Illinois bobkitten makes Archaeology magazine's Top 10 list while governor fiddles with SB 317 veto

D R A F T

This may be the saddest story to come down the pike in Springfield for a long time. It's a local story, but it shows that in spite of what they say, all politics isn't always local. Here's what I posted to Facebook:

Here's a link to the story in Archaeology, monthly magazine of the Archaeological Institute of America, at:

http://www.archaeology.org/exclusives?slg=top-10-bobkitten-discovery

Be sure to link through the the Illinois Archaeological Survey's video. It's also available on YouTube at xxxx.

Save the Illinois State Museum, the local single-issue advocacy group that formed when Gov. Rauner closed the museum in connection with his budgetary spat with House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, posted the Archaeology magazine's Top 10 story this afternoon to its Facebook feed.

This year archaeologists announced that bones discovered in a Hopewell Mound in Illinois did not belong to a dog, as previously supposed, but to a baby bobcat. It is the first known example of a bobcat buried like a human and is one of ARCHAEOLOGY's Top 10 Discoveries of 2015.

The bones remain in a collection housed at ISM's research facility on 11th Street in Springfield. But they are no longer accessible to scholars since Gov. Rauner closed the museum. The true cost of his political tactics came in the comments section, when A.R. Perri said:

We are really proud of this research. If the ISM reopens we can continue our work on this exciting bobcat find. Until then, any work on the bobcat has to be put on hold, sadly.

A.R. Perri's name isn't a household word, but she has a perspective here. A postdoctoral fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, she is the scientist who discovered the bobkitten skeleton in an ISM collection and began looking into its significance.

More details here, in http://www.archaeology.org/issues/200-1601/features/3955-illinois-hopewell-bobcat-burial, on another magazine webpage:

[Perri] determined that the nearly complete skeleton belonged to a juvenile bobcat, between four and seven months old. The bones show no signs of trauma, indicating the bobkitten likely died of natural causes, probably malnutrition. “It looks like they came across a baby that they tried to raise but failed,” says Perri. “When it died they had become close enough to it that it warranted this special burial.”

Along with the bones, Perri found four shell beads and two carved effigies of bear teeth worn as a necklace—grave goods common to Hopewell human burials—making this the only decorated burial of a wild cat found in North America, as well as the only animal buried alone in its own mound. Though the Hopewell had had domesticated dogs for hundreds of years, Perri says that having a tamed bobcat would have been “a very uncommon experience.”

Links to today's YouTube posts:

• https://www.facebook.com/peter.ellertsen/posts/1639393496321690 -- to my FB feed.

• http://www.archaeology.org/issues/200-1601/features/3965-top-10-archaeological-discoveries-of-2015 -- to the Archaeology story and ISM video. Dr. Perri's is the first comment.

Cartoons and political discourse

Rich Miller, who runs the Capitol Fax legislative information service and is easily the most incisive political blogger in Illinois, had an especially thought-provoking post today. It wasn't about Statehouse politics: It was Miller's personal reaction -- which he called a rant -- to the death of Fox Lake police lieutenant Joe Gliniewicz, who committed suicide after embezzling an estimated $50,000 from a scout post affiliated with the police department.

It was anything but a rant.

Basically Miller added his voice to other commentators who said the circumstances of Gliniewicz's life and death were too complex and nuanced for a good cop-bad cop story:

Too much about our society isn’t real. Our public discourse is too often based on way too little information and way too much ideology, all intensified by our too-quick reactions in an age when everybody has access to their own online megaphones.

Many of us in this Statehouse business got a close look at how this works when Barack Obama ran for President. He was quickly turned into a cartoon character that few of us recognized. Hero or villain, that just wasn’t the person we knew.

Cartoon versions of reality abound. Just read any newspaper comment section for two minutes (or more than a few newspaper opinion pages), or browse your Facebook feed. It’s not only disappointing, but downright dangerous that so many people choose to live in their own black and white fantasy worlds and forcefully believe that everyone else should, too.

Miller quoted Greg Tejeda of the Chicago Argus blog, who resisted the knee-jerk impulse to paint Gliniewicz as a "crooked cop" and leave it at that. "They’re human beings! Just like everybody else," Tejeda said, and Miller agreed:

We are, indeed, all just human beings. We’re all a little different and strange in our own dark little corners. Even so, most of us try to do good things. ... We should recognize that, once we’ve grown into adulthood, everybody will occasionally disappoint, some much more than others. It’s simply the reality of being an adult and part of the oftentimes puzzling beauty of living on this planet.

(I'll fight off the temptation to quote Luther -- we're all in bondage to sin -- and leave it at that.)

Miller's right about something else. We do make cartoon characters out of our public figures, and it does get us in trouble. It devalues our political discourse. He's right about Obama, too.

