When Educators Are Functionally Illiterate, Part 2

Click on the bingo card to expand it; it's worth it!

Below is an actual unedited email from our son's IEP coordinator at Morningside Elementary School last year. I won't further embarrass the poor guy (who now has reportedly completed his Ph.D) by mentioning his name here, but let's just say that his possession of a Ph.D. proves that some colleges will give sheepskins to any fool who will write them enough checks.

To set the scene: I had been writing and calling this guy for more than a month to pin him down on a summer education program for our son.

When he finally got back to me, weeks too late, this, in its entirety, is what he wrote.

Thank you for your patience regarding an answer for Vance to have Extended
School Year beyond the dates that have been established by the system.

recieved an answer on Friday, April 3rd, 2009.

Being that the program has been in place for the student and that there are no attendance issues, Vance will be offered the opportunity to participate in the ESY according to the dates that were provided to you in the previous e-mail.

due to the severity of his disability, the rate of progress on his goals and the skills that are emerging at this time.

I look forward in meeting with the team to create the Extended Year Plan for Vance.
Thank you,
(name withheld)

Now you tell me whether somebody who can't do better than that should be able to get a high school diploma, never mind a Ph.D.
Here's my point: Do you, my fellow parents, really and truly understand who is setting the standards for your child's education, or are you letting white liberal guilt interfere with your responsibility to demand the very best from our taxpayer-funded system?

When Educators Are Functionally Illiterate, Part 1

OMFG.

Black-on-black crime: the paradox of black-led school districts

The courageous columnist Walter Williams, cousin to the great Dr. J., seen here dunking on black-led school systems






If you believe all that crap about this being "post-racial" America, just imagine the uproar if a white person like me wrote what you're about to read.

But here comes Walter Williams, scholar, straight-shooter and (most importantly) a cousin of the great Dr. J, Julius Erving, to tell it like it is when it comes to black-dominated inner-city school systems. He finds plenty of targets, but, in my opinion, goes too easy on the biggest problem of all: parents who don't understand or emphasize the importance of a good education.

Williams comes to a very pessimistic conclusion; one that (fortunately) may not play out here in Atlanta because of the shifting demographics of the electorate here.

Check it out. See my emphases in bold, and my additional comments at the bottom.


BLACK STUDENTS HELD BACK BY POLITICS, UNION TEACHERS

By WALTER E. WILLIAMS

Detroit’s (predominantly black) public schools are the worst in the nation and it takes some doing to be worse than Washington, D.C.

Only 3 percent of Detroit’s fourth-graders scored proficient on the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test, sometimes called “The Nation’s Report Card.” Twenty-eight percent scored basic and 69 percent below basic. “Below basic” is the NAEP category when students are unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at their grade level. It’s the same story for Detroit’s eighth-graders. Four percent scored proficient, 18 percent basic and 77 percent below basic.

The academic performance of black students in other large cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles is not much better than Detroit and Washington.

The education establishment and politicians tell us that we need to spend more for higher teacher pay and smaller class size. The fact of business is higher teacher salaries and smaller class sizes mean little or nothing in terms of academic achievement. Washington, D.C., for example spends over $15,000 per student, has class sizes smaller than the nation’s average, and with an average annual salary of $61,195, its teachers are the most highly paid in the nation.

What about role models? Standard psychobabble asserts a positive relationship between the race of teachers and administrators and student performance. That’s nonsense. Black academic performance is the worst in the very cities where large percentages of teachers and administrators are black, and often the school superintendent is black, the mayor is black, most of the city council is black and very often the chief of police is black.

Black people have accepted hare-brained ideas that have made large percentages of black youngsters virtually useless in an increasingly technological economy. This destruction will continue until the day comes when black people are willing to turn their backs on liberals and the education establishment’s agenda and confront issues that are both embarrassing and uncomfortable.

Many black students are alien and hostile to the education process. They have parents with little interest in their education. These students not only sabotage the education process, but make schools unsafe as well. These students should not be permitted to destroy the education chances of others. They should be removed or those students who want to learn should be provided with a mechanism to go to another school.

