together for effective reform in America’s public schools From the Annenberg Institute on Vimeo. To get related resources on parent-teacher collaboration, visit www.realparentpower.com

Another Blow to the Teacher-Quality-Trumps-Poverty Meme

Two weeks ago, The American Prospect published an article that used Joel Klein’s life story as a counter-argument to his proposition that teacher quality is the most important determinant of educational outcomes. A study released this week by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University also packs a punch.

“Is Demography Still Destiny: Neighborhood Demographics and Public High School Students’ Readiness for College in New York City” was released to the public October 23, 2012. It shows that the effort to create a portfolio of options for city public school students has not made an impact on the gross disparity of outcomes in a city that cleaves along the lines of class and race – especially race. The study should be called “Demography Is Destiny,” which is what AISR titled the PDF itself.

Click to read the AISR’s abstract and to download the PDF.

Shock and Audits: Clocking Five Days of Baltimore City Public Schools News

I offer the following timeline of publications with no comment:

Saturday, October 6, 2012, 3:35 p.m.
The Baltimore Sun publishes City schools criticized in financial audit: Legislative audit from 2010 finds millions in uncollected debts, unjustified payouts, unreported conflicts of interest by Erica L. Green.

Monday, October 8, 2012, 11:41 a.m.
Andres A. Alonso, Ed.D., Baltimore City Public Schools CEO, sends out a mass email with the subject line, “First External Evaluation of Major City Schools Reform.” The email, which is addressed to City Schools Colleagues, Staff, Partners and Friends, summarizes the findings of a report by Education Resource Strategies on Fair Student Funding. The report had been released to the public on September 6, 2012.

Later that day, at 9:23 p.m.
The Baltimore Sun publishes Schools audit alarms state, city lawmakers by Julie Scharper.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012, 3:14 p.m.
The Baltimore Sun publishes Mayor calls on Alonso, school board to fix broken financial management: Rawlings-Blake said lack of public confidence could hinder Annapolis funding campaign by Erica L. Green.

Later that day, at 7:56 p.m.
The Baltimore Sun publishes this: City to pilot new evaluations for all teachers: New model will include student performance, by Erica L. Green.

Thursday, October 11, 2012 (Today), 12:05 p.m.
Andres A. Alonso, Ed.D., Baltimore City Public Schools CEO, sends out a mass email with the subject line, “2012 State Audit of City Schools: Findings and Actions.” The email, which is addressed to City Schools Colleagues, Staff, Partners and Friends, is intended to share the results of second audit of Baltimore City Public Schools by the Maryland Office of Legislative Audits (OLA), which you can download here. The email notes that “the state restricted the district from commenting on the audit and any of its findings until today’s release.”

Two Thumbs Up for Won’t Back Down

The latest film from Walden Media and 20th Century Fox shows American audiences how to stage a parent revolution.

Won’t Back Down is a new feature film starring Oscar-nominated actresses Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis as two moms, Jaime and Nona, who take over their F-grade public elementary school. The school has a mathematical problem: Eighty percent of graduates can’t read. It’s personal for Jaime, whose 8-year-old daughter, Malia, is a walking statistic. The film opens with Malia’s anguished attempt to sound out a command: “Put the story in order.”

Okay.

1. Choose an American city with a troubled public school system. Make it Pittsburgh.
2. Cast a svelte pale-skinned girl with deep brown eyes and honey-blond hair as a FARM-eligible dyslexic second grader.
3. Give her a feisty, single white mom who has no college degree, works two jobs, and earns less than $27,000 a year.
4. Stick them in a class with a really bad union teacher who is “tenurized” (in non-college-educated-white-mom parlance), and therefore can never be fired.
5. Block the exits. a) Make sure the kid can’t switch classrooms. b) Show the heartless Catholic school turn the child away for her parent’s failure to make timely tuition payments (as in Walden Media’s Waiting for Superman.) Then c) recreate the emotional trial of a lottery for a seat in a charter school. Call it Rosa Parks.
6. When luck is less than a lady, have a linebacker of a principal (Ving Rhames) say something locker room-speechy, like, One in four Americans can’t read. If you don’t like the odds, go out there and fight for something better. You can do it. Yes you can.

