Failing Schools: Our Own "127 Hours"

Schools fail in areas where parents aren't involved. Throwing more resources at those schools won't make the parents more involved, and since social engineering is frowned upon (see Naziism, et al), we're trapped.

"Progressives" won't acknowledge this; they're stuck in their own vicious cycle of complaining about inadequate funding while earnestly pushing for some new idea--like Beverly Hall's now-infamous "data-driven best practices."

But we are well and truly trapped, and we ought to own up to it like James Franco's character in "127 Hours," and face the inevitable. In this case, the limb we'll have to sever is the idea that public schools will always be there for you, free and undemanding, and all you have to do to get your kid in the door is fill out the enrollment form.

When we don't ask anything of do-nothing parents, they do nothing. This may be because they're dirt poor or they work too many jobs or they grew up in a household where education was never prized, or because they don't want to assimilate (Hispanic parents who refuse to learn English). It's not our responsibility to fix these people, and I don't care about them. I do care about their kids, because I'm soft that way.

If you're going to squeeze any young person through a rigorous, 15-year-or-more program of drills and tests, you're going to need a vise. Schools and teachers comprise only one jaw in that vise, and vises need two jaws to work. The other jaw is parents.

To be effective, a parent must persuade or compel a child to work hard and do well (some parents lean more toward persuasion; I'm fine with a little Dragon-Momming now and again too).

You don't have to attend a single PTO or PTA meeting or bake fundraising brownies to do your part well. But you do have to set up your kid for success (purchase supplies, make sure the kid is properly rested and ready to go each morning, etc.) and you do have to set expectations for their performance in school and hold fast to those expectations.

Many parents don't do these things and never will. Our system demands nothing from these parents, and nothing is what we get.

So if you want to reform the system, start by making the parents sign a contract stipulating that students who miss homework, flunk tests, get into discipline troubles at school or otherwise screw up will be held back and parents will be liable for the cost of remedial education. (In other words, education is free until you screw up. After that, you pay for it). Parents who withdraw their children from school must use their public funding for homeschooling or private school and provide documentation. Homeschooling parents would have to be licensed and monitored.

This will create all kinds of new headaches, but it will also create many new kinds of schools: charters, co-ops, technical academies, etc. Some will fail to produce strong graduates. In that way, they will be exactly like the expensive failing schools we keep trying to resuscitate now. Parents will eventually figure out that their best and cheapest option is to hew to the rules for our new, sign-the-contract-or-you-don't-get-in public schools.

You can't make schools better until do-nothing parents are forced to put some skin into the game. Until they have incentives to participate (or, rather, strong disincentives for non-participation), they won't change. When they change, the schools will change. But trying to change the schools without addressing the parents is a fool's game.

If he had kept trying to pull his hand out from behind that boulder, Aron Ralston (the guy whose true story is the basis of 127 Hours) would be dead now, instead of a worldwide celebrity.

You need guts to cut off your arm with a dull multi-tool, I guess, but what you mostly need is desperation. Well, we certainly have that here.

The Big Hypothetical

What if we just told APS to get lost and took over responsibility for our own community school. What if we decided conversion charters are NOT just for failing schools in dismal neighborhoods, but that we could use the same process to get the elementary school our kids deserve?

PROS:

No more APS scandals, excuses, delays, con-jobs, bureaucratese, "data-driven best practices," low-character superintendents, rampant nepotism, etc., etc.

Hire teachers and administrators who are directly accountable to the parent board

No obstacles to purchasing and implementing whatever technology is appropriate (see "How We Flunked the iPad Test," below).

Add electives we want (keyboarding class for all third graders & up!); sports, art, music, and all the other things APS keeps trying to cut.

Fire bad teachers sooner. Establish incentives to persuade great teachers to come here and stick around.

(Feel free to add your own items in comments).

CONS:

Have to manage every little detail (from lights to custodial to tech support to HR). Even if you hire someone good to manage the process (a real world-class principal, say, instead of a scandal-dogged Beverly Hall protege), you're going to have headaches aplenty.

Fighting APS for control of the curriculum (because they'll always be desperate to appear relevant).

Lingering guilt over abandoning the public education system (some of our more "progressive" parents seem to be unable to conquer this obstacle, which I think is silly. But we could compromise and agree to adopt a "sister school" in the public system and offer assistance).

(Again, if you can think of any CONS to add here, use the comments).

Doomsday at APS

I want you to remember one thing before you read this post: remember the date you saw it. Right now, it's early 2011, and there's still time to stop this catastrophe from happening. When it does happen, all sorts of people (including our BOE, and our new superintendent) will wail about the suddenness of it, the unfairness of it, the tragedy of it.

But because none of the people in power at APS are doing anything about it now, the outcome predicted here is (in my mind) an inevitability. So I don't want to hear any of those gutless, infighting, scandal-plagued poseurs whine about it when that day comes.