Another issue deemed too delicate to discuss is the overall quality of people teaching our children. Students who have chosen education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any other major. Students who have an education degree earn lower scores than any other major on graduate school admission tests such as the GRE, MCAT or LSAT. Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university. They are home to the least able students and professors. Schools of education should be shut down.

Yet another issue is the academic fraud committed by teachers and administrators. After all, what is it when a student is granted a diploma certifying a 12th grade level of achievement when, in fact, he can’t perform at the sixth- or seventh-grade level?

Prospects for improvement in black education are not likely given the cozy relationship between black politicians, civil rights organizations and teacher unions.


Rick Lockridge comments:

Numbers don't lie. The numbers tell you that Jewish and Asian families tend to put a strong emphasis on education while Hispanic and African-American families do not. Every time I think about criticizing "black culture" (as if I would have insight into the boundaries of such a thing, if it even is homogeneous enough to have boundaries), I stop short: it's hard to put my shoulder and back into pushing against thugs like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson while my own ethnic group (melanin-deficient Americans) claims 10x the number of Idiots Who Inexplicably Rose To A Position Of Power.

However, Atlanta is gentrifying. There are pockets of affluence and a strong black middle-class, and those communities do in fact emphasize academic excellence. The Atlanta Public Schools will one day soon have an administration that more closely reflects these changing demographics and the district's standards and performance will rise accordingly. Many current APS administrators will be displaced by this rising tide; the shame of it is that like all evolutionary processes, this one just takes too damn long.

I'll mildly disagree with one other of Williams' points. Not all education majors are as unimpressive as Williams contends. Most of the APS teachers and principals I've met are really sharp and really, really dedicated. You could argue that inner-city teachers in black-led school districts have to be much more dedicated than the average teacher because (a) they, too have to fight against a shitty system overpopulated by dead-weight bureaucrats and (b) they often have to fight the bullies, thugs and delinquents for control of their classrooms before they can even think about getting any teaching done. My contempt is reserved for the bureaucrats in the system who do not teach. I have seen so many of these folks in meetings and downtown at 130 Trinity, and they appear to do nothing more than go to meetings and lose track of thousands of pieces of expensive, taxpayer-funded equipment.

Lively banter with Aaron Fernander

Former Bunche Middle School Principal (now Executive Director of the APS Office of Student Programs & Services) Aaron Fernander, seen here standing to the right, wearing the khaki blazer....

I have been complimentary toward Aaron Fernander, the man who's now in charge of, among other things, the APS Program for Exceptional Children) elsewhere in this blog. Last week, I had a little bit more than 2 hours of one-on-one face-time with the man himself; the result of an invitation he extended to me after specific complaints I'd made about some of his employees. (PEC Director Constance Goodson was supposed to be there, too, but begged off because of illness).

Fernander is a big, soft-spoken guy with a cracked Louie-Armstrong voice; perhaps the result of having to shout down a few thousand noisy adolescents at Bunche Middle School, where he was a principal. Before that, he says he spent 17 years as a special-ed teacher, a fact that earns some points with me, for sure.

I went to tell him about specific problems I've faced with PEC staff, improvements I feel must be made, and the way the media can (and, I promised him, will) be used to expose the deep-seated problems at PEC if Fernander doesn't act quickly enough.

Here are the points I made, and his responses to them.

1. PEC employees overwhelmingly have subpar communications skills and a poor "communications work ethic." In my 3-year history comprising hundreds of emails and phone calls directed at nine specific PEC employees, my email records (and APS Open Records Act requests) show that only one individual (a teacher) routinely answered important inquiries in a timely manner. Most failed to reply to a large majority of messages, even important messages, and one individual (Compliance Coordinator Gwen Stokes) has never replied to a single email nor returned a phone call from me. Two of our PEC liaisons could not compose a single sentence in clear English. Their poor grammar and punctuation would have prevented them from passing any college-level language arts course, and yet both had degrees--and one is a Ph.D!