But how?

1. Read The Secret (Jaime has), and brush those teeth. Your winning smile is your greatest asset.
2. Get the gossip. Pull the receptionist card to get in with the superintendent, then buy that chatty gal a cup of coffee. You’ll never need her again, but she’ll give you the skinny on the latest law that will enable you to takeover your failing school if only you can get half the parents and teachers to agree.
3. Find a partner. A smart woman. A smart Black teacher whose ideals are in a cardboard box at the bottom of a closet in a Cosby Show-quality African-American home from which her soon-to-be-ex-husband has removed his clothes. Throw in a kid who is picked on for being slow. (This fact may be her fault and your plot’s undoing. Drama!)
4. Crush on the miraculously still-teaching Teach for America alum at your F-grade school who plays the ukelele, can do the electric slide, and will rub his teeth clean for a woman with a full grown kid and no college degree. You’ll need him.
5. Try and try and try again to get girlfriend fired up. Keep at it until you see a curl of smoke in her smile and a glint in her eye.
6. Get to work.

This is the point when real parent organizers will start sharpening their pencils. Because from the looks of it, you need to buy three reams of paper ($15). Make that colored paper, so it looks good on camera (add $3). Copy up some petition forms (200 x $.10). Then take off from your minimum wage receptionist job so you can gather signatures when school lets out at 3 p.m. sharp (at least 8 hours at $8.48 an hour) and lure your new squeeze away from his union with shots of Jack Daniels from the bar where you work nights ($9). Use him to a) convert other teachers to your anti-union cause (his soul), and b) babysit your kid (free) while you and your partner canvass the tenements in your inner city neighborhood in the dark (priceless).

Once you’ve got your petitions signed, stage a rally. Borrow some bullhorns. Call the media. Make sure to have 220 or so custom green T-shirts ($2,200), two bounce houses ($378 plus tax), and a bakery-grade cookie the size of a Frisbee for everyone and his/her mother ($500). Reserve one plate of cookies for the crew in the local news van so they’ll run your story at the top of the hour. Don’t forget the $60 you need to replace your daughter’s backpack, which her classmate broke during an in-classroom cat fight. You’ll also need money for the two buses it takes you to get to the tony private school where the beret-wearing head of the teacher’s union (Holly Hunter) wants to pay your child’s way in a last ditch effort to prevent your becoming the downfall of the American labor movement ($9.50).

By my count, Jaime is out $3262.34 so far. Not that the film ever mentions money. (That is, not until a line item in a proposed budget almost torpedoes the entire enterprise. But I don’t want to spoil the ending.) The question of who’s paying for all this is another math problem the film never solves. For that, one has to look at “actual events.”

“Inspired by actual events” may be the most honest line in Won’t Back Down. Though the city and the cast looked and sounded a lot different. In real life, the first attempt to call “Action!” on the set of a parent trigger law-enabled takeover took place not too far from the sound stages of Hollywood. Printing up forms, canvassing, transporting people to rallies, handling the press – Parent Revolution, a nonprofit with a $1 million budget paid for by corporate philanthropists, took care of all that. (For the skinny, read Parent Trigger: Straight Outta Compton? I wrote it.) Parent Revolution told parents about the trigger and collected their signatures. Just like in the movie, they never asked about a PTA. They even fronted people matching T-shirts. They made them yellow.

Won’t Back Down is unbelievable crap. But it’s also phenomenal as a witless send up of Parent Revolution. The Los Angeles-based equivalent of a production company hammers together Potemkin villages of faux-populist uprising for audiences across America. The ruse, for which Compton was a dress rehearsal, seems designed to convince elites (Democrats for Education Reform, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, Michelle Rhee, etc.) that real people will buy the reform package that their money bought and paid for.

Brilliant. Two thumbs up.

UPDATE: Parent Revolution had a $1 million budget when it was working in Compton, per this article in Mother Jones published April 7, 2011. According to this article, published October 2, 2012 in the Hechinger Report, Parent Revolution’s budget is “roughly $3 million.”

Hebrew Language Charter Schools: Who Knew?

