Monday, September 17, 2012

Online Law Education - Your Guide To Making An Educated Decision

Becoming a lawyer is among the most fashionable course of study nowadays and with really fine reason. In the present time, in that respect, are several characters of practicing law are publicized regularly. Criminal justice law is in much demand in real time more than ever. Modifications to real estate and property laws in the past 50 years approximately have brought in property attorneys marketable to a critical level. Divorce attorneys, for marital separations, experience a plenty of wreak delegate their direction. And so let alone there follows the culture of litigating for insurance policy takes which we altogether exist in personifies the reason behind a bunch of the financial obligation and physical injury business law firm survive. With so a great deal of opportunities and businesses active around at some given period sooner or later, there is no doubt why a respectable percentage of scholars prefer to encourage successful the domain of law. Nonetheless, not every last of them has the chance.

That had better really show they were not able to find the opportunity in the beginning when cyberspace education was contrived. Legal philosophy is an exceedingly best-selling field of study and is tendered through a swollen percentage from the internet schools, universities and colleges out in that location at the moment. Steady cyberspace colleges feature a modified count of posts all semester and on that point are generally really a couple to reserve. Really some folks quit either, for they are indeed esteemed and a person will call for a law academic degree to pass into a business firm later upon graduation. You must therefore make certain that your schooling is every bit a good deal amusing as achievable because you will live wedged on it for a couple of years!

Monday, August 20, 2012

Girls with ADHD more likely to self-harm, attempt suicide

study out of the University of California at Berkeley conducted over a 20-year period and funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, researchers and psychologists found that girls who have ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER (ADHD) show higher rates of self-inflicted injury and suicide attempts than girls who do not have ADHD.  Researchers found that of the girls in the study diagnosed as both ADHD-inattentive and ADHD-impulsive, 22% reported at least one suicide attempt by the 10-year follow-up mark; of the girls diagnosed as only ADHD-inattentive, and 8% reported at least one attempt at suicide at some point, compared to 6% of the control group.  In the category of self-inflicted harm, researchers found that 51% of the ADHD-combined group reported instances such as scratching, cutting, burning, or hitting themselves as compared to 29% of the ADHD-inattentive group and 19% of the control group.  The study tracked 140 girls diagnosed with ADHD and 88 girls without ADHC from childhood to teen and young adult years.  The study's lead researcher concluded that "ADHD is a highly genetic condition with a strong biological basis."
If your daughter has ADHD, you ought to bring this study to the attention of the school, 504 and/or IEP team, and ask them to be vigilant and note any concerns of such behaviors. 

Sunday, August 19, 2012

New to Arizona? What you need to know about INTERSTATE TRANSFERS

When a child with an IEP in effect in another state moves into Arizona, the new Arizona school district (or charter school) is responsible for providing the student with FAPE.  That means that the new school must provide services comparable to those described in the existing IEP from the former school until such time as the Arizona school district conducts an evaluation (if it determines that is necessary) and develops a new IEP, if appropriate, consistent with federal and state law. 20 USC 1414 (d)(2)(C)(i)(II).  The new school must take reasonable steps to obtain the child's records, including the IEP and supporting documentation, from the previous school in compliance with FERPA. 34 CFR 300.323 (g)(1). To facilitate the transition, you as parents should provide the last/existing IEP and any other school records to the Arizona school district.  Typically, the new school will schedule an IEP meeting within thirty (30) school days of your child's entry into the new school, but you may also request an IEP meeting.  If a parent requests an "emergency" IEP meeting, it must be held within fifteen (15) school days (not calendar days) of the request.  NOTE:  The new school district must implement the existing IEP (the IEP from your out-of-state school) on the first day your child enters school.  Of course, practically speaking, you should have provided the school with the IEP in advance of your child's first day of school so that all services, or equivalent services, could be in place.  And make sure all communications with your new school are followed up with confirming emails.     

http://www.azspecialeducationlawyers.com/  

Friday, August 17, 2012

Autism Awareness in Iraq

 A new center for children with autism has opened in Baghdad, a positive step that the world is working towards understanding those with special needs. This CNN report gives hope to those who are in need of services and support. Bravo!

 

http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=wo_t3#/video/world/2012/08/17/karadsheh-iraq-austim.cnn

Cheat Sheet of Acronyms

Print this out and use as a guide when reading through the special ed records (the REDs, METs and IEPs) and at RED, MET and IEP meetings:
ADAAA            Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act
ALJ                   Administrative Law Judge
BIP                   Behavior Intervention Plan
ED                    Emotional Disturbance
ESY                  Extended School Year
FAPE               Free and Appropriate Public Education
FBA                 Functional Behavioral Assessment
FERPA             Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act
IAEP or IAES   Interim Alternative Educational Placement/Setting
IEE                   Independent Educational Evaluation
IEP                   Individualized Education Program
IFSP                 individualized Family Service Plan
ISS                   in-School Suspension
LEA                  Local Educational Agency
LRE                  Least Restrictive Environment
MDR                Manifestation Determination Review
MET                Multidisciplinary Education Team
OAH                Office of Administrative Hearings
OCR                 Office of Civil Rights
ODD                Oppositional Defiant Disorder
OHI                  Other Health Impaired
RED                 Review of Existing Data
SEA                  State Educational Agency
SLD                  Specific Learning Disability
SLI                   Speech and Language Impaired
SPED               Special Education

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

What is Public about Public Education: Jim Strickland's Thoughts to the National League of Democratic Schools

Editor:  Jim Strickland has been a long-time believer in an education for sustaining democratic life.  He is also the former regional coordinator for the Western region of the National League of Democratic Schools and a special education teacher in Washington State.  Jim has written several posts for us in the past and also has written for Dick Clark's blog, Community and Education, that we talked about in the memorial to Dick below.  We welcome Jim's latest reflections on "Citizenship as Education," and thank him for his permission to reprint it here. Jim writes that it was a response to his reading of Benjamin Barber's Strong Democracy, and believes that "Barber's participatory understanding of democracy and citizenship provides a powerful context for our work in education."  The National League of Democratic Schools in which the journal participates has become richer because of the work of both Jim and Dick.

Citizenship as Education
by
Jim Strickland

The term “public education” can be understood in a couple of different ways. One common meaning is related to its funding source. Public education is education that is publicly funded, as in our public schools and other publicly financed educational programs.

Another meaning of public education, however, is related to its primary purpose. In this view, public education refers to our intentional efforts to create a public – that is, a body of citizens who have the inclination and the capacity to participate in the ongoing and responsible practice of self-government. This broader understanding of public education encompasses the work done by our public schools, but extends far beyond them to include the institutions and political, economic, and social structures of the larger community.

This kind of public education – citizenship education – is a community responsibility. And, as is the case with other types of learning, it is best learned by doing. In other words, the best way to become a true citizen is in the actual practice of citizenship. Citizenship is its own education. And to make this education possible, it is our job as a community to ensure that real opportunities for citizen participation are widely and continuously available, known to the community, and actively supported.

So what does the practice of citizenship look like? I like to think of citizenship as simply doing my part to make my community work. And in a democracy, that means participating at some level in the practice of self-government. Voting, yes, but much more than that. Democracy can be understood as a continuous process of mutual transformation. It is a respectful “give and take” that results in beneficial growth to all those involved.

And this process is driven by, more than anything else, ongoing and thoughtful dialogue. Yes, the foundation of democracy is the very human act of just talking with each other. It is through this never-ending public conversation that we come to understand each other, grapple with new ideas, enlarge our thinking, and ultimately solve problems and make decisions together. This kind of citizenship is the most transformative kind of education there is. You cannot emerge unchanged because continuous and responsible change is the name of the game.

But this kind of public education – citizenship education – doesn’t just happen all by itself. We have to intentionally create the forums for it to flourish. Here are a few suggestions to get us started. We could begin by:

1) Creating more opportunities for nonpartisan dialogue around issues that are important to us (this could include regular citizens’ forums and neighborhood assemblies).