One last thing: in the microscopically improbable chance that I'm wrong about this, I will not only publicly apologize on this blog, I will write personal emails to all the people I am about to embarrass here, apologizing to them personally. I might just as well pledge to send them each a check for $1,000, made out to their favorite charity. I'm that confident.

Here's what's going to happen.

The Atlanta Public Schools special-ed program known as the Program for Exceptional Children (full disclosure: our family has sued the PEC and had what we consider to be a wholly successful outcome) is about to lose its eligibility for federal funding. The district doesn't disclose how much special-ed funding it receives from the feds, but it is in the many millions of dollars per year--enough to fund arts classes, music programs, field trips....remember that, as you read on.

The PEC has either this year or this year plus one more year (this audit of the program fails to specify whether it's the former or the latter, but concedes it is at most a two-year period ending in 2012) to get its act together. (If you are not aware of the disastrously poor performance of the PEC, read down on this blog and you'll get the drift).

So, fine. We have time to fix things. That's what most people would conclude.

But here's the problem: the only way to fix the program is to fire some people, and the guy in charge won't fire them.

The PEC is made up of people. The only way to make the program better is to either change the personnel and get better people, or convince the current people that they should do their jobs better. (I hate to oversimplify the issue this way, because there are some very nice and competent people in the PEC, but they are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the incompetent, racist fools on the staff).

You cannot reform this program and comply with federal law by writing some memos, implementing new rules and expecting your current shoddy workforce to suddenly wake up and decide they want to do things right. If it were possible to effect change via lawsuit, then extremely costly lawsuits like ours would have already done that. But APS has a curious business model for the PEC which is based, as far as our family could tell, on nothing more tangible than hope: the hope that more families won't sue like we did.

Hope is a fine quality; heck, we elected a president on it. But it is not a very good business model.

No, to reform the PEC you will have to change out the people who have failed the special-needs families of the Atlanta Public School system for oh-so-long. And the job of doing that falls to former middle-school principal Aaron Fernander, who spent time as a special-ed teacher before becoming a principal, but who never in his life expected to have to reform a deeply dysfunctional, legally complex system like APS special-ed. With all due respect to Fernander, who's actually a pretty nice guy, he's got no shot. Zero.

The reason? The last time he tried to fire a female employee, he screwed it up and got himself and the district sued. The Board of Education approved a $97,000 settlement to make the lawsuit go away.

Now, first of all, who pays $97,000 to avoid the cost of litigation? You can damn well litigate a case for under $100,000 if you didn't screw up.

But if you did screw up, and you got your ass sued, and the district had to pay nearly six figures to bail you out, how the hell do you get yourself promoted, the very next year, to a position of critical importance in APS, and where you will routinely have to make tough calls on personnel?

And yet, that is the legacy Beverly Hall is leaving us: not just the worst cheating scandal in the history of standardized testing, but a school-district hierarchy riddled with questionable hires.

So now we must ask ourselves a pretty obvious question: can we expect a guy who got himself sued last time he bungled an HR issue with a female employee to actually fire the middle-aged (and older) female employees who run the PEC? (Because they are all--and I mean all--middle-aged and older females).

Of course he's not going to fire them. He's going to stay as far away from employee terminations as he can for the remainder of his career.

So the APS will make rearrange the deck chairs on this Titanic, and when it goes down, as it inevitably will, the district will have to take millions of dollars from mainstream programs and divert it to special ed (because APS will still have to follow federal special-ed laws no matter what).

And when that day comes, Aaron Fernander (if he has any spine at all) and our new superintendent of schools will stand in front of the microphones and look really sorry about how all of this has played out, and announce dramatic cutbacks in mainstream programs.

If you are standing in a tunnel and a freight train is barreling at you at 100mph, it is not going out on a limb for you to predict that you're about to get squashed. The laws of inertia are not going to suddenly disappear because you really really want them to and you pledge to try harder and be smarter next time.

So it will be this time. There's no cavalry coming for the PEC, nobody to stop the program from going right over the cliff. The problem is, when the PEC crashes, we all go with it.

Remember the day you read this.

An open letter to my fellow SPARK parents

Dear Fellow SPARK parents:

Let's take a moment to hear from you parents who still believe that the only appropriate way to participate in your childrens' elementary-school education is to tirelessly and patiently collaborate with the municipal employees of the scandal-plagued Atlanta Public School System.

(Sound of crickets chirping).

Now, let's talk about your other options.

1. Stop believing people who tell you the Alpo they're serving you is really filet mignon. Be a forceful advocate for your child. (My mantra about this is: be as polite as possible, but as confrontational as necessary).

Or, if that doesn't work:

2. Take over the process and eliminate APS from any meaningful role in your child's daily life.

I've tried #1, but I think only #2 is likely to work.