The language spread of Hebrew in the United States according to U. S. Census 2000 and other resources interpreted by research of U. S. ENGLISH Foundation, percentage of home speakers, via Wikimedia Commons

A Hebrew language charter school won approval last week to open in Harlem. In April, Washington, D.C., approved its first Hebrew language charter school. In March, San Diego approved one for a September 2012 opening. There is a Hebrew language charter school movement afoot. When I wrote my last post, on teaching identity in traditional public schools, I had no idea how current the Hebrew charter school issue would turn out to be. I obviously hadn’t been keeping up with Jewish Week.

I bring up this movement not because I have an opinion as to whether it’s good or evil, but because (to my mind, at least) it raises interesting questions not just about public schooling and who charter schools are meant to serve, but more specifically about:

• the ways in which the charter school movement parallels the big sort, the geographic clustering of like-minded people – people with similar political beliefs and values – that some argue is tearing America apart
• what’s happening to the role American public schools have long played in assimilating the children of immigrants (Antero Pietila, author of Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City, brought up this topic in this comment on my last post.)
• what happens when charter schools – quasi-public, quasi-private institutions – become an out for independent schools that are incapable of sustaining their operations through tuition and fundraising

What follows is a set of links to articles and websites meant to give anyone new to the subject of Hebrew charter schools a running start. I’ve divided them by location.

New York City 

1. Sara Berman, 35, Hebrew charter school pioneer, Julie Wiener, Jewish Week, June 15, 2010 New Yorker
   Sara Berman founded the first Hebrew language charter school in New York City and now runs the Hebrew Charter School Center. Berman’s father is Michael Steinhardt, a philanthropist who made his money in hedge funds. He is an atheist, but he backs Birthright Israel and other Jewish organizations. (In our secular age, you don’t have to believe in God to be Jewish.) Her background is much like mine – New York City independent schools followed by the Ivy League. She sends her kids (she has six) to the yeshiva where I went through sixth grade. I met her after a panel she was on at the PEJE conference in 2010, at which she introduced the Hebrew charter she founded in Brooklyn. She was unfazed by angry representatives of Jewish day schools in Florida who bore witness to significant drops in enrollment when Hebrew charter schools emerged on the scene. She is on a mission.
2. Here is the proposal from the Harlem Hebrew folks. I won’t say anything about it except that the leading is a tad tight: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/psc/documents/HHLACSAppRedacted.pdf. The website: Harlem Hebrew Charter School.
3. A new Hebrew Charter School approved for NYC District 3 in Harlem! Alina Adams, examiner.com, June 21, 2012 This is an excited post from a mom who is well-informed of the work of Sara Berman and the Hebrew Charter School Center. The mom sends her child to a Jewish day school, but she would consider Harlem Hebrew if she could.
4. Hebrew Language Charter School Approved for Harlem, JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), The Times of Israel, June  21, 2012, originally published as Hebrew-language charter school in N.Y.’s Harlem gets go-ahead, JTA website, June 20, 2012
5. Harlem Hebrew Charter Ok’ed, Julie Wiener, Jewish Week, June 19, 2012
6. Hebrew School: The Hebrew Language Academy, New York City’s first Hebrew-language charter school, opened two years ago. Now its backers – including financier Michael Steinhardt – want to replicate the model nationwide, Anna Phillips, Tablet, March 9, 2011
7. Outcry over plan for Hebrew language school in Harlem, Michael J. Feeney, New York Daily News, March 3, 2011

Northern New Jersey

1. Hebrew Charter School Seeking Approval for Teaneck Location School files application for space on Galway Place, Noah Cohen, Teaneck Patch, June 14, 2012
   This article is about Shalom Academy’s struggle to find a building.
2. Hebrew charter school prevails in state Supreme Court (Decision ends dispute with East Brunswick Board of Education), Debra Rubin, New Jersey Jewish News, April 3, 2012
   This is on Hatikvah International Academy Hebrew charter school.
3. Hatikvah Charter Still Facing Legal Challenges, Julie Wiener, Jewish Week, January 31, 2012 This article is on much more than Hatikvah. It also covers Tikun Olam, a proposed high school that does not have the backing of the Hebrew Charter School Center. Its application for charter was rejected multiple times. Still, they received a $600,000 grant from the federal government for the project, as discussed in this next link:
4. Rejected 3 Times, School May Still Open Soon, and With a Grant, Too, Michael Winerip, New York Times, January 8, 2012