2) Finding ways to integrate the practice of citizenship more seamlessly into our daily lives, even at the workplace (this could include an increase in workplace democracy and giving employees paid time off for participation in citizenship activities).

3) Raising expectations for citizenship by empowering citizen groups with real decision-making authority and promoting a culture of ownership.

4) Exploring new ways to increase participatory citizenship in our schools (this could include more participatory modes of school governance, regular civic action involving school-community partnerships, and making citizenship a primary measure of student success).

Citizenship, like democracy, is a way of living that stretches us to grow and brings out the best we can be. It is the common arena in which we define ourselves both as individuals and in terms of our relationships with others. Citizenship is how we hammer out a vision for community that works for us all – today.

But what works today may not work tomorrow, so this process can never stop. I want to live in a world where growth never stops, where learning never stops, where the human conversation never stops. And to me, that’s what public education is all about.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Presentation August 15, 2012: Overview of Special Education Law

In this overview of special education law, a school attorney alongside two “parent attorneys” will present the framework and concepts of federal and state special education laws (IDEA, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, NCLB, FERPA, the Rowley S. Ct. decision) and discuss defenses in special education litigation and how to avoid litigation in the first instance. You will gain perspective from both sides of the aisle, and learn the legal avenues available when students’ educational rights have been violated, and how schools can avoid violations in the identification, evaluation, eligibility and placement of students with disabilities, and disciplinary procedures when a student has an IEP or 504. 

Who should attend: Attorneys who defend public, charter and private schools, including nursery and pre-schools and colleges and technical schools; Judges who may have special education students appear before them.

Earn 1.5 CLE credits.  

Date/Time:
Wednesday, August 15, 2012, 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM

Location:
Lewis and Roca LLC, 40 N. Central 15th Floor 

To Register:
https://www.azadc.org/Default.aspx?tabid=2335&mid=4280&ctl=Register&eventid=1807


Speakers
 

Denise Lowell-Britt is an equity partner at the law firm of Udall, Shumway & Lyons where she heads the firm’s education law practice group.  Her practice is devoted entirely to representing school districts, charter schools and other public educational institutions in matters that include:  special education, student disciplinary hearings, employment and personnel, student records, governing board liability and open meeting issues.  In November 2006, she was named a “Top Education Attorney” in Phoenix Magazine. In 2007, 2008 and 2009, she was selected by her peers as a “Best Lawyer in America” in the specialty of Education Law.  Ms. Lowell-Britt is a member of the National School Board Association, Arizona School Boards Association and Arizona Council of School Attorneys.  She has also been an adjunct faculty member for Arizona State University, teaching graduate level Education Law classes for the College of Education, Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies.  She has been on the steering committee for the Arizona School Administrators “Principal and the Law” conference for approximately 14 years.  In March 2009, Ms. Lowell-Britt was presented with the Laura Ganoung Award, which is the Arizona Council of Administrators of Special Education’s (CASE) highest award recognizing leadership in the area of special education.

Hope Kirsch and Lori Kirsch-Goodwin are the founding members of Kirsch-Goodwin & Kirsch, PLLC, which has an education practice devoted to representing students and their families in disputes with public, private and charter schools, and secondary education institutions.  Hope is a 17 year veteran of the New York City Board of Education where she was a special education teacher, Crisis Intervention Teacher and Unit Coordinator in self-contained classes, public special education day schools and psychiatric hospitals before embarking on law, and earned her B.S. and M.A. in special education and completed post-graduate work in in educational supervision and administration.  Lori has navigated the special education system first-hand as the mother of her now teenage son who is “on the spectrum.”  Hope and Lori have worked collaboratively with Denise for the past several years in the due process arena and with disciplinary matters. 


Monday, July 30, 2012

In Memory: Richard “Dick” Clark 1936-2012

I was saddened to hear of Dick Clark’s passing on July 6th. I saw Dick just last month at the conference of the National League of Democratic Schools in Seattle, a network of schools across the nation, started by John Goodlad, that has been a laboratory for democratic practices. The Journal of Educational Controversy and its partner school in the Educational Institute for Democratic Renewal have been part of the movement since 2004 and we have written about it many times on this blog.

Dick shared his thoughts along with John Goodlad and stayed for some two hours. His voice was strong and his arguments compelling even while his body was weak. He fought the good fight right to the end and will be missed. I have a link on my blog to the blog, Community and Education, that he had been writing over the years as well as a special link to "Washington Happenings" where he followed the significant events in our state. It was very helpful for my readers. Dick believed in the public purposes of education and kept arguing for a democratic vision right to the end. We hope to continue his concerns in the media and in the public debate. Indeed, Dick’s call for scholars to advance the Agenda for Democracy is echoed in our journal’s mission to bring scholars in their capacity as public intellectuals into conversation with the public and its legislators.

Dick’s last post on his blog was an inspiring message to those committed to the League’s Agenda for Democracy. We reprint it here so Dick’s voice will continue through our readers.

Make AED [Agenda for Democracy] Scholars an Organizing Center

By Dick Clark

Can the AED Scholars Become an Organizing Center?

The Institute works to advance the Agenda for Education in a Democracy. This Agenda consists of a four-part mission, a set of strategies to achieve that mission, and conditions that are necessary to carry out the strategies.
The agenda is mission driven and research based. It seeks to:
• Foster in the nation's young the skills, attitudes, and knowledge necessary for effective participation in a social and political democracy.

• Ensure that all youths have access to those understandings and skills required for satisfying and responsible lives regardless of race, religion, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, or birth language.

• Develop and provide continuing support to educators who nurture the learning and well being of every student.

• Ensure that educators are competent and committed to serving as stewards of their schools.
To accomplish this mission, schools and universities seek simultaneous renewal of schools and the education of educators.  They do so by putting in place the conditions necessary to renewing the nation's schools and its democracy.
There is little doubt about the commitment to the Agenda for Education in a Democracy among the AED scholars. I suspect we live out that commitment everyday and in every aspect of our work. The question before us, as I understand it, is not about commitment to the work of furthering the Agenda, but about whether or not we, as a group of scholars, want to be an organizing center for its promotion. Surely we are all enmeshed in a web of groups and institutions that occupy all of our waking hours (and some of our sleeping hours as well). We endeavor to exercise responsible influence on the groups and institutions within our spheres.

For me thus far, belonging to AED Scholars has been an honor. I feel privileged to be in the company of so many gifted, ethical and like-minded educators. It gives me some measure of comfort to know that others are doing the work to which we have a collective commitment. However, I do not feel as though I have been a very good steward of the agenda beyond my own personal actions day to day. That is to say, I feel that I have promoted democratic ideals whenever and wherever possible, but have not deliberately or publically connected them to AED. Very few people who have read my scholarship or with whom I interact day to day understand that my behavior is motivated by AED. Perhaps one of the best things we can do as AED scholars is make our commitment more public. It would not be a small thing to agree to use a common symbol of our work that acknowledges our group, one that links us to the agenda and to one another.

How are linked? What kind of relationships exist among the AED scholars? Thus far we have been primarily a community of ideals, not so much a community of place or even a discourse community (in the sense that we share scholarship on a regular basis). The AED scholars may not feel that it’s necessary to draw together as yet another freestanding entity. Do we wish to add to the current constellation of groups and institutions to which we belong? I would argue that we do need to draw together, that we do need to be an organizing center and that we do need to become a strong community of mind. We need to be so simply because our mission is to further the agenda. I once asked John [Goodlad] what he meant when he used this phrase, for he uses it quite often. What does it mean to further the Agenda? Does it mean further develop the agenda or does it mean to better disseminate the Agenda? John was pretty clear that he meant the latter. If that is so, it implies enlisting others to share our values and see the world, and what is important in it, as we do. If you follow that reasoning, then the AED Scholars’ role would be to formulate an identity and expand our influence. We would go as many other organizations have gone – increase our membership, accumulate resources, undertake “missionary” work, mentor new scholars into this group, become better known. Surely we know how to do this. The question is, do we have the will?