Here's the argument for converting SPARK to a charter school:

SPARK will never be the high-achieving, best-of-class school we imagined so long as it is run by APS bureaucrats who have no interest in nor any background in managing a high-performing elementary school.

Look at the way the school is run today. We have a principal, Yolonda Brown, who was sold to us by Bev Hall on the basis of Brown's remarkable (and, as it would turn out, fraudulent) CRCT record at the traditionally low-performing (and now closed) CW Hill elementary school.

Even if Yolonda Brown had raised CW Hill's CRCT test scores honestly (I do not believe Ms. Brown cheated on any tests, but that doesn't change the fact that we can no longer believe the gains she supposedly achieved at Hill were valid), what does that have to do with running a school like SPARK?

We don't care about the CRCT (Platinum, schmatinum). Our kids should be able to pass the subminimal CRCT exam on the first day of school. But Yolonda Brown cares about the CRCT--that, in fact, is what she cares about most, because it has been her meal ticket thus far. When Yolonda Brown took this year's new kindergarten parents into the school cafeteria this year and showed them a PowerPoint focusing on--you guessed it--SPARK's exemplary CRCT scores, well, that told you everything you ever needed to know about Yolonda Brown.

She just doesn't get it. SPARK cannot be about CRCT scores. It should be a school with a very high ceiling.

This is why the CRCT cheating scandal matters. Because of the cheating that was going on, Beverly Hall was able to spread the myth that she was some sort of educational messiah. Because so many people on the initial SPARK principal selection committee bought into this myth, they accepted Hall's recommendation to hire Brown to be our principal.

If there hadn't been any cheating, Yolonda Brown's improbable CRCT test-score achievements at Hill would not have existed. Also without the cheating, Beverly Hall would not have had the messianic clout she had to push her protege Yolonda Brown onto the SPARK parent committee.

Now, we have Yolonda Brown as our principal. Let's take a look at how she's doing. To do that, let's examine the key duties of any principal:

1. Hiring and retaining only the best teachers and staffers. How's Yolonda Brown doing in that regard? Well, she hired a "technology specialist" who has not been able or willing to exploit even a fraction of SPARK's high-tech resources. She hired a friend's son to an important special-ed position, only to get the district sued. She administratively-transferred (AKA fired) one of SPARK's very best teachers, Julia Zahra, because Julia dared stand up to her. SPARK still has some great teachers. You know why? Because great teachers wanted to come to our beautiful new school and work with our actively involved parents and our high-achieving children. They didn't come because of Yolonda Brown.

2. Handling important construction projects. Anyone want to talk about the gym project this year? The parking lot project last year?

3. Special Ed: This is something our family is well-positioned to know about. There are many ways to mishandle special ed, and some of them get you sued. (We filed suit against APS this past summer, and the district quickly settled with us over their mistakes, one of the most serious of which was the hiring by Yolonda Brown of a friend's son with no relevant experience or credentials to work directly with our little boy).

But there are other ways special-ed can affect mainstream classrooms. Many parents of special-ed kids, including us, want their children "mainstreamed" as much as possible. But if this isn't done carefully and thoughtfully, it can be (and, in our case, was) devastatingly disruptive to mainstream classrooms. I am very sorry to say that our child was the cause of many such disruptions in his mainstream classroom, a fact that left us, his parents, positively mortified when we learned about it. None of that had to happen. But when we needed leadership from Ms. Brown on anything having to do with special ed, all we got was excuses.

4. Technology. Nothing galls me more than SPARK's underutilization of its comparative wealth of high-tech resources. We literally have more tech in our school than any other elementary school in the system (including MES), and yet we don't exploit it as we should. Where are the keyboarding classes? (Keyboarding is offered as a standard part of the curriculum at Woodward Academy starting in the 3rd grade). Where are the classroom blogs? Where are the videos shot by our students and edited in iMovie in our fantastic Mac lab? Where are the original music creations our kids could have done using GarageBand? Where are the digital photo slideshows? Why do we have a "technology specialist" who actually has no capacity to teach the software we went to such great lengths to obtain and install at SPARK?

In every key test of leadership: managing construction projects to completion; professionally managing personnel; tackling special ed; using technology to create a "high ceiling" for our high-performing student population, what grade would you give Ms. Brown right now?

This job--the job of SPARK principal--is too important a position for us to allow it to be occupied by an employee who's not up to it. Employees can be changed. And changing one employee, in this particular case, would lead to a cascade of other changes: better teachers. No more nepotism. Creative leadership on the technology front. Better management of special-ed issues.

It's an employee issue, folks. It's not personal. It's not racial. It's about the fact that SPARK needs and deserves a world-class principal who comes from a school where expectations were through the roof---not a school like CW Hill where the teachers were just doing anything they could to keep kids from failing the subminimal CRCT exam.