San Diego, California

1. Kavod Elementary will open in fall 2012. Their website has stock photography of blond and brown children in a school setting together. Given that the Brooklyn Hebrew charter on which it is modeled is around 40 percent minority, this dream may be realized.
2. The RosenRant This is a blog by one of the school’s founders, Michael Rosen. (I think all the founders are Jewish.)
3. New Hebrew Charter School Approved in San Diego, Julie Wiener, Jewish Week, March 28, 2012
4. Kol Ha Kavod Moment for San Diego Charter, Julie Wiener, Jewish Week, April 17, 2012 (Is it me, or has Julie Wiener become completely sold on the Jewish, er, Hebrew charter school trend over the years?)

Washington, D.C.

1. Hebrew Charter School Approved in D.C., JTA, Jewish Daily Forward, April 24, 2012 Originally published by JTA as Hebrew-language charter school gets OK in D.C.
2. Sela, a Hebrew language charter school, will strengthen D.C. Jewish community, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, Washington Post (Opinion), June 24, 2012 (This rabbi is looking to populate his after school programs with the children of secularly minded Jewish parents, if you ask me.)
3. Hebrew Charter Schools Focus on Israel; New Crop of Public Schools Groom Generation of Advocates, Nathan Guttman and Naomi Zeveloff, Forward, May 8, 2012 – The leap from charter school founding to advocacy for Israel isn’t so far fetched given the connection between Modern Hebrew and Zionism.

South Florida

1. Ben Gamla charter school website  Here’s the website of the first Hebrew charter school in the country, which opened when a private Jewish day school in the neighborhood closed. An estimated 80 percent of the private school’s attendees enrolled in the charter school. It’s located in Hollywood, Fl.
2. Hebrew Charter School as Growth Industry: Former Florida Rep. Peter Deutsch’s burgeoning network of schools is toeing the church-state line, and could greatly affect American Jewish life, Julie Wiener, Jewish Week, March 20, 2012
3. A Charter Network’s Emerging Imprint: Across South Florida Jewish institutions learn to live with – and embrace – Hebrew language schools, Julie Wiener, Jewish Week, March 27, 2012
4. Hebrew Charter School Spurs Dispute in Florida, Abby Goodnough, New York Times, August 24, 2007

Miscellaneous Related Links

As an Israeli-born Jew married to a Catholic, I am personally interested in the secularization of American Jewry and Jewish leaders’ responses to it. Here are some pieces I found intriguing as I slogged through putting together the post you are reading right now:

1. Across Differing Faiths, Shared Holidays, Michael Winerip, New York Times, December 17, 2008 This article has some good stats on the rise of interfaith marriage. It’s also a good read.
2. The Next Jew blog by drdan, August 13, 2011 There are some interesting thoughts on the Hebrew charter school trend here, from someone much more in on the Jewish scene than I. Worth reading.

Like this post? Or not? Let me know in the comments section. (In English, please.) And feel free to share it. Toda raba!

-Edit Barry

Some Thoughts on Public Schooling and Segregated Cities

Cities cleave along racial and ethnic lines, and every city I’ve ever lived in proves it. When I grew up in Manhattan, there was Harlem, which was black. And East Harlem, which was Hispanic. And the Upper East and Upper West sides, which was where I and most of my friends lived. I’m white and they were, too. Over the years, I watched the formerly Jewish Lower East Side, where my grandpa used to own a textile shop with a handful of his brothers, turn Chinese. Later on I lived in Oakland, where the hills were white. There’s a Chinatown there, too.

In Baltimore the racial divide feels more extreme. Small numbers of young Jews are moving back to town, but the Jewish community at large worships outside the beltway. The Spanish speaking population is growing but per the 2010 U.S. Census only 4.2 percent of Baltimoreans are of Hispanic or Latino origin. The racial split is almost purely Black and White, 63.7 to 29.6 percent. And a fifth of people here live below the poverty line.