I can think of six strategies for pulling a group such as ours together: 1. Write a text in which we each take responsibility for a section or chapter. 2. Convene together to present papers and discuss ways to support one another. 3. Make presentations about aspects of the agenda at state and national meetings. 4. Create a virtual community using all of the tools available to us on the World Wide Web. 5. Band together with other groups and organizations that share our values. 6. Construct a common syllabus and see that it gets institutionalized in our college or university.

I am sorry that I do not have more imaginative suggestions. The key in making this group more viable is for those of us involved to make a conscious pledge to devote a portion of every week/month/year to furthering the agenda through collaborating together. I look forward to seeing other ideas and suggestions.

Posted by Dick Clark at 11:54 AM June 23, 2012

http://www.communityandeducation.org/

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Attorney Hope Kirsch Obtains Arizona Department of Education Certificate in Special Education (Emotional Disturbance)

KGK is pleased to announce that attorney Hope Kirsch has obtained a Special Education Teaching Certificate from the Arizona Department of Education in Emotional Disturbance, grades K-12.  This is in addition to the several special education teaching and supervisory licenses she had obtained in New York.  KGK represents special needs students and their families in special education disputes.  Hope has an understanding of the IEP process, having worked the school side; Lori's understanding of the IEP process is as a parent.  Together, they know how to work with parents and the schools to obtain the education to which students are entitled.     

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Upcoming Presentation at SARRC, July 23, 2012

  Lunch & Learn - Know Your Educational Rights Under the Law
Guest Presenters: Hope N. Kirsch, Esq. & Lori Kirsch-Goodwin, Esq.

The presentation will begin with an overview of the federal special education law, “Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act” (IDEA), state law and notable case law decisions interpreting the legislation.

The presentation will also address:
• The rights of students with special needs in public and charter schools
• Whether a student is entitled to IDEA protections at private schools
• Requirements of FAPE (free and appropriate public education)
• LRE (least restrictive environments)
• Evaluations and reevaluations
• Placement
• The IEP itself
• Timeline and discipline procedures
• Other laws (No Child Left Behind, FERPA)

Helpful hints will also be provided that most parents do not know about and schools might not clearly inform the parents about.

When: Monday, July 23, 2012

Time:
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Where:
SARRC Main Campus
300 N. 18th Street
Phoenix, AZ 85006

Cost:$15 per person

Contact & Registration:  http://sarrc2012-know-ed-rights.ettend.com/

For additional details, please contact Sheri Dollin at (480) 603-3284
or email training@autismcenter.org

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

What child prodigies and people with autism have in common

Child prodigies evoke awe, wonder and sometimes jealousy: how can such young children display the kinds of musical or mathematical talents that most adults will never master, even with years of dedicated practice? Lucky for these despairing types, the prevailing wisdom suggests that such comparisons are unfair — prodigies are born, not made (mostly). Practice alone isn't going to turn out the next 6-year-old Mozart.

So finds a recent study of eight young prodigies, which sought to shed some light on the innate roots of their talent. The prodigies included in the study are all famous (but remain unidentified in the paper), having achieved acclaim and professional status in their fields by the ripe age of 10. Most are musical prodigies; one is an artist and another a math whiz, who developed a new discipline in mathematics and, by age 13, had had a paper accepted for publication in a mathematics journal. Two of the youngsters showed extraordinary skill in two separate fields: one child in music and art (his work now hangs in prestigious galleries the world over), and the other in music and molecular gastronomy (the science behind food preparation — why mayonnaise becomes firm or why a soufflé swells, for example). He became interested in food at age 10 and, by 11, had carried out his first catering event.

All of the prodigies had stories of remarkable early abilities: one infant began speaking at 3 months old and was reading by age 1; two others were reading at age 2. The gastronomist was programming computers at 3. Several children could reproduce complex pieces of music after hearing them just once, at the age most kids are finishing preschool. Many had toured internationally or played Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall well before age 10.

Six of the prodigies were still children at the time of the study, which is slated for publication in the journal Intelligence. The other two participants were grown, aged 19 and 32.

The study found a few key characteristics these youngsters had in common. For one, they all had exceptional working memories — the system that holds information active in the mind, keeping it available for further processing. The capacity of working memory is limited: for numbers, for example, most people can hold seven digits at a time on average; hence, the seven-digit phone number. But prodigies can hold much more, and not only can they remember extraordinarily large numbers, but they can also manipulate them and carry out calculations that you or I might have trouble managing with pencil and paper.

Working memory isn't just the ability to remember long strings of numbers. It is the ability to hold and process quantities of information, both verbal and non-verbal — such as, say, memorizing a musical score and rewriting it in your head. All the children in the study scored off the charts when tested on measures of working memory: they placed in at least the 99th percentile, with most in the 99.9th percentile.

Surprisingly, however, the study found that not all of the prodigies had high IQs. Indeed, while they had higher-than-average intelligence, some didn't have IQs that were as elevated as their performance and early achievements would suggest. One child had an IQ of just 108, at the high end of normal.

Other unusual parallels: prodigies and autistic people are more likely to be male (though that finding may be due in part to the failure to recognize girls on the autism spectrum and, perhaps, girls’ outsized talents) and both are associated with difficult pregnancies, suggesting that uterine environment may play a role in their development. In the math whiz's case, for example, his mother "started labor nine times between the 29th and 37th weeks of her pregnancy and required medication to stop the labor. During the 35th week of her pregnancy, her water broke and she had a 105-degree fever from an infection in her uterus. The child prodigy did not have a soft spot at delivery," the authors write.

There was something else striking too. The authors found that prodigies scored high in autistic traits, most notably in their ferocious attention to detail. They scored even higher on this trait than did people diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism that typically includes obsession with details.

Three of the eight prodigies had a diagnosed autism spectrum disorder themselves. The child who had spoken his first words at 3 months, stopped speaking altogether at 18 months, then started again when he was just over two-and-a-half years old; he was diagnosed with autism at 3. What's more, four of the eight families included in the study reported autism diagnoses in first- or second-degree relatives, and three of these families reported a total of 11 close relatives with autism. In the general population, by contrast, about 1 in 88 people have either autism or Asperger’s.

When Asperger’s was first described in 1944 by Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, he referred to children with the syndrome as “little professors” because of their prodigious vocabularies and precocious expertise, and because they tended to lecture others endlessly without being aware of their own tediousness. Poor social skills and obsessive interests characterize the condition.

Yet, despite the obvious similarities, very little research has been done on the connection between autism and extreme talent. One previous study, published in 2007, did find that close relatives of prodigies — like close relatives of people with autism — tended to score higher on autistic traits, particularly in problems with social skills, difficulty switching attention and intense attention to detail. Other than that, however, the issue hasn't been studied systematically, beyond the observation that autism is often seen in savants, or people with exceptional abilities who have other simultaneous impairments.

Prodigies, in contrast, appear to benefit from certain autistic tendencies while avoiding the shortfalls of others. On a standard assessment of traits associated with autism, the prodigies in the current study scored higher than a control group on all measures, including attention to detail and problems with social skills or communication. But they scored lower than a separate comparison group of people who had Asperger's — except on the attention-to-detail measure, in which they outshone everyone.

“One possible explanation for the child prodigies’ lack of deficits is that, while the child prodigies may have a form of autism, a biological modifier suppresses many of the typical signs of autism, but leaves attention to detail — a quality that actually enhances their prodigiousness — undiminished or even enhanced,” the authors write.