These are your children, and they deserve an experienced, standout principal with valid, verified credentials. Yolonda Brown can and should do fine things at schools like CW Hill. Maybe someday she'll learn how to professionally manage people and will become a principal worthy of a school like SPARK. I hope so.

Remember this: SPARK does not necessarily belong in perpetuity to APS and you do not have to let them run it any way they feel like. This school can be yours to run if you have the tenacity and the desire to do the job right.

The iPad test, and how we flunked it.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that equipping our SPARK kids with a few dozen iPads would be lead to some very interesting possibilities. I know, because I thought of it in late 2009, even before iPads debuted, and I presented it to the SPARK technology committee shortly thereafter (I'll tell you how that went over in a minute).

Suddenly it's a year and a half later, and that same totally obvious idea is rapidly catching on elsewhere, as reported in the New York Times and elsewhere this week: New York City schools have ordered thousands of iPads; meanwhile, there's a whoops-the-reporter-totally-missed-the-whole-point article in the Times on the usefulness of giving every student an iPad instead of making them all tote around a bunch of textbooks.

In my mind, the whole point of giving kids at least some regular access to iPads was never about replacing textbooks or using them as a teaching aid. The point of an iPad in the hands of an elementary school student is to give them a way to create and communicate, not just another way to ingest the stuff we want to cram into their little heads.

Elementary school education can't be all about ingesting facts and spitting them back out onto test sheets, and yet at SPARK and other APS schools, that is indeed what it is about, because teachers are teaching to a test. In the (all too many) bad APS schools, teachers are threatened with all kinds of dire consequences if they don't get badly-parented and underprepared children up to the level where those kids can pass the ridiculously easy CRCT test. So the culture at APS is that you teach to the test and you follow the rote curriculum and if you have any time left over you let the kids make something out of paper and glue.

But it's 2011, people. Our children should be encouraged to create digital works of music and art and photography and video; they should publish blogs and make slideshows and do all sorts of other tasks in the digital environment where they will live and make a living their entire adult lives. If I have to persuade you that providing children with creative outlets is part of your job as a parent, you are definitely reading the wrong blog right now.

The iPad isn't necessarily the best vehicle for creative expression--I would much rather do all of that stuff I just mentioned on my Macbook. But kids think it is cool; many creative iPad apps are cool, and it is not up to us to tell children what means of creative expression they prefer, it is our job to listen to them and figure out what they'd like to do and then provide them with those tools if at all possible.

Part of this discussion must be about SPARK's curriculum. We emphatically do NOT have a good curriculum for SPARK. It may or may not be a good curriculum for the underserved, poorly parented children of typical APS schools, but even that point is arguable. It is inarguable that any curriculum for high-ceiling children must have room for teacher inspiration and teacher improvisation (and ours does not); it is inarguable that any curriculum for high-ceiling children may not use as its goal proficiency on the subminimal CRCT test, and our curriculum does.

But let's get back to the creative stuff. We all want our children to explore their creativity. We live in a digital world and on the Web. That's just the way things are now. Therefore, it falls to us as parents to make sure our kids have access to great digital tools and to those parts of the Web that are useful and safe.

That's where the iPad comes back into the equation.

When I brought up the idea of supplying our kids with, say, an iPad cart (which could be checked out by teachers and travel from room to room), I was under the assumption that our iBook cart and our iPad Touch cart--won from the tight-fisted and unimaginative APS bureaucrats only after a mighty struggle--were already in daily use around the school. But that turned out to be more than a little naive on my part.

When I asked the SPARK "technology specialist" (and I'm always going to put quotes around that phrase when I talk about her) exactly how many times the iBook cart had been checked out and used by teachers, I was told the answer was exactly zero.

Zero times. In four months of school.

Why isn't it being checked out? She couldn't give me an answer. But when I put a little blurb in the school newsletter asking for parent volunteers to help us figure out a way to get those iBooks used more often, she took it as a direct personal attack and asked her bosses to call me to retract the article.

Why do you want me to retract it? I asked. I was only relaying what you told me, and it wasn't like I was accusing you of being the reason we don't utilize the resource, I was just trying to ask parents how they would suggest we create more demand for the cart.

No, she said, you are blaming me and I want the article withdrawn.

But your name isn't in the article, and I never even mention you by title. How can you feel this is personal? Still, in the interest of maintaining a good relationship, I changed the article to be more "positive." (Looking back, this was a mistake on my part; our "technology specialist" is in fact a great hindrance to SPARK and to our children and I should never have considered trying to spare her the embarrassment she would diligently continue to earn).

Once again I will ask you to follow me back to this now-tortuous narrative about the iPad: after we'd had our little discussion about the iBook, I could not manage to get any of my fellow committee members, including the laptop-toting but totally useless "data specialists" from APS HQ to reply in any meaningful way about planning for the impact of iPads on our culture. It was as if I had suggested we all start training our children to breathe methane instead of air. They thought I was crazy.