Baltimore City School demographics are another indication of how segregated and poor this city has become. This school year, 2011-2012, the public school student population is 86 percent black, though there are still individual neighborhood public schools – like the one in Hampden – where the racial breakdown looks more like that of a New England liberal arts college than of an HBCU. That is, the percentage of students of color in Baltimore’s predominantly white public schools is large enough that an elite college with similar numbers would tout itself as highly diverse. (Everything’s relative.) The big difference: 84 percent of kids in Baltimore City Schools come from low income backgrounds.

Given my private school background, my thoughts on public schooling are skewed. My thoughts on  integrated elementary schooling are just as funky. I was born in Israel. Before my first birthday, my mother took me from Tel Aviv to New York, where I attended a yeshiva from kindergarten through sixth grade. I learned all the things most public school students would learn. I also learned about my cultural heritage and Jewish identity.

My background colored my thinking about the reports and opinions in the New York Times a few weeks ago – they came out around the time of the May 17 anniversary of the decision in Brown v. Board – about what is effectively segregated public schooling in New York City schools. My thoughts went something like this: If the de facto segregation in predominantly Black or Latino or Asian elementary schools included curricula that engaged students in learning about their heritage and grappling with the meaning of their identity as Black or Latino or Chinese, wouldn’t our pluralistic society be better off? Is it enough to prepare students for “democratic citizenship” (if that is what public schools are doing) by teaching them about the Declaration of Independence and Constitution? Maybe we would have a more vibrant political culture if we also prepared students by teaching them about themselves.*

Learning about where I came from when I was young shaped my thinking for life. Is there a better place to do that than in school? Is whitewashing personal and cultural history part of the tragic legacy of the separate but equal logic that led to forced and legally enforced desegregation?

Can public schools teach us about our complex identities? Should they? Do they?** Can it be done in schools where integration is forced?*** I have many questions and few answers. So I read.

—

* Baltimore-based writer Stacey Patton’s piece on Black studies in the Chronicle of Higher Education also got me thinking about disciplined approaches to teaching identity. The piece kindled a well contained conflagration of controversy when a blogger for the CHE not only questioned the merit of dissertations in the field but outright ridiculed them based on their titles. She was fired.

** Hebrew charter schools are ruffling feathers in the private Jewish day school world. I attended a panel at the Project for Excellence in Jewish Education (PEJE) conference in 2010 that included the founder of the Hebrew Language Academy Charter School in Brooklyn. The school cannot teach prayers or engage students in religious study. They can teach Hebrew and cover topics such as Israeli independence. (Nevertheless, I found it online by searching “Jewish charter school.”) Washington D.C. approved a Hebrew language charter school on April 25, 2012.

*** In thinking about all this, I returned to the 20th century political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s controversial essay, “Reflections on Little Rock.” It’s difficult to make sense of her thinking without knowing something about her allegiance to distinctions between the private and public realms and her critique of the rise of the murky region she calls “the social,” but it’s worth a look.

Up next, some curated links to posts on and around these issues.

Ten Things You Should’ve Read About Education This Week (in case you haven’t already)

Illustration from 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. Original caption: Fig. 1.–Fruit of the pine-apple (”Ananas sativa”), consisting of numerous flowers and bracts united together so as to form a collective or anthocarpous fruit.

This is one of those weeks where there was too much going on to reflect. So, I collect:

1. Housing Policy and Educational Opportunity: Some Notes, Rachel Levy, All Things Education blog, April 24, 2012

If you’re interested in the questions that come up in the debates around zoned versus citywide elementary schools – issues about access and prohibitive housing costs and the importance of socioeconomic diversity to student achievement – this is chock full of important links. (Loosely related to this was a piece in the New York Times about a housing fight in Texas. Then there’s this, on political discussions in Washington, D.C., about whether charters schools can be neighborhood schools. (I don’t have time to connect the dots at the moment.)

2. Believing in City Schools, Adam Bednar, North Baltimore Patch, April 26, 2012

The Village Parents have been models of active citizenship when it comes to informing the community about the public school options in Charles Village. This week they brought a panel of parents from Roland Park, Mt. Washington, and Federal Hill – attractive neighborhoods with zoned elementary schools that have managed to lure scores of middle and upper-middle class families into their classrooms – to tell their stories. It was a great small event. Glad Adam Bednar was there to cover it. (There are obvious connections between this story and the housing concerns in the previous post, but I’ll leave that for another day.)