In other words, these children may have some genetic trait or learned skill that allows them to maintain intense focus, without compromising their social skills or suffering from other disabilities that typically accompany autism spectrum disorders. Comparing these children with those who have full-blown autism or Asperger's could therefore potentially help pinpoint what goes wrong in those who develop disabling forms of autism and what goes right in others with similar traits who simply benefit from enhanced abilities.

The current study doesn't tread that ground, but its findings do fit in with the intense world theory of autism, which posits how the disorder may arise. The theory holds that certain patterns of brain circuitry cause autistic symptoms, including excessive connectivity in local brain regions, which can heighten attention and perception, and diminished wiring between distant regions, which can lead to a sort of system overload. In both animal and human studies, this type of brain wiring has been associated with enhanced memory and also with amplified fear and sensory overstimulation. The former is a good thing; the latter may cause disability.

The intense world theory propounds that all autism carries the potential for exceptional talent and social deficits. The social problems, the theory suggests, may ensue from the autistic person's dysfunctional attempts — social withdrawal and repetitive behaviors, for instance — to deal with his heightened senses and memory.

It's possible, then, that the wiring in prodigies' brains resembles that of an autistic person's, with tight local connections, except without the reduction in long-distance links. Or, their brains may function just like those with autism, but their high intelligence allows them to develop socially acceptable ways of coping with the sensory overload.

Although some researchers — and much of the public, influenced by popular books like journalist Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers — argue that prodigious expertise can be acquired with sheer effort, 10,000 hours of practice to be exact, the current findings suggest that natural talents can blossom in far less time. “[Many prodigies] displayed their extreme talent before reaching 10 years of age, undercutting the nurture-based theories that credit contemporary training techniques and upwards of 10 years of deliberate practice as the root of all exceptional achievement,” the authors write.

That doesn't mean all is lost for the rest of us, notes Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive psychologist at New York University. “There is research showing the positive benefits of working memory training,” he wrote on his blog on Psychology Today's website, suggesting that practice could take us closer to perfect.

The current study is a small one, and much more research needs to be done to elucidate the connections between highly gifted children and those with autism spectrum conditions. But the findings strongly suggest that such connections exist. They also caution against characterizing the genetic roots of conditions like autism — or other potentially disabling problems like mood disorders, which have been linked with exceptional creativity — as wholly negative. If the same "risk" genes may lead to both debilitating autism and great intellectual gifts, we need to understand them far better before we label them as unwanted.

The IEP Team - who is a required member and who is not?

Who is required to be on the IEP Team and who is not?  What rights do Parents have about who is on the child's IEP Team? 

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ("IDEA" at 20 U.S.C. 1414[d][1][B]-[d][1][D]) describes the IEP Team as including the following members:
The IEP members are required to attend each IEP meeting, unless excused by the Parents.  Each IEP Team member should attend the annual IEPs, but Parents may excuse any IEP Team member who is not particularly involved in an issue that is to be discussed at other IEP meetings, including emergency IEP meetings.  Parents may object to any "other individual" who does not know the child, and Parents may and should object to the school's attorney attending an IEP meeting unless the attorney for the parents/child is also attending.  We encourage Parents to include an educational advocate and/or a relative or close friend for support.   

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Upcoming presentation at SARRC to get you ready for the new school year

Lunch & Learn: Know Your Educational Rights Under the Law
Guest presenters Hope N. Kirsch, Esq., and Lori Kirsch-Goodwin, Esq.  
Hope and Lori will begin with an overview of the federal special education law, “Individuals with Disabilities Education Act” (IDEA), state law and notable case law decisions interpreting the legislation. Their presentation will also address:
  • The rights of students with special needs in public and charter schools
  • Whether a student is entitled to IDEA protections at private schools
  • Requirements of FAPE (free and appropriate public education)
  • LRE (least restrictive environment)
  • Identification
  • Evaluations and reevaluations
  • Placement
  • The IEP itself
  • Timelines
  • Discipline procedures
  • Other laws (No Child Left Behind, FERPA, ADAAA and 504)
Date: Monday, July 23, 2012
Time: Noon-1 p.m.
Place: SARRC Campus for Exceptional Children, 300 N. 18th St., Phoenix
Cost: $15 per person
To register:  call (480) 603-3283 or e-mail training@autismcenter.org.
Visit:  http://www.autismcenter.org/documents/Outreach_S_2012.pdf

Monday, June 25, 2012

Call to Action: Keep All Students Safe Act

COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR
AND PENSIONS

HEARING NOTICE
 
To:             All Committee Members
                        Title:         Beyond Seclusion and Restraint: 
                                           Creating Positive Learning Environments for All Students
Date:          Thursday, July 12, 2012                                     
Time:          10 a.m.
Place:         TBD
Witnesses
§  Dr. Daniel Crimmins , Director, Center for Leadership in Disability, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia
§  Ms. Cyndi Pitonyak , Coordinator of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, Montgomery County Public Schools, Christiansburg, Virginia
§  Dr. Michael George , Director, Centennial School, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
§  Ms. Deborah (Debbie) Jackson , parent, Easton, Pennsylvania
RAISE YOUR VOICE in Congress
Let Congress know that now is the time to pass federal legislation that provides protections for every child in school. Even if you have told them before, tell them again – and urge everyone you know to do the same!  Many school, parent and national advocacy organizations  have been actively working  towards the passage of federal legislation that raises the bar of protection and safety in schools for all students.   All students must be safe in the schoolhouse.  Insist that Congress pass federal legislation without delay. 

Senator Tom Harkin (Chair, Health Education Labor and Pension Committee) introduced S. 2020, the Keeping All Students Safe Act on December 16, 2011 to protect students from dangerous restraint and seclusion. A bipartisan hearing, “Beyond Seclusion and Restraint: Creating Positive Learning Environments for All Students,” cosponsored by Senators Harkin and Enzi is scheduled for June 28th

Representative George Miller (Ranking Member, House Education and Workforce Committee) introduced H.R. 1381, the Keeping All Students Safe Act in the House on April 6, 2011. The bill currently has bipartisan support, thanks to Rep. Gregg Harper with 42 cosponsors.

Representive Miller and Senator Harkin must be applauded for their staunch and continued leadership on this critical issue. 

The Keeping All Students Safe Act will promote a shift toward preventing problematic behavior through the use of de-escalation techniques, conflict management and evidence-based positive behavioral interventions and supports. This shift will help school personnel understand the needs of their students and safely address the source of challenging behaviors – a better result for everyone in the classroom. In many cases, the use of positive supports and interventions greatly diminishes and even eliminates the need to use restraint and seclusion. For example, the Centennial School in Pennsylvania, which serves children in 35 school districts, has cut the use of restraint and seclusion from well over 1,000 occurrences per year to less than ten through the use of positive supports. Reports and studies have also shown that students and staff are safer when positive interventions and supports, rather than restraint and seclusion, are used in schools. Worker's Compensation costs even decrease significantly.
Other critical provisions of the bill include:
§  Ensure the safety of all students and school personnel
§  Promote positive school culture and climate.
§  Protect students from being locked in rooms or spaces from which they cannot exit.
§  Promote of effective intervention and prevention practices, emphasize training, de-escalation, conflict management, and evidence-based practices shown to be effective in prevention.
§  Restrict physical restraint to emergencies posing a serious threat of physical harm to self or other.
§  Prohibit use of these dangerous practices to punish children, coerce compliance, for behavioral infractions, or as a substitute for positive behavioral support or proper educational programming.
§  Prohibit the use when less restrictive measures would be effective in stopping the threat of harm.
§  Require that the imposition end when the emergency ends.
§  Ban restraints that are life threatening (including those that interfere with breathing), mechanical and chemical restraints, aversives that threaten health or safety, and restraints that interfere with the ability to communicate or which would harm a child.
§  Require that parental notification occur within 24 hours and require staff and family to debrief so as to prevent use in the future.
§  Require that states collect data, make it available to members of the public, and use the data to minimize further use.
§  Protect teachers, staff, and parents from retaliation when they report violations of the law.
§  Prohibit including restraint as a planned intervention in Individual Educational Programs or other individualized planning documents. 
§  Preserve existing rights under state and federal law and regulation.
Existing laws alone have not protected students against such abuse and injury, though many do offer important protections.  Creating a national floor of protection will ensure that children are protected in every state.
Urge Arizona's elected officials to co-sponsor and pass H.R. 1381 and S. 2020.   Email Senators Jon Kyl and John McCain and your Congressional Representative.  Ask them to co-sponsor and pass the Keeping All Students Safe Act.    Ask your friends, family members and colleagues to do the same.
HOW TO CONTACT CONGRESS
·         Arizona's Senators are Jon Kyl and John McCain
·        Look up your Representative:  http://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/AZ
·         Give them your message, then pass this alert along to others!
Call, write a letter or email: “I am contacting Senator ___________/Representative _________ to move legislation to end the use of seclusion in schools.  Restraint should only be used in emergencies threatening the physical safety of the student or others.  The Keeping All Students Safe Act will create a baseline of protections to ensure the safety of all students and school personnel.   I urge Senator ___________/Representative __________ to address this national problem and move the Keeping All Students Safe Act now.”
Please, call, write or email this week. Children’s lives depend on it. 

