Is being critical of NCLB supposed to be a bad thing?

While supporting Obama in general, I do worry about his effect on school curriculum. The (President Bill) Clinton were bad, pushing whole language reading and fuzzy math. One of the positive things about Bush (the single positive thing?) was a return to sensibility.

The idea that phonetics is inappropriate for black kids for "cultural" reasons is not liberal. Having kids practice and master the operations of arithmetic is not conservative.

"The appointment of Darling-Hammond, a teacher quality expert who opposes merit pay and is more critical than supportive of NCLB, signals that Obama wishes to avoid a fight with the unions. He'll spend his political capital on energy and health care instead."

It is important to remember that there is a difference between being pro-teacher and pro-teacher's unions. In Darling-Hammond's PBS interview she described why teaching is the most important element to ed reform. She also talked about how 40 states will allow teachers to teach without any training. How is wanting high-quality teaching in our public schools counter to Obama's education plan?

http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/today2.html

LDH is one of the few ed. reformers who is smart about teacher recruitment AND retention. You are right that LDH has shown herself to be ever thoughtful by shifting her position on TFA in terms of recruitment of teachers to high need schools. She is also an expert on teacher retention, which is probably the biggest problem facing high need schools in our country. I know because I've been teaching in high need schools for the last 5 years and seen more teachers leave the profession than I can count. LDH wants to give highly effective teachers leadership opportunities and a real career path, which will give them incentive to stay in the classroom, rather than leave at the typical window of time--following year 3, 4 or 5. She is also a proponent of real support for new teachers through programs like urban teacher residencies, which will help address the fact that many new teachers leave in the first year or two because they do not feel effective in their classrooms and don't have the support to see a path to success. These working conditions be improved so that more teachers will want to continue to teach in the most challenging schools, and so that the focus will be on quality teaching and not simply survival until burn-out kicks in. LDH's plans will save money spent by schools on constant recruitment and basic professional development due to high teacher turnover and resulting numbers of inexperienced teachers at high needs schools. Linda Darling Hammond has the knowledge, experience and sensibility to make these changes, which will greatly improve the quality of the teaching force for all our nation's children.

Unfortunately, Dana Goldstein has missed the mark with her November 19th post on President-elect Obama’s vision for the future of teaching and public education, and his support for Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education. Goldstein has it all wrong suggesting that because Darling-Hammond “opposes merit pay” and is “more critical than supportive of NCLB,” Obama is not interested in meaningful education reform and “wishes to avoid a fight with the unions.”
First of all, merit pay — an approach to reward teachers financially for raising standardized test scores — has been tried many times in the past 80 years — and consistently has failed. Historically these tests have not been accurate enough and only a small percentage of teachers actually teach students who are tested annually with valid and reliable assessments. Effective performance pay systems — the ones that Obama (and his advisor Darling-Hammond) support — focus outcomes on standardized tests as well as more authentic measures of 21st century student learning and the spread of teaching expertise. A good example is the new system in Chicago forged by Arne Duncan (also a candidate for Secretary of Education) where teacher unions have worked with administrators to reward teachers as individuals and in teams for progress, results, and leadership.

Second, because Darling-Hammond has questioned NCLB and its narrow focus on current standardized tests, Goldstein suggests that she is the purveyor of the status quo and anti-accountability. In reality, Professor Darling-Hammond has called for improving tests and assessments to better measure higher-order skills, not for eliminating tests. When she has critiqued No Child Left Behind, it has been to suggest improving its assessments and fixing its accountability provisions, not abandoning the law or its focus on results. She has proposed strategies to make the NCLB accountability system more able to track and support all levels of student progress, and to create stronger incentives and supports for serving English language learners and special needs students well. She also has argued that true equity requires investing alongside testing – and that it requires testing which is higher quality, more like the assessments other high-achieving countries use.

Darling-Hammond is not only one of the nation’s most accomplished education researchers, but she also is an excellent teacher. She has worked effectively for decades with federal, state, and local policymakers to improve public education for all students and has pushed the teacher unions to focus primarily on teaching and learning. This is why President-elect Obama has entrusted her as his senior education advisor — and someone who can lead the nation, and the teacher unions, in transforming the teaching profession and the public schools in the 21st century.
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Dana Goldstein shares some useful info about Linda Darling-Hammond, but I don't think she looks at the most important issues.

It's not about the unions. It's about the policies that will take us to the most far-reaching and transformative changes in our schools--changes we desperately need. Linda Darling-Hammond is an incredible leader for serious, transformative educaitonal change. Sometimes these changes are pro-union and sometimes they are not, but that is not the point.

Dr. Darling-Hammond grounded in schools and in student experience. One of the biggest problems of education policy today is the huge disconnect between policy and the reality of schools, and she knows how to make policy bridge this gap. Dr. Darling-Hammond starts with an understanding of what good teaching looks like, and she is able to translate that into all of the key policy areas: teacher and principal preparation, professional development, assessment, accountability, school design, and funding.

Trying to portray Linda Darling-Hammond as "status quo," as some are doing, is absurd. I am a high school principal in California, and from her position at Stanford, she has been one of the most prominent and effective advocates of progressive school reform in the state, if not the nation. She supports real redesign of schools, not tinkering around the edges. She is a huge advocate of teacher quality and teacher training. And she is always focused on equity and on improving the achievement of low-income students and students of color. She has been a teacher, a researcher, a policy advocate, and a school founder. I can't think of a better "change" pick for Secretary of Education.