This is exactly my point about the way SPARK is being managed. Of COURSE our school should have been among the first to try out iPads. We have some wonderfully tech-savvy parents and we have plenty of fundraising muscle. There is no chance we would have failed to raise the $20,000 or so it would have cost to do a pilot program, and there is no chance we would have failed to find creative ways to use iPads to enrich the classroom experience.

We could have blazed the trail for many other schools while giving our kids a fantastic new toolkit.

But there is such a failure of imagination among APS employees assigned to our school that the idea was never seriously considered.

It's the circle of life. Many of these APS employees went to dismal public schools and diploma-mill colleges and then were recruited by APS where they would come learn the Data-Driven Gospel According to Beverly Hall, and as a result any imagination they might have once had has vanished.

This is what will happen to your kids if they are not encouraged to create but are instead asked to absorb a bunch of stuff that's going to appear on a test. That's not learning; it's preparation for a life of mediocrity and drudgery.

There is a direct connection between the empty closet at SPARK where our iPad cart should now sit, and the quality of education your kids are now receiving. It may seem like not having iPads is a small thing. But it's not about having them or not having them; it's about failing to see the possibilities. The people to whom you are delegating the job of educating your children--your second-most important responsibility as a parent (after feeding and clothing them and keeping your children safe)--lack imagination.

They are the low ceiling over your child's future.

When you are ready for something better; when you are ready to go to work, let me know and we'll do better.

Kumon comes to Midtown

I've shot footage at several Kumon centers in NY and NJ and talked with a dozen or more parents whose children use the inexpensive, twice-weekly afterschool tutoring service. They uniformly believe Kumon is the greatest ally a parent can have; particularly in areas where the public schools are not great. Kumons hire active and retired teachers and supply them with materials that are definitely challenging but also fun; for me, the most interesting part of my shoots was seeing how much the kids were really into it.

I've checked out the materials and even purchased some for my own son, and I think it is a great service and a great value--particularly compared to the cost of private school or private tutoring.

Check them out at:

http://www.kumon.com/atlanta-piedmont-park

The address is:

1529 Piedmont Ave. Suite K; next to Ansley Mall

Atlanta 30324

Telephone: 404-736-6367

I don't know the folks who have set up this particular Kumon Center (it's a franchisee operation) but we will be getting to know them going forward.

Cecily, why did you run?

I'd like our elected school board rep Cecily Harsch-Kinnane to reply to this question publicly: why did you run for re-election, if you weren't going to at least try to show some leadership during what might be the most sudden, most complete meltdown of an urban school system ever seen in the U.S.?

You have been conspicuously silent on the issue of Beverly Hall's cover-up of the CRCT cheating scandal. When I questioned you on the phone about it, you literally stammered through a rambling, 20-minute monologue during which you questioned whether the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's reporting on the facts was accurate (blaming the media--a page straight out of the Shirley Franklin playbook) before going on to say that you "could understand" why Beverly Hall felt it was okay to hide the Porter CRCT cheating report from your Board and to lie to her Open Records clerk, Rebecca Kaye, so that Kaye could claim, in all innocence, that APS was not "in possession" of the document.

Your reasoning? You believe that because the hilariously misnamed "Blue Ribbon Panel" had received the Porter report, the Board did not also have to look at it, and that you agreed with Hall's reasoning that it might not be "the best idea" to release it to the public.

Well, guess what: you don't get to decide not to abide by the Open Records Act. The "furious five" APS BOE members, including the current BOE president Khaatim El, testified that the Blue Ribbon Panel kept them in the dark about its investigation, including the Porter report. That puts you in the position of supporting the employee---yes, Beverly Hall is your employee--who withheld an important document from your fellow BOE members. I'm sure they appreciate your deciding what they should and shouldn't be allowed to read.

Your other weak defense for Beverly Hall's conduct was that you felt the Porter report "wasn't all that important." Really? Of the two "investigations" arranged by Bev Hall in the immediate aftermath of the CRCT cheating allegations, one, a literal drive-by performed by a no-name hack, was proudly posted on the APS website. The other, the credible document executed by Mr. Porter, was deliberately hidden from BOE and public view.

And you're okay with that.

Parents, this kind of stuff is the best argument I could make for conversion charters. Not only is APS not set up or interested in running a high-ceiling school for your children, APS has as its willing accomplice BOE members like Cecily Look-The-Other-Way Harsch-Kinnane.

I cannot for the life of me understand why you ran for this post, Cecily. At the moment when leadership is most needed, you're quietly and meekly supporting the disgraced and soon to be displaced employee Beverly Hall. If and when parents wrestle control of their neighborhood schools away from your bickering, disfunctional BOE, you and your Board colleagues will only have yourselves to blame.

When you figure out what it is you really want to say about all of this, this forum is yours.

Why do we even need APS in Va-Hi?