Sunday, June 17, 2012

“Wreaking Havoc in Public Education”-- and Undermining our Democracy

 Editor:  In our current issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy, Deborah Meier raised some important questions about the educational reform movement that has dominated our national discourse in her article, “Is This What Democracy Looks Like.”  Below is another author who looks critically at the buying and selling of school reform in our nation.  We thank Dissent Magazine for giving us permission to reprint this timely article for our readers.  We don’t usually put up such long posts on our blog, but because we believe it is important to understand the complexities on how money is being used to undermine our democracy, we are reprinting the article in its entirety.

Hired Guns on Astroturf: How to Buy and Sell School Reform
By Joanne Barkan

Dissent Magazine, Spring 2012


If you want to change government policy, change the politicians who make it. The implications of this truism have now taken hold in the market-modeled “education reform movement.” As a result, the private funders and nonprofit groups that run the movement have overhauled their strategy. They’ve gone political as never before—like the National Rifle Association or Big Pharma or (ed reformers emphasize) the teachers’ unions.

Devolution of a Movement

For the last decade or so, this generation of ed reformers has been setting up programs to show the power of competition and market-style accountability to transform inner-city public schools: establishing nonprofit and for-profit charter schools, hiring business executives to run school districts, and calculating a teacher’s worth based on student test scores. Along the way, the reformers recognized the value of public promotion and persuasion (called “advocacy”) for their agenda, and they started pouring more money into media outlets, friendly think tanks, and the work of well-disposed researchers. By 2010 critics of the movement saw “reform-think” dominating national discourse about education, but key reform players judged the pace of change too slow.

Ed reformers spend at least a half-billion dollars a year in private money, whereas government expenditures on K-12 schooling are about $525 billion a year. Nevertheless, a half-billion dollars in discretionary money yields great leverage when budgets are consumed by ordinary expenses. But the reformers—even titanic Bill and Melinda Gates—see themselves as competing with too little against existing government policies. Hence, to revolutionize public education, which is largely under state and local jurisdiction, reformers must get state and local governments to adopt their agenda as basic policy; they must counter the teachers’ unions’ political clout. To this end, ed reformers are shifting major resources—staff and money—into state and local campaigns for candidates and legislation.

Jonah Edelman, CEO of Stand for Children ($5.2 million from Gates, 2003-2011), sums up the thinking: “We’ve learned the hard way that if you want to have the clout needed to change policies for kids, you have to help politicians get elected. It’s about money, money, money” (Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2010).*

* The ed reform movement comprises a large network of nonprofit organizations and consultancies whose funding comes mostly from private foundations. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—with assets six times larger than Ford, the next largest foundation in the United States—dominates the movement. To give some sense of the interconnections and the scope of the colossal foundation, I note in parentheses the amount of money various groups have received from Gates.

The Great Political Opening

The Obama administration created the perfect opening for the ed reformers’ political strategy. The U.S. Department of Education stipulated that in order to win federal funds in the 2010 Race to the Top contest, applicant states would have to pledge to abolish limits on charter schools, legislate teacher and principal evaluations based in part on students’ standardized test scores, and fully implement statewide data-collection systems. The mandates spurred money-starved states to propose controversial new education laws. Candidates running for office—from state senator to local school board member—took sides. The ed reform organizations plunged into both legislative and candidate battles, ratcheting up the campaign spending and rhetoric, casting each contest as a battle for the future of the nation through public school reform (tales of the campaigns further on).

The movement’s market-modeled reforms have so far produced more failures than successes. Study after study throws into question the value of most charter schools, incessant standardized testing, and grading teachers or closing schools based on student test scores. The ed reformers’ drive to get new laws passed aggravates matters by making bad policy mandatory and more widespread. It is mindless micromanaging gone amuck.

Take the case of Tennessee, where 35 percent of every teacher’s evaluation is now based on standardized test scores. On November 6, 2011, the New York Times reported that no tests exist for over half the subjects and grades, including kindergarten, first, second, and third grades, art, music, and vocational training. So state officials ruled that a school’s average scores for another subject and grade will be used for teachers without student scores. For example, fifth-grade writing scores will be plugged into, say, a first-grade teacher’s evaluation. In addition, teachers can choose the plug-in subject themselves for 15 percent of the 35 percent. This means they have to bet on which classes will produce the highest scores. A travesty? Not for the ever-ready boosters of the ed reform movement, including the New York Times editorial page. The Times offered this judgment on November 11: “…political forces [in Tennessee] are now talking about delaying the use of these evaluations. State lawmakers and education officials must resist any backsliding.” Anything goes as long as it’s stamped “ed reform.”

A summary critique of the reform strategy comes from Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute ($5.2 million from Gates, 2003-20011) and executive editor of Education Next (sponsored in part by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, $4.2 million from Gates, 2003-2009). Hess swears allegiance to market-based reforms but often criticizes the quality of his allies’ actual work. This is from his November 16, 2011 blog post on Education Week ($4.6 million from Gates, 2005-2009):


By turning school reform into a moral crusade, in which one either is, to quote our last President, “with us or against us,” would-be reformers wind up planting their flag atop all kinds of half-baked or ill-conceived proposals....Would-be reformers insist that overshooting the mark with half-baked proposals is actually a strategy, because that's how they'll cow the unions and change the culture of schooling. Indeed, they think concerns about program design are quaint evidence of naiveté.
Chipping Away at Democracy

Yes, the policies of ed reformers are wreaking havoc in public education, but equally destructive is the impact of their strategy on American democracy. From the start, the we-know-best stance, the top-down interventions at every level of schooling, the endless flow of big private money, and the imperviousness to criticism have undermined the “public” in public education. Moreover, the large private foundations that fund the ed reformers are accountable to no one—not to voters, not to parents, not to the children whose lives they affect. The beefed-up political strategy extends the damage: the ed reformers (most of whom take advantage of tax-exempt status) are immersing themselves in the dollars-mean-votes world of lobbying and campaigning.