(That just proves some colleges out there will give a Ph.D. to any fool willing to write enough tuition checks).

My biggest beef is with Gwen "Felonious G" Stokes, who negotiated a key provision of my child's IEP with me back in Oct. '09 only to subsequently refuse to acknowledge our deal; implement it, ask anybody else to implement it, or return phone calls or emails seeking comment about it.

Ms. Stokes was invited by Mr. Fernander to sit in on our meeting for a few minutes where she had a chance to see the stack of some 300 emails that had flown 'round the PEC about my child's IEP, none of which came from her, and, looking very indignant about having to answer to an actual parent, gave me this excuse for her non-responsiveness to my inquiries:

"I've been out sick some of the time."

How long? I asked.

"Two weeks."

"What about the other four and a half months I've been trying to get you to answer my questions via email or phone? After all, you are the only person who knew the answers I was seeking, as you were the PEC official who negotiated our IEP modification with me. And not only would you not talk to me," I said, "the email trail also indicates you did not respond to inquiries from your own colleagues our agreement. How do you explain that?"

"Mr. Lockridge," she said with a deep, patronizing sigh, "I do not know. I do not have an answer for you."

Well, okay. That's at least truthful. But after she left, and when I continued to press home the point with Mr. Fernander, his response was this:

"We DO answer our emails and phone calls from parents in a timely way."

"But," I protested, "I've just shown you how your folks don't do that at all. And I have a huge stack of your own emails from your own legal department proving they don't. All of these people: Constance Goodson, Yolonda Brown, Vernita Burford, Gwen Stokes, Brenda Hallman, Jennifer Holloway, Cecil Dalton; virtually everyone we've ever had important dealings with in the PEC fails to meet any ordinary standard of professionalism when it comes to communicating with parents, who are, after all, their childrens' proxies.

"So when are you going to implement a policy--send a memo--that says, 'effective immediately, all PEC employees will reply to all parent inquiries within one business day?'"

"I'm not going to put out a memo," he said,

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because we already do answer parents' questions," he said.

So Fernander is drinking his own Kool-Aid there. Mostly, I think he's smarter than that, but in this case, he's not getting it. So the best thing you could do for the PEC right now, as a parent, is to drop him a line at afernander@atlanta.k12.ga.us and tell him to send out that memo. PEC employees are directly accountable to parents. Yet they avoid us as though we were bill collectors.

We went over some other problems at the PEC (the horrible delays in getting any piece of paperwork done; sloppy record-keeping, the high failure rate of APS therapists in fulfilling scheduled appointments) and in each case Fernander said "changes are in the works" which will make the program better by Fall 2010. But pressed for details, he would offer only one: "Our people are undergoing IEP training right now," he said.

What does that mean? Are they being trained to produce IEPs that are more appropriate for the individual child? Or are they being retrained to push parents toward solutions that are more budget-conscious? He wouldn't say.

Fernander wants us to take a lot of things on faith. He wants us to be patient, even though he acknowledges that parents of special-needs kids don't have time to be patient--their kids need what they need and they need it today, not four months from now.

I still don't believe Fernander can succeed in reforming this desperately-in-need-of-comprehensive-reform department without several key firings (or "redeployments of resources"). If you talk to high-level APS managers in other areas, which I've occasionally had the opportunity to do, and you even mention the PEC, they react like someone who's just been forced to eat bug larvae.

Take a moribund, underfunded department like the PEC. Leave it without a leader for a year and a half, then, instead of appointing an energetic outsider, install your own safe choice as interim manager (Constance Goodson); then, after a little time has passed, give her the full title of Director. Then cut its budget even further. Do all of this while a huge new bubble of autistic children is closing in on you. Then meet with parents, tell them you're going to make a bunch of good changes, then miss your own deadline (Jan. 31) for announcing the conclusions you've reached.

I like Aaron Fernander, I really do. But nothing he has done so far has earned him more of our childrens' time and more of our patience.

Mr. Fernander, this forum is open to you anytime. If you've got something encouraging to tell us, then by all means, keep it to yourself no longer.