Why Linda Darling-Hammond would make the best Secretary of Education for President-Elect Obama and the nation: Darling-Hammond has been and continues to be a cutting edge education reformer. She as been in the forefront dealing with the issues that confront us today: standards and accountability, high schools reform, assessment reform, and equity and excellence. About 20 years ago, Darling-Hammond reconceptualized accountability to be centered on the learner. This has become the current conception of accountability. As the executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, nearly 15 years ago, Darling-Hammond framed the idea of a competent caring teacher as every child's right—now the nation has run with this idea. She worked on fiscal reforms as well as district and state level management reforms. She is a key designer and player in the Stanford University Business School and Education School collaboration and leadership program. She has tirelessly promoted reforms for teacher education. And, she has gotten the support of diverse, often oppositional constituencies for these reforms: governors, state education commissioners, legislators, policy makers, researchers, practitioners, and unions, all of whose cooperation is necessary to reform education in this country. Like Obama, Darling-Hammond has shown herself to be a unifier rather than a divider.

Darling-Hammond has started and supported charter schools and in fact works with the Washington DC Association of Public Chartered Schools. She has had the courage to take unpopular stands such as opposing the placement of untrained and unqualified teachers in classrooms (particularly those with the neediest learners), the privatization of public education, and the improper use of standardized tests, and the proliferation of low-level-test-prep curriculum that dominates many of classrooms with the nation's poorest children. And she uses evidence not ideology to support her positions. Despite a long history of an effective reformer who understands the complexity of making educational change, ideologues have branded her a traditionalist! That is simply ridiculous.

Regarding, Joel Klein, founder of Democrats for Education Reform, where are the facts that support the assertion that he is a reformer? The NYC small schools high school reform for which Klein is credited, was actually initiated in 1993 and Darling-Hammond was a partner in that work at that time. That work proliferated through at least 4 NYC schools Chancellors before Klein. Of merit pay, the NYC BOE was giving bonus pay to schools that improved their performance for several years before Klein came on the scene. Of the claims of increased student test scores, the NAEP shows that the scores have remained flat through Klein's tenure (you can read it in the NY Times--a front page article). You can also read in the NY Times that during Klein's tenure there has been a decrease in the percentage of Black and Latino students admitted to gifted programs and NYC's highest performing high schools. The percent of Latinos admitted to NYC's 4-year colleges has remained static while the percentage of Blacks has declined. There is no diversity in Klein's cabinet--there is and has consistently been one position for a person of color: Deputy Chancellor for Instruction, lately an invisible position with no oversight authority. A recent survey showed that more than 75% of parents give Klein poor job approval rating. The report card accountability system is a statistical sham that has schools narrowing curriculum to test-prep rather than college-prep. The old bureaucracy has been replaced with a new bureaucracy that lacks transparency and is as confusing as ever. Read the NY Times on the middle and high school choice processes. What the NYC DOE has is great PR. The current NYC reform is about the privatization of public education and undoing the teachers union. While unions as well as district-union contracts need to be reformed, it should be noted that school districts where teachers are not unionized do not produce better student outcomes than districts where they are unionized.

The Obama adminstration would be smart to appoint an educator to be Secretary of Education. And none is more accomplished, committed, and determined that Linda Darling-Hammond.

As a high school principal for the past 17 years in a school serving a rural, poor population, I wait with great anticipation for a Secretary of Education who cares about the things that matter to my students and staff. We are a good school, a graduation rate of over 98%, 100% acceptance rate into colleges (including Harvard last year), kids who leave registered to vote and having done community service, and some of the highest standards in the state (Ohio) including a graduation portfolio and senior project. Yet because our kids do not always pass the NCLB mandated tests the first time, all the other things we do go unrecognized and unfunded. We need a Secretary of Education who will support the genuine innovations and reforms that will improve the odds for schools like mine. Reforms centered on supporting teaching and teachers, moving to performance assessment, and promoting equity of educational opportunities. Linda Darling-Hammond has committed her professional life to these reforms and would be an advocate for America's students in Washington. Her research and advocacy has been based on research and not ideology and speaks directly to the issue of teacher supply and equity, the key issues the federal government should address. I can only hope that Mr. Obama, for whom I campaigned more than I have for any candidate before, will have the courage to appoint someone with Darling-Hammonds experience and background to ODE. The recent appointment of Chu at Energy is perhaps a good sign that the Obama team will choose expertise over politics when it comes to Education.

Selecting a Secretary of Education is quickly being re-framed by competing ideas of accountability and the future of education. With that has come a rush to label ideas as either "reform" or "establishment" (see Brooks, 12/5/08). Such steps are in stark contrast to the Barack Obama's candidacy, which was built on a platform of inclusion -- moving beyond stale and divisive ideologies and finding common ground. The values at the core are equity, opportunity and possibility for all children. The re-authorization of NCLB and economic challenges ahead make it imperative that we reaffirm three core values in supporting educational reform:

* the holistic development of all children (not just reading/language arts and math standardized test scores);

* deep and extensive educator preparation and in-service staff development; and

* the development and support of entire organic communities that support quality teaching and learning, not the disenfranchisement of many to make way for quick structural reforms.

We believe that David Brooks has it exactly backward in referring to Joel Klein as an exponent of reform and Linda Darling-Hammond as representing the establishment. We strongly support the policy platforms of educators like Linda Darling-Hammond who have worked throughout their careers for policies and reforms built on the above core values. We welcome the day when these core values and approaches would actually be the "establishment" rather than solely the option of a select few.

Let's face it the political brainwashing of our kids will continue, even worse, with Sizer and Ayers schools and politics being pushed as education is being used for 'social change'.

SHAMEFUL.

Just look at this list of criminals:

www.forumforeducation.org

I am a high school principal in California, and from her position at Stanford, she has been one of the most prominent and effective advocates of progressive school reform in the state, if not the nation. She supports real redesign of schools, not tinkering around the edges. She is a huge advocate of teacher quality and teacher training.