This is a serious question: why do we need APS to run Springdale Park Elementary, Inman Middle School and Grady High School? It seems to me the only plausible reason for allowing APS administrators to run these schools is because we're too lazy (by "we," I mean the parents of the current and future students at those schools) to convert these schools to charter schools and do the job ourselves.

Could we do a better job than APS bureaucrats at running our schools? That's a silly question. Have you seen APS in action? But let's assume it's not a rhetorical question; that you really want to know why we should do the job instead of APS. Here's the answer: there is a definite need for something like APS in poor neighborhoods where parents use schools as free daycare. But in neighborhoods in which high-achieving parents who value education have decided to coalesce, APS has never demonstrated an ability or willingness to run a high-ceiling school. I believe that even if they wanted to, they wouldn't have the first clue how to do it.

When it comes to figuring out how to run a school, I'll take a team of motivated parents over a diploma-mill APS bureaucrat any day, and so would you. But it's a lot of work, and it requires admitting to yourself that the school you thought was good enough for your kid really isn't. That last leap is one many of my fellow parents are unwilling to take. They convince themselves that because our schools are pretty good compared to other APS schools and Georgia schools in general, they're good enough.

That's exactly like saying "hey, she's awfully good-looking, for a rural Alabamian."

Career Suicide: Data Driven!

One of the walls you bang your head into whenever you try to challenge someone inside the APS reality distortion field is the "Yes, but we're data-driven!" mantra the Bevvy Hall acolytes repeat like--well, a mantra--whenever they're challenged on any little thing.

Back when I was still covering technology for CNN my producers and I had a list of phrases we would ban from any report, because they were so hackneyed, cliched and (almost always) inaccurate. They were usually phrases that the PR folks or product reps would try to work into any soundbite they gave us about their products. My favorite one of these is this one:

"Our customers told us they wanted this feature."

When you heard that, you always knew there was a major bug with the product and they just couldn't figure out how to fix it.

I'll give you two examples: when the very first .mp3 players appeared on the market (long before the iPod came along and made everyone else irrelevant), one of the very first was a particularly difficult-to-use product that required the user to reboot their computer OUT of Windows and into the computer's BIOS (basic in-out system) in order to hack in some software that would allow the player to load music.

It was a catastrophically bad and user-unfriendly product, and yet when I challenged its marketing rep on the phone about this BIOS nonsense, he gave me exactly the sentence I was expecting:

"Our customers told us they wanted it this way."

A couple of years later, when I had to sign up for AOL service using my own credit card so we could report on some AOL story or other (this was long before AOL devoured Time Warner like a snake devouring a rat--exactly like a snake devouring a rat, actually)--I found myself having to call AOL a couple of weeks later to cancel the account, because our reporting was finished. Only they didn't let me leave. Oh, they told me my account was cancelled, but I kept getting billed. For months. And every time I spoke to a new rep, I was again reassured that my account was cancelled and my credit card charges were being refunded. Of course, as we all know now, AOL was engaged in a systematic campaign of retaining and charging customers who had tried to cancel their service, and I was among the many victims. When I finally lost patience and called AOL Corporate --this time as a CNN correspondent--and got into a yelling match with an absolute nightmare of a VP, she again used the magic words: "Our customers have told us they like to be sure about their decision to cancel before all of their accumulated information is deleted, so we like to give them some extra time, but we always honor their wishes."

(No, you didn't, and by the way, fuck you for destroying Time Warner and my 401 (k), you overrated, arrogant assholes).

But I digress.

The point I was making was how whenever you try to tell somebody in APS how utterly inadequate a job they're doing at something, the first words out of their mouth are likely to be:

"but we are using data-driven best practices."

Of all the frauds committed on the public while Bevvy Hall has been in office, she must be most proud of her ability to con so many smart people into believing that if you call something data-driven it's unassailable. Shame on all of you for buying into that crap as long as you did. Me? I snorted in derision the first time I heard it.

It's almost always uncool to point out instances where you were right about something and a whole lot of other people were wrong. That's bullshit. This wasn't hard to figure out. It was right there in front of you all along. I didn't have any trouble spotting it--I attended a few meetings with these laptop-toting "data specialists" and could tell right away they contributed nothing of value to the process. My wish for the new year is that these parasites will all be forcibly relocated to careers where they don't directly suck needed resources away from children.

Meltdown

It's like watching an old newsreel of the Hindenberg disaster frame by frame. You see it in front of you in super-slow-motion and yet you can't quite believe it's really happening; you can't get your head around the enormity of it all. Such is the experience of watching the Atlanta Public School System go down in flames. I'll have a lot more to say about that coming up in the next weeks.

It's been a good long while since I last posted. In that interval, two important things happened. We had a baby daughter, and we sued the Atlanta Public Schools for failing to provide a free and appropriate public education for our son Vance (about whom you can read elsewhere on this blog). I haven't had the stomach to write much about the lawsuit, frankly, because even though we obtained a settlement that was exactly what we wanted, I'm disgusted that we had to file it at all.