Letter to state representatives regarding closure of the Illinois State Musuem

Email message(s) sent today to:

• Robert Pritchard, 70th Dist. -- R-Sycamore
• Carol Ammons, 103rd -- D-Champaign
• Scott Drury, 58th -- D-Highwood
• Norine Hammond, 93rd -- R-Macomb
• Donald Moffitt, 74th -- R-Galesburg

Paragraph in brackets was sent only to Rep. Moffitt.

I am writing to urge your support of SB 317, which would mandate reopening the Illinois State Museum in Springfield and its satellite facilities in Lewistown, Rend Lake, Lockport and Chicago. My interest in the issue is personal, since on Sept. 22, 2010, I discussed my research on the topic "Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters and the Roots of Oldtime Music" at an Illinois State Museum Brown Bag Lecture in the ISM’s Research and Collections Center in Springfield. The opportunity to present my findings to a group of my academic peers at the Museum was important to my personal and professional development; in fact it helped me clarify research questions that led me to develop a proposal for the Illinois Humanities Council’s Road Scholars Program in 2014. I am retired now from my position as an associate professor at Benedictine University-Springfield, but I believe it is of utmost importance that younger scholars in Illinois have the same opportunities that I did.

[I have also presented talks on musical history in Andover and Bishop Hill in your legislative district, so I speak from experience when I say the impact of closing the ISM goes beyond the communities where its facilities are located.]

My interest in reopening the ISM facilities goes beyond that, however. As you are no doubt aware, the Accreditation Commission of the American Alliance of Museums has voted to put Illinois’ state museum system on probation. According to Commission Chair Burt Logan, “The actions by the Illinois state government that forced the Illinois State Museum system to close to the public left us no choice but to place this museum on probation pending further information from the museum system. We have grave concerns about the impact of this closure on the long-term viability of the museum, including affecting its ability to retain a professional staff and operate at the highest professional level; impairing the museum’s ability to care for the 13.5 million specimens in its collection; impacting donor support; risking its role as a major educational resource in the state of Illinois; and harming its reputation as a premier international museum and research institution.”

Senior administrators and scientific researchers have already found employment elsewhere, and some of the damage done by closure already is irreparable. If AAM is forced to pull accreditation, it will be terribly difficult to get it back. For all of these reasons, and because of the adverse economic impact that closure is having in the affected communities – and among artists and craftspeople statewide – I urge a yes vote on SB 317.

-- Dr. Peter Ellertsen (Ph.D., English; M.A., history and journalism)

One of my all-time favorite New Yorker covers

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cover-story-2015-10-05

https://www.facebook.com/peter.ellertsen/posts/1626741690920204?pnref=story

“Cats and dogs are just like people—they have their own likes and dislikes,” the artist Peter de Sève says about this week’s cover, “Catnap.” “When I see dogs dragged out by their masters for a run, I wonder whether they may not rather be doing something else. As for cats, there’s never a question about what they want: a nap. We have both a cat and a dog, and in fact, both are on that cover. That’s our cat, Cleo (short for Cleopatra), and Henry, who has already been on a New Yorker cover. He’s blasé about the whole thing.”

Jeb Bush: Shakin' up Washington?

Olivia Nuzzi, who's been covering the presidential primary campaigns, had an article on the Daily Beast website yesterday headlined "Jeb Wants a Recession in D.C., Having Forgotten That Real People Live There."

Anything here sound familiar, Springfield?

Nuzzi reports:

In New Hampshire on Wednesday, speaking to Sean Hannity in front of two plastic pumpkins and a Jeb! 2016 placard, the former Florida governor was asked how he would make the argument to voters that the Democrats’ plans to expand the safety net would bankrupt the country.

“We have the benefit now of all of this philosophy of offering free things to people not working,” Bush said. “I think the better message is, let’s disrupt Washington. Let’s create a little bit of a recession in Washington, D.C., so that we can have economic prosperity outside of Washington.”

Bush added that as governor, “I got to do that," and it resulted in the Sunshine State leading the nation in job growth for the majority of his tenure.

Asked if Bush really meant that he would like to create a recession in Washington, D.C., the country’s fourth-largest metropolitan economy, his spokesman, Tim Miller, responded, “We should shrink D.C. so we can grow the economy of the rest of the country.”

But Bush said recession.

She adds:

Shrinking the size of the federal government is a vastly different endeavor than creating a recession in the city in which the federal government is based. Asked if Bush is aware of the definition of a recession, Miller said, “a period of temporary economic decline generally identified by a fall of GDP in two successive quarters.”

Asked why in the hell a candidate for president of the United States would wish such a thing on an American city, Miller didn’t respond—not even to suggest it was a joke.

For future reference -- Rauner bumper stickers

$4 from the Sangamon County Democratic Party http://www.rauneriswrong.com/

Connecting some far-flung dots: The Bolsheviks, the GOP "blackmail caucus," Gov. Rauner and the speakers of the House in Springfield and Washington, D.C.