3. As school facilities crumble, executive suites get remodeled, Erica L. Green, Baltimore Sun, April 26, 2012

After the heady effects of the Village Parents event, this story was a downer. The District spent $500,000 on renovations to the central office, half of which went to spruce up the executive suite of the chief of information technology. This story comes against the backdrop of a push to raise $1.2 billion – a fraction of the total needed – to fix crumbling public schools. City Schools CEO Andres Alonso chalked it up to “a bad judgment call.” Right. The story makes me question my willingness to work within a system whose leaders’ have their priorities so crooked. I’m sure I’m not alone.

UPDATE: BCPSS Chief of Information Technology Jerome Olberton resigned his post in January 2013 and took a $185,000 chief-of-staff position in the Dallas public school system.

4. Critics seek more oversight of renovations at school district headquarters, Erica L. Green, Baltimore Sun, April 27, 2012.

City Schools advocates who have to fight for funding in Annapolis have more to be disappointed about than I do. The choicest part of this follow-up piece is where the chief information officer, Jerome Olberton, explains himself by claiming that the reason he needs to improve his department’s work space is to attract more highly qualified applicants. Um, to ask the obvious, how about upgrading school facilities to attract highly qualified teachers?

5. The suite life on North Ave., Sun editorial, Baltimore Sun, April 29, 2012

As a follow-up to Erica Green’s breaking news story, the editorial board weighed in with their view on why the allocations were “more than just bad judgment.”

6. Politics and Education Don’t Mix, P.D. Thomas, The Atlantic, April 26, 2012

News of the crazy renovation expenditures for North Avenue got my mind singing a refrain that’s been in the back of my head for a long time. It goes like this: “It’s the Bureaucracy, Stupid.” I have yet to write that post. Thomas’s opinion sort of takes care of it for me.

7. PD, Jess Gartner, jessgartner.com, April 22, 2012

The newest voice in Baltimore education blogging belongs to Jess Gartner, a teacher who has way more than the average level of commitment to her students. She took on Professional Development a week ago. Ms. Gartner is optimistic about the potential of the Common Core Standards to give teachers more autonomy. She is also far more positive than I am about the potential of the free market to solve problems that I would argue are of the free market’s own making. I commented with a note on Pearson, the educational content powerhouse that is making the kind of tailored instruction that Jess Gartner imagines a difficult dream to realize. She commented back. More on that below.

8. Mass Localism for Improving America’s Education, Yong Zhao, April 24, 2012

I think Jess Gartner would like this post. God knows I do. It talks about creativity, about autocratic rule, about radical localization of decision making. It should be required reading for anyone who works at North Avenue. Especially the ones at the top who moved here from New York and Boston and Atlanta via the Dallas/Fort Worth area and… you catch my drift. Is it me, or is Baltimore run by out-of-towners?

9. A Very Pricey Pineapple, Gail Collins, New York Times, April 27, 2012

Picking up on that Pearson thread I brought up earlier was Gail Collins, who uses a pineapple as a juicy pretext for talking about privatization of public schools. The topic is a yawner otherwise, isn’t it?

10. New York’s Bargain Basement Tests, Diane Ravitch, Diane Ravitch’s blog, April 28, 2012

Diane Ravitch started her own personal blog this week. In this post, she explains the appearance of said pineapple in a test item on a New York state test that Pearson had produced, originally for Texas. Pearson seems to be the goose that laid the golden pineapple.

SPECIAL BONUS: The Common Core: The Technocracts Re-engineer Learning, Anthony Cody, Education Week Teachers’ “Living in Dialogue” blog, April 27, 2012

Like everyone else who reads opinions online, I gravitate toward those that articulate what I already believe. I try to do more than that – to read people I disagree with, to argue with people I wish I agreed with, to question my own positions, which are highly flexible on all but my worst days. This piece articulated all my misgivings about the Common Core. It also made me want to move to Nebraska, a state that held out against No Child Left Behind because its education commissioner values local-level initiative. Just like me. (Not that I have anything against imported fruit.)