The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United (January 2010) and a related federal appeals court ruling in SpeechNow.org (March 2010) created loopholes for nonprofit organizations that effectively abolish all limits on campaign contributions. Ed reformers exploit the new legal framework exactly like other political operatives. This has two marked consequences. First is the fate of the original deal established by Congress—tax-exempt status in exchange for staying away from politics while serving some public good. The deal was eroded before Citizens United; now it has collapsed. In the world of ed reform, the political strategy makes a mockery of the tax-exempt privilege of the foundations and nonprofit groups involved. Second, most ed reformers have benefitted from branding themselves as progressives or “lifelong Democrats” (“I love labor unions—just not teachers’ unions”). This has given them credibility with liberals who, like most voters, haven’t paid close attention to the content and results of the ed reforms. The labeling has always been a ruse, but the politicking reformers have obliterated dividing lines: they work in local and state campaigns alongside corporate free-marketers and right-wing social conservatives who’ve long and openly supported privatizing public education, ending social programs, and eviscerating labor unions. In practice, they are one team.


Some funders and their tax-exempt grantees have hesitated to get more involved in politics. On occasion the reluctance has been cultural: they’ve always shied away from public debates on government policy and advocacy in general. More often it’s fear of jeopardizing their tax status. According to IRS regulations

• private foundations—a type of 501(c)3 organization—cannot lobby (defined as trying to influence legislation); they cannot campaign (defined as supporting or criticizing a candidate for public office); they can, however, “educate” anyone, including lawmakers, on any issue;

• most of the recipients of foundation money for ed reform are nonprofit groups with a different 501(c)3 status; they can do a specified amount of lobbying but no campaigning for candidates.

Here is the loophole: this second type of 501(c)3 can set up affiliated groups that do lobby and campaign. It can set up the following:

• political action committees (PACs), which have limits on the size of contributions accepted

• Independent Expenditure Committees (super PACs), which can accept unlimited contributions but cannot “coordinate” work with a candidate or party (an almost meaningless restriction)

• 501(c)4 “social welfare” organizations, such as the AARP and NAACP, which can accept unlimited  contributions as long as political activity is not their “primary” activity (another weak restriction)


• 527 organizations that advocate only for issues, not candidates, and can accept unlimited contributions (the line separating issues from candidates is fuzzy)
Pro-politicking ed reformers routinely set up a full array of such groups and solicit contributions for each. In this way, they can collect unlimited funds from many donors for different purposes. Having mastered the nitty-gritty of political money, these reformers have been trying to convince their hesitant colleagues to join in and pony up.

Wary of Politics? Get Over It

On May 12, 2010, six reform leaders made their pitch to a roomful of funders, consultants, and staffers of nonprofits at the annual “summit” of the New Schools Venture Fund. The panel was called “Political Savvy: Guidebook for a New Landscape.” Speakers included executives from Green Dot Public [charter] Schools (Gates, $9.7 million, 2006-2007), Bellwether Education Partners (Gates, $951,800 in 2011), Hope Street Group (Gates, $875,000 in 2008-2009), Stand for Children (as noted above, $5.2 million from Gates, 2003-20011), Democrats for Education Reform (a PAC), and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation (one of the largest ed reform funders, nonetheless a Gates grantee, $3.6 million, 2010).

Stand for Children’s Jonah Edelman—who has turned his nonprofit into a political machine with prodigious fundraising capability and offices in eleven states—articulated the afternoon’s main themes: “We’re not using money for political purposes almost at all in this movement. If one percent of the money that’s going into charter schools went into politics and elections in the support of education reform, we would end up with way more progress for the movement.” Later, he exhorted, “And if you search your heart and you feel uncomfortable using certain tools, get over it.” He also addressed the legal issue: “It really needs to be ‘by any means necessary,’ and you can do a lot legally. What you can’t do legally in terms of electioneering, that’s where partnerships come in.” Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform (another robust political outfit with affiliates around the country), offered more specific advice: “Find more creative lawyers. We need them [ed reform nonprofits] to fire all of their lawyers that tell them ‘no’ all the time, if they have traditional 501(c)3 lawyers….”


Another of Williams’s comments reveals what is so misguided about this brand of education reform: “I think charter schools should be paying advocacy organizations for their advocacy work out of their per pupil dollars. If you think of running a school as running a business, any sound business is going to allocate right off the bat a certain percentage of their funding towards lobbying, advocacy work.”

But why think of running a school as running a business? Striving for efficiency is one thing—a good thing in many human endeavors, including school administration. But the analogy doesn’t hold beyond that: a school’s “bottom line” is not measured in dollars of profit; it shouldn’t waste resources on winning “market share” away from other schools. And why should charter schools pay for advocacy out of per-pupil dollars? Those are taxpayer dollars meant for those children’s education; the students “carry” those dollars away from a regular public school and give them to a charter school.

Williams’s position is self-serving: the per-pupil “fee” for advocacy would go to him and others among the multitude of salaried ed reform advocates. This problem of self-interest goes far beyond dunning kids for advocacy dollars. The ed reform movement has turned itself into an industry—an industry made up of scores of nonprofit groups of every size that operate locally, statewide, and nationally. They employ hundreds of people, many at high salaries (Williams’s 2010 salary was over $265,000); they rake in money from private foundations, wealthy individuals, and government. (As critics note, George Bush’s signature ed reform program, No Child Left Behind, quickly became No Consultant Left Behind.) The nonprofit ed reform industry has a growth model: the more of its agenda that becomes law, the greater the demand for personnel to design, implement, study, and revise government mandated programs. To opponents, this looks like a racket. For ed reformers, it’s only, and always, about “helping children.”

It Takes a Bundle: The New School Board

In one model of democracy, local school board elections would be genuinely local. With a few hundred dollars, a stack of lawn signs, time to ring doorbells, and one or two endorsements, you could win a position of importance in your community: a say in how children would be educated and how a sizable amount of public money would be spent. In the real world until recently, only teachers unions and the Christian Right paid much attention to these elections (the Christian Right recognized their importance as a political stepping stone some thirty-five years ago); few citizens bothered to vote. Now the ed reformers have jumped in, turning school board races into battles requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars per candidate and outside operatives. This sabotages both rootedness in the community and access. A potential forum for grassroots democracy is lost.

Consider the November 1, 2011 school board race in Denver. Three candidates ran as a “reform slate” for the three available seats on the seven-member board. Colorado doesn’t limit contributions in school board elections, so money from the ed reform movement and corporate CEOs poured in.

According to the final tallies posted on Colorado’s Campaign Finance Disclosure website, the reform slate took in $633,807 (an average of $211,269 per candidate). Just six donors—including executives in the oil, health-care, construction, and financial industries—accounted for $293,000 of the total. One of them, Strata Capital president Henry Gordon, told the Colorado Statesman (October 17, 2011) that he wasn’t familiar with the candidates when he gave the slate $75,000 but simply complied with the request of another major donor. The market approach to ed reform appeals to business leaders in general. Depending on their industry, some of them also stand to gain from reform-generated contracts.

STAND FOR Children (headquartered in Portland, Oregon) gave the reform slate $88,511 in “non-monetary” contributions of staff support and canvassing services. When an outside organization hires and pays for staff and vote solicitors and then “donates” their work to a candidate, the work looks like grassroots organizing but isn’t. It is “astroturfing”—a term the late U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is believed to have coined in 1985. Astroturfing is political activity designed to appear unsolicited, autonomous, and community-rooted without actually being so.

Astroturfing is the modus operandi of the ed reform movement. Contributions of staff and services skyrocketed in Denver in 2011. Two years earlier, for example, the candidate who is now the pro-reform school board president received just $310 in non-monetary contributions. In 2011, in addition to the $88,511 from Stand for Children, the reform slate took in $34,231 in mostly non-monetary contributions from a 501(c)4 group called Great Schools for Great Kids (Education News Colorado, December 2, 2011). The original source of this money isn’t clear—501(c)4s are not required to disclose donors. But the record shows that Great Schools for Great Kids transferred money to a super PAC that has the same registered agent and office suite as a Stand for Children affiliate. The money sloshes around.