You can download the lawsuit PDF here, if you're interested. If you don't feel like wading through 58 pages of legalese, I'll break it down for you this way:

There were a bunch of things, none terribly difficult to figure out or to do, that APS was required by law to do for our autistic son. If they had the will or ability to do these things, it would not have been terribly difficult or expensive. But most of the people we encountered in the special ed program known as the APS PEC (Program for Exceptional Children) were either unwilling or unable to do what they were hired, trained and compensated to do, and as a result, the Atlanta Public School system is now paying for our child to attend a private school that costs a small fortune.

Now, you might think that as the parent of this child I would be happy that he is now enrolled in a very expensive private school requiring his own private carpool (for a 90-minute daily round trip), but you would be wrong. I couldn't possibly be more pissed off about it than I am. It didn't have to be this way. Vance could still be--and should be-- at his lovely brand-new neighborhood school (SPARK). As a taxpayer, as a libertarian, as a parent--I am outraged that the school system failed Vance so utterly that it must now squander a huge amount of money (I'm bound by the terms of the settlement not to discuss precise sums) correcting its own mistakes. And you should be too.

We interrupt this regularly scheduled ranting....

To announce the birth of Siena Vee Lockridge, born Sept. 7th, 2010, at about 1:40 in the afternoon at Northside Hospital in Atlanta. Debuting at 8 lbs, 4 oz and 22 inches long, and as of this writing (9-9) the baby is following her mom's example and exceeding all expectations in every way.

APS's Wall of Shame

Uh, maybe it's time to take this down...?

As recently as Aug. 20, 2010, this giant posterboard trumpeting APS's CRCT scores in the cheating-plagued 2008-2009 school year was still greeting visitors to APS headquarters downtown.

Do you think they still want visitors to believe that these scores were legit?

I think they still refuse to let go of the notion the scores were utterly fraudulent. They're determined to believe no cheating occurred. Or maybe they have no sense of irony. See more photos here.

Auditing the Program for Exceptional Children

I have obtained a draft of the "Self-Improvement Audit" of the Program for Exceptional Children. The audit is being done by a team of education professionals led by the Boston-based EDC, Inc. You can download the audit (minus the CVs of the auditors) here.

I'll be blogging about it in the days ahead.

My letter to Arne Duncan

Okay, so former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin decides to take it upon herself as a private citizen to appeal to US Education Sec'y Arne Duncan (AKA "White Shaq") to help us with our APS problems.

I say that's a great idea, and here is mine to go with hers.

Dear Arne:

First of all, you are SO freaking tall. What is up with that? Could you bend over a little so I am not just looking up your gigantic tunnel-sized nostrils?

We have a problem. All the statistical gains our city school district claims to have made over the past few years are now turning up to be either fraudulent or doctored in some way. We stacked the chips to get a good NAEP score and then we got blindsided by a few educators who decided to cheat on the CRCTs.

OK, maybe not a few. OK, it was more like a hundred and nine.

But we can't get rid of our superintendent, because she's, like, really popular and won a bunch of awards and it would be embarrassing now to admit that none of the test-score gains or dropout-rate reductions she's claiming are actually valid. (Could we please just not talk any more about scores and data right now? It's kind of a sore spot).

All of us parents who are professionals in other fields know our school district is really screwed. We can't fix it unless we fire everybody who isn't a teacher or principal then fire the bottom ten percent of those, then ask everyone to reapply for their old jobs then turn away most of those who do. Then we have to go back and re-fire everyone who snuck back in via nepotism and "connections," then we have to re-re-fire anyone who got back in to a job where they only collect and sort PowerPoint data.

Because the thing about data collection is this: we were never really good at it. We fudged a lot of numbers and missed some big ones, like the ones that would have told us 58 of our schools had test-cheating issues. And we thought our dropout rate was dropping, but it was, like, exponentially rising.

Oops.

But because our school leaders made such a big whoop about data, it's kind of hard for them to now admit all those data-manipulation jobs were just siphoning away money from people who actually educate children.

Could you please fix all of this for us? After all, it's not fair to have to blame the boss when things go wrong. I mean, I know everyone blamed Obama for not handling the BP spill better, but that's different. Why? Because....well, it just is.

God, you are so unbelievably tall. Where do you buy your suits?

And I know they blamed Obama for all the other stuff that has gone wrong and that it's sort of the American Way to fire the manager when the ballplayers are on a big losing streak, but....well, I just think that is so unfair, because our super is such a nice lady and if you put her out of a job, what in the world is her $100k/year driver going to do to put food on the table? Have a HEART to match the size of your pituitary gland, would ya?

We want you to come down here and tell the local newspaper to stop being so mean. And stop publishing so many facts.