The six other candidates in the nonpartisan race raised a total of $212,973 (an average of $35,495 per candidate). This, too, seems like a lot of money for a school board race, and yet, on a per candidate basis, the reform slate took in six times as much money as opponents did. The Denver Classroom Teachers Association endorsed two candidates. One of them received $71,240 from the union in monetary and non-monetary donations; the other received $40,720. According to the Denver Post (December 2, 2011), the union spent another $86,000 through a committee called Delta 4.0 on mailers to advocate for the two candidates. Labor unions [501(c)5s in the IRS code] have tax exempt status, as do business associations and political campaign organizations. Unlike ed reformers backed by private funders, however, the teachers’ unions are mass organizations with established local affiliates and elected leaders accountable to dues-paying members. Whatever their strengths and weaknesses, teachers unions are tied to schools, students, parents, and communities through their members.

Two of the three Denver reform candidates won; the third lost by only 142 votes to the union-endorsed incumbent. The deluge of money certainly helped the reformers retain their four-to-three majority on the board. Equally important, the ed reform operation reached a pivotal goal: to eclipse the longstanding power of the teachers’ unions in the political arena. The expense and acrimony of the race prompted a Democratic state representative to re-propose spending limits. Unfortunately, after Citizens United, limits can end up funneling even more money into the web of political committees, where it’s harder to track and where individual donors can remain anonymous.

Denver wasn’t the only absurdly expensive school board race in 2011. For other examples, click here.

The Company They Keep


Ed reformers liven up their websites with photographs of happy-looking school children, many of them minorities: the kids are busy at work or smiling into the camera. Meanwhile, their self-appointed benefactors ally with politicians who are slashing school budgets, cutting social services and benefits, gutting jobs programs, undercutting health-care reform, pummeling public sector unions, and passing laws that make it harder for the children’s parents to vote. The disconnect between what ed reformers claim to be doing for low-income children and what they actually bring about boggles the mind.

The poster child for this moral disconnect is former Washington, D.C. schools chancellor and ed reform celebrity Michelle Rhee. Rhee resigned her D.C. post in October 2010 after her boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, failed in his reelection bid. Within weeks, Rhee had set up a 501(c)4 advocacy organization called StudentsFirst; she announced a five-year fundraising goal of $1 billion. Rhee explained the purpose of her project this way (Daily Beast/Newsweek, December 6, 2010):

When you think about how things happen in our country—how laws get passed or policies are made—they happen through the exertion of influence. From the National Rifle Association to the pharmaceutical industry to the tobacco lobby, powerful interests put pressure on our elected officials and government institutions to sway or stop change. Education is no different.
Rhee had a hectic first year. She started 2011 with gigs as ed reform policy advisor to three conservative Republican governors: Florida’s Rick Scott, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, and Ohio’s John Kasich. Walker and Kasich provoked mass protests in their respective states by pushing through laws that rolled back not only the salaries and pensions of public sector workers (including teachers) but also their union rights. Rhee came under fire for helping to shape the teacher-related provisions of the laws. She tried to wash her hands of the matter by saying that she didn’t work on collective bargaining issues and didn’t endorse everything in the laws. But during a March 5, 2011 interview on Fox News, she asserted that unions “don’t have a place in getting involved in policies, and so I think that the move to try to limit what they bargain over is an incredibly important one.”

NO ONE knows how much money Rhee has raised so far or from whom: at this writing, the tax returns haven’t been filed, and she keeps her donors anonymous (although Rupert Murdoch is rumored to have given $50 million). Regardless, Rhee made a splashy debut as a high-rolling lobbyist. Her lobbying entity in Michigan, called United for Children Advocacy DBA StudentsFirst, spent $951,018 from January through July 2011 to influence the content of ed reform legislation. According to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, this made Rhee the biggest spending lobbyist in the state. She accounted for nearly half of the 11.6 percent increase in total lobbying spending compared to the same period in 2010. The state’s largest teachers union, the Michigan Education Association, ranked sixth, spending $324,197.

Rhee also set up a super PAC in Michigan called Parents and Teachers for Putting Students First. It contributed $73,000 of its $155,000 bankroll to oppose the recall of Paul Scott, Republican chair of the state House Education Committee. Scott voted to cut K-12 spending while advancing ed reform bills. According to the Flint Journal (January 1, 2012), the Michigan Education Association contributed $140,000 to support the recall. Scott raised almost double that amount. Rhee’s major allies in this battle included the right-wing billionaire couple Dick and Betsy DeVos (his father co-founded Amway). The DeVos family has funded education privatization efforts around the country since 1990; they are among the biggest promoters of vouchers (per-pupil public funds that students can withdraw from the public system and use to pay for private schools, including religious schools); they also fund Christian Right schools. The recall effort succeeded by 197 votes.

In New Jersey, Rhee connected with two hedge-fund managers—David Tepper, a Democrat, and Alan Fournier, a Republican. The duo had recently joined the club of no-expertise-in-education billionaires dedicated to changing public schools. In March 2011, Tepper and Fournier launched a 501(c)4 called Better Education for Kids, Inc., and a super PAC called Better Education for New Jersey Kids, Inc. During the summer of 2011, the super PAC spent about $1 million on TV and radio commercials to promote Republican Governor Chris Christie’s ed reform program. In the fall, the super PAC gave $400,000 to support four pro-reform candidates for state Assembly: two, both Democrats, won; the two Republicans lost. Since then, the 501(c)4 has been offering New Jersey teachers $100 gift certificates to participate in private meetings about teacher evaluations. Tepper and Fournier’s super PAC and 501(c)4, it turns out, constitute the New Jersey branch of Rhee’s StudentsFirst. The ed reform network expands while remaining knit together by money and the strength of the moral crusade.

Jammed Down Their Throats: An Inside Story

Hubris is a core characteristic of today’s ed reformers. Of necessity, it informs their politicking. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the ed-world scandal that Stand for Children’s Jonah Edelman created (his name reappears because he’s a prime mover of the political strategy). At a session of the Aspen Ideas Festival on June 28, 2011, Edelman told his story of how the Illinois chapter of Stand, under his direction, shaped the state’s education reform bill and helped get it through the legislature. A video of Edelman’s presentation went viral on the Web, causing great embarrassment for Illinois lawmakers and teachers’ unions. They promptly denounced him and tried to correct the record. Edelman made a public apology, and Stand’s Illinois chapter appointed a new, if nominal, director. Still, Edelman’s account is extremely useful for understanding the attitude and style of ed reformers.

The Illinois law, which the governor signed on June 13, 2011, makes it easier to fire tenured teachers and revoke certification, eliminates seniority as the top consideration in layoffs, bases teacher evaluations on to-be-finalized measures of student performance, gives Chicago’s school administrators the unilateral power to lengthen the school day and year, and makes a strike by Chicago’s teachers nearly impossible.

Maneuvering for the law began with the 2010 elections to the state legislature. Chicago Democrat Michael Madigan, speaker of the Illinois House for twenty-seven years, was running again. Edelman had raised more than $3.5 million for Stand’s Illinois war chest, mostly from Chicago’s wealthiest families, Republicans as well as Democrats. Since the substance of the story is in Edelman’s telling, here are excerpts from his talk (for the complete video, click here):

…So our analysis was he’s [Madigan] still going to be in power, and as such the raw politics were that we should tilt toward him, and so we interviewed thirty-six candidates in targeted races.…I’m being quite blunt here. The individual candidates were essentially a vehicle to execute a political objective, which was to tilt toward Madigan. The press never picked up on it. We endorsed nine individuals, and six of them were Democrats, three Republicans….


…That was really a show of—indication to him that we could be a new partner to take the place of the Illinois Federation of Teachers. That was the point. Luckily, it never got covered that way. That wouldn’t have worked well in Illinois. Madigan is not particularly well liked.


[Stand for Children, which gave $610,000 to its endorsed candidates, was one of the biggest contributors in the election.]…After the election, we went back to Madigan…and I confirmed the support [for Stand’s legislative proposal]….The next day he created an Education Reform Commission, and his political director called to ask for our suggestions who should be on it….In addition, we hired eleven lobbyists, including four of the absolute best insiders and seven of the best minority lobbyists, preventing the unions from hiring them. We raised $3 million for our political action committee. That’s more money than either of the unions have in their political action committees.


And so essentially what we did in a very short period of time was shift the balance of power. And I can tell you, there was a palpable sense of concern, if not shock, on the part of the teachers unions in Illinois that Speaker Madigan had changed allegiance and that we had clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down their throats the same way pension reform had been jammed down their throats six months earlier.


…And so over the course of three months, with Advance Illinois [another ed reform group, $1.8 million from Gates in 2008] taking the negotiating lead…and Advance and Stand working in lockstep…they [the union negotiators] essentially gave away every single provision related to teacher effectiveness that we had proposed.


…We fully expected [on the collective bargaining issues] that our collaborative problem-solving of three months would end, and we would have an impasse and go to war, and we were prepared. We had money raised for radio ads, and our lobbyists were ready. Well, to our surprise, and with [Chicago’s newly elected mayor] Rahm Emanuel’s involvement behind the scenes, we were able to split the IEA [Illinois Education Association, a statewide union] from the Chicago Teachers Union.


…So the Senate backed it [the bill] 59 to zero, and then the Chicago Teachers Union leader started getting pushback from her membership for a deal that really, probably, wasn’t from their perspective strategic. She backed off for a little while, but the die had been cast. She had publicly been supportive. So we did some face-saving technical fixes in a separate bill, but the House approved it 112 to one.


… We’ve been happy to dole out plenty of credit, and now it makes it hard for folks leading unions in other states to say these types of reforms are terrible because their colleagues in Illinois just said these are great. So our hope and our expectation is to use this as a catalyst to very quickly make similar changes in other very entrenched states.

Astroturf—Says Who?

Jonah Edelman’s exploits offended not only Illinois legislators and unionists but also African American clergy in Chicago. BlackCommentator.com posted an account by David A. Love on July 29, 2011 (available here):

Edelman attended a community meeting of black Chicago clergy with what observers have called a "slick dog and pony show."…According to Rev. Robin Hood, executive director of Clergy Committed to Community, SFC [Stand] wasn't the least bit interested in the concerns of the black community. "They were interested in getting people to see [the pro-charter film] Waiting for Superman....I found they were anti-union when we met with Stand for Children. It was all about money.”…Although SFC spread around a lot of money in Chicago communities, Rev. Hood emphasized that not one of the pastors in his group would take any of it.
The Edelman Affair is a sorry tale, not only because Jonah is the son of civil-rights leader Marian Wright Edelman and poverty analyst Peter Edelman, but also because Stand started out as an authentic grassroots organization in Oregon. When the scandal broke, longtime activists who had quit or become inactive “spoke out” online. Their reports are remarkably similar. The following is from an open letter to Edelman from Tom Olson, a decade-long volunteer and local leader, posted on the Parents Across America website on July 22, 2011. Olson and his wife had cancelled their sustaining memberships fifteen months earlier:

[I]n 2009, a number of us began to observe a serious erosion of your commitment to true grassroots operations....One of the “reforms” you and your staff began to tout was a call for legislation to create more “flexibility” for schools. This was obviously a thinly disguised attempt to erode negotiated teacher contract agreements and to create more charter schools. It was clearly modeled after some Colorado legislation you had pushed as you shifted to demanding attention to a national agenda supported mostly by corporate and Wall Street millionaires.
Dropping grassroots activism in favor of the ed reformers’ top-down strategy put Stand in sync with the rest of the movement. Ed reformers rarely concede, let alone lament, that they deal mostly in astroturf paid for by wealthy whites. So a frank assessment by Jeanne Allen, founder of the Center for Education Reform, merits attention. In 2010 CER received $275,000 from Gates to launch the Media Bullpen, a baseball-themed website that rates education reporting according to reform criteria. (I gladly disclose that my article in Dissent, Winter 2011, “Got Dough: How Billionaires Rule Our Schools,” received a “strike out,” the lowest rating.) Allen posted the following online on December 19, 2011:

The main reason that poor and minority communities fail to engage in our movement has very little to do with elected Republicans or Democrats and everything to do with us. As a movement (and I've seen this first-hand for more than twenty years), we believe advocacy is when a professional shows up in their friend the majority leader's office and has a good meeting....Real grassroots efforts are on the ground, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, long-term, sustainable education efforts to engage and fortify REAL people, to be REAL voices. Neither ConnCan [flagship branch of 50CAN, $2.4 million from Gates in 2011], nor Stand, nor any of those who claim to do grassroots do it....It's the failure of people who love and advance an issue through their own narrow (albeit powerful) lenses and fail to recognize that the marketing and lobbying firms they hire are clueless about what is really necessary to truly make progress
.
Endgame

A strong democracy requires a public education system, one that is excellent throughout and open to all. The United States failed even to aim for this standard until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawed racial segregation in schools. Since then, since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (which directed federal funds to low-income schools), the nation has made progress toward access and excellence. Too slowly, of course, but progress nonetheless (see Richard Rothstein’s March 8, 2011 analysis for the Economic Policy Institute). Ed reformers ignore the data, claiming that poor and minority children are no better educated now than thirty or forty years ago. In fact, progress has slowed only in the last decade, since No Child Left Behind was implemented and the reform agenda gained traction. Other factors may play a role, but the ed reformers certainly haven’t improved progress.

The line of battle for the future of public education is clear. Allied on one side are free-market zealots in the business community, pro-voucher social conservatives, and this peculiar breed of reformers whose political movers are often wealthy, private-school educated, white, male, and under the age of fifty. They are the junior plutocracy, strivers whose do-good goal twenty years ago would have been a seat on the board of the municipal art museum. They are typically clueless about public education. On the other side are public school students, their families, their teachers, and believers in the link between democracy and public education. The first side has money, powerful political connections, and an infrastructure of nonprofit organizations with paid staff. The other side has this: the ability to become a true grassroots movement. This looks like an unequal contest. But with sustained effort, citizen activists at the grassroots can trump hired guns on astroturf.

Appendix:

The 1 Percent for School Board

Louisiana: The usually low-key elections for state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education cost well over $1 million in the fall of 2011. According to state campaign finance data, a pro-reform funding group called the Alliance for Better Classrooms took in more than $750,000—40 percent of it from construction mogul Lane Grisby and family members ($200,000) and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s trust ($100,000). The state’s most important business lobby, the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, gave pro-reform candidates at least $250,000, according to Stateline, a news service sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts (Gates, $1.4 million to the Pew Research Center, 2011). The pro-reformers won six of the seven races.

Wake County, NC: The fall 2011 school board elections were the most expensive in the county’s history, costing more than $500,000, according to an early tally by the News & Observer website (November 8, 2011). At stake was a nationally acclaimed program that uses busing to achieve economic—and thereby racial—diversity. In 2009 multimillionaire conservative Art Pope (profiled in the New Yorker, October 10, 2011) spent heavily to get a Republican majority elected that would dismantle the program. The board promptly devised a plan to do that. The backlash against Pope, his allies, and the board produced a Democratic sweep of the five open seats in 2011. This vote for school integration made news around the country.

Correction: The original version of this article stated, “Three candidates ran as a ‘reform slate’ for the three open seats on the seven-member board.” Three candidates did run on a “reform slate,” however only two of the seats were open; the other was contested by an incumbent.

About the Author:
Joanne Barkan is a writer who lives in Manhattan and Truro, Massachusetts. She grew up on the South Side of Chicago where she attended public elementary and high schools.

For other articles by the author of interest to our readers, go to: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781

Editor: There are considerable numbers of links in this article.  Go to the original article at Dissent to connect with the links.