Oh, I forgot one other thing we'd like you to fix. Most of the kids in our system--well, their parents really suck. They're uninterested in helping educate their kids and think our schools are just daycare paid for by taxes paid by people who work and pay taxes (people not like them, in other words). Could you please fix all those parents?

We're counting on you!

Your pals,

The top 10% of APS parents (don't ask me how we got that percentage. Please).

"Tight" security for APS CRCT cheating--er, testing.

In the latest (summer 2010) issue of that must-read periodical "The Atlanta Educator" (you might not have received a copy, or used yours to line a bird cage, so I'll clue you in here), Bev Hall writes one slender paragraph addressing the massive, catastrophic CRCT cheating at APS (which, of course, she's in complete denial about):

"Let me also take time to note that the district anxiously awaits results of an investigation concerning excessive erasures on 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) answer sheets. Headed up by a blue-ribbon panel of business and community leaders, the investigation is expected to be complete by mid- June. Initial reports have found that the district has “tight” testing security and is using many exemplary practices. To strengthen our processes, the panel made a number of recommendations that we implemented for the 2010 CRCT, which our students took in April."

Yup, that's it. That's all she has to say about it.

What "initial reports" is she talking about?

The only official investigation of the Atlanta Public Schools CRCT scandal is being conducted by the "Blue Ribbon Panel" (wow, what PR genius came up with THAT name?) and will be released Monday, Aug. 2, five months after it began and more than two and a half months later than it was due.

Cite your sources, Bev, then explain how your idea of "tight security" squares with the Panel's findings on Monday, when it becomes clear that the Atlanta Public Schools, under your direct supervision, have indeed set a new standard for cheating on standardized tests; a disgrace unequaled by any school district in U.S. history.

You can read the whole issue of "The Atlanta Educator" online, but I won't link to it here, on principle. Any publication that would print such garbage doesn't deserve a link.

Can I use this school-issued credit card to buy me some common sense?

Here's the text of an email I received today from "The Friends of Courtney English," who is our Seat 7 representative on the Atlanta Public Schools Board.

Dear Atlanta Community Member,

As an elected member of the Atlanta Board of Education, I've made a mistake and I hope you will accept my apology.

I did not fully understand the terms of use of a credit card issued to me by the Atlanta Public Schools. I misinterpreted a document that accompanied the credit card when it was issued to me. I mistakenly thought I could use the credit card for personal use as long as I immediately reimbursed the district for any charges incurred.

This is not the policy. I never should have made any personal purchases, period.

I am responsible for $855.83 of disallowed charges made to the credit card between May 29 and June 30, 2010. These charges included an airline ticket, food, gratuities, hotel charges, and other sundries. On July 14, 2010, I reimbursed the district in full for all disallowed charges.

I apologize for this mistake. I take seriously my responsibilities as an elected school board member. I will never make this mistake again.

Sincerely,

Courtney English

Board of Education Seat 7

friendsofCourtneyEnglish@gmail.com
.

And here's what I wrote back to him (corrected from earlier version, where I assumed Courtney was a "her"--rl):

Dear Courtney:

It takes character to admit you made a mistake. Now I hope you will insist on the people you supervise showing the same character.

It is a mistake to try to claim that the worst cheating scandal in the history of standardized testing was the result of some "poor disadvantaged children" trying hard to "correct their own mistakes," as YOUR Atlanta Public Schools spokesman Keith Browery put it when the cheating scandal broke.

To try to actually put this scandal on the backs on the children who were victimized--to, in essence, try to use those children as a shield to deflect criticism from the adults who perpetrated this fraud---now THAT is a mistake that makes yours seem trivial by comparison.

To take credit for being one of the top reformers in the country while in fact your success is largely based on fraudulent test scores (as Bev Hall has done, and is doing)--now THAT is a mistake. Yours is small potatoes compared to that.

When the cheating results are announced on Monday (with a healthy dollop of sugar-coating from the "Blue Ribbon" whatever-it-is, I'm sure), many of us will expect you, our elected leader, to correct some OTHER major mistakes that have been going on lately--like your unwillingness to insist on a permanent director for the Program for Exceptional Children for nearly THREE YEARS now.

Admitting you made a mistake because you're afraid some AJC reporter will find out about it using the Open Records Act is a small first step. (Someone gives you an Atlanta Public Schools credit card and you actually think it would be appropriate to use it for any personal purchases? Give me a break).

If you want forgiveness, show some real courage on Monday.

Let me just add this: does Courtney English not have a credit card of his own? How did it even enter his sphere of consciousness to use a taxpayer-funded credit card --provided for use to him as an elected official -- for personal use?

I think what really happened here is that Courtney English found out that someone from the AJC was sniffing around using the Open Records Act, and he (English) decided to cop a plea before the hammer fell.

How many other APS employees (including Board members) are wondering right now if their own credit card charges are going to be scrutinized now? (Hopefully, the answer is: all of them).