D R A F T

It wasn't exactly an inspiring weekend.

First, on Friday morning in Washington, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, announced his resignation. John Cassidy of the New Yorker caught the tone of the event with perfect pitch:

It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, who on Friday announced his resignation from Congress, effective at the end of October. Some. You wouldn’t wish the job of leading hundreds of G.O.P. congressmen and congresswomen, many of them hailing from the Tea Party/foaming-at-the-mouth wing of the Republican movement, on your worst enemy.

Also catching the tone of the event was Paul Krugman of the New York Times, with an op-ed column on Boehner's resignation headlined "The Blackmail Caucus, a.k.a. the Republican Party."

Krugman says Boehner's tenure as House speaker "has been an era of budget blackmail, in which threats that Republicans will shut down the government or push it into default unless they get their way have become standard operating procedure." Cassidy, for his part, says Boehner was an old-fashioned bedrock conservative. But in today's political climate that wasn't enough:

Following the rise of Tea Party-backed candidates in the 2010 midterms, many Republicans wanted all-out war with the Obama Administration. Boehner found himself playing the role of Count Mirabeau, or, perhaps, Alexander Kerensky, a reformer rapidly outflanked by genuine revolutionaries. On a range of issues, from public spending to the debt limit to Obamacare, the ultras wanted to shut down the federal government. Boehner, well aware that Congress was already highly unpopular, resisted.

Interesting thought -- Kerensky, who led the Russian provisional government after the Tsar was overthrown in 1917, was consumed by the radicals brought to power in his own revolution.

That would be the Bolsheviks. We'll come back to them in a minute.

In the meantime in Springfield, late Friday afternoon Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner's Department of Natural Resources formally announced the state museum facilities in Springfield, Rend Lake, Lewistown, Lockport and Chicago will close at the end of the month in spite of a prolonged public outcry to "Save the Illinois State Museum."

SPRINGFIELD, IL – The Illinois Department of Natural Resources announced today that the Illinois State Museum system and World Shooting and Recreational Complex near Sparta will close as scheduled Sept. 30 and will remain closed while the court case regarding the associated layoffs is arbitrated.

Due to the lack of a balanced budget, IDNR was set to lay off 107 bargaining unit employees effective Sept. 30. Those layoffs have been suspended indefinitely due to an agreement between the State of Illinois and labor unions representing employees affected. While employees will return to work, the facilities will remain closed to the public during the suspension.

Why is the museum closing? See if you can catch a whiff of blackmail in Rauner's explanation. On June 25, the Chicago Tribune reported:

Rauner's office, when asked to comment on the museum situation, stuck to the line it has offered in most recent public discourse about the state budget: Blame House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago.

"Speaker Madigan and the politicians he controls passed a budget that's unbalanced by $4 billion, and the governor is taking the appropriate steps to manage the hole in their budget proposal," a spokeswoman said via email.

Explained Steve Johnson, who covers arts and entertainment for the Trib and for some reason was assigned to report on the museum closing:

On June 3 and 12, Gov. Bruce Rauner threatened a series of cuts he said were intended to shave more than $820 million from a fiscal year 2016 state budget that is at least $3 billion in the red.

The Republican governor's stance in the current, complex budget stalemate has been fairly basic: The Democrats controlling the legislature passed an unbalanced budget that he cannot sign as is and must do what he can to fix.

Democrats contend that Rauner is using the proposed cuts as a bargaining tool and potential wedge to try to force concessions out of them on issues including stripping state employee unions of power.

Caught in the middle is a relatively small operation like the state museum system, overseen by the Department of Natural Resources. Its five branches are the natural history mothership, the Illinois State Museum in Springfield; the Dickson Mounds Museum and archaeological site in Lewiston; and three art galleries, Chicago and the affiliated artisans' shop, the Lockport Gallery, and the Southern Illinois Art and Artisans Center at Rend Lake.

---

http://www.theglobalist.com/the-bolshevik-roots-of-the-u-s-tea-party/ Alexei Bayer is the Eastern Europe Editor of The Globalist.

The U.S. Tea Party movement most closely resembles its total ideological opposite – Russia’s intransigent Bolshevik Party. The Bolsheviks took power in revolutionary Russia in October 1917 and built the Soviet Union. The Tea Party grew out of the Republican Party. But no sooner did it emerge as a real force did it turn its venom on its political progenitor. Tea Party candidates started accusing mainstream Republicans of betraying the conservative cause and of being inclined to reach compromises with the hated Democrats. * * * his makes a mockery of the Tea Party’s self-identification as a “conservative” force. Traditional conservatives are people who trust the established order and are reluctant to tinker with it. Their core belief is that, for better or worse, the system has been shown to work. In contrast, reforms and innovations, however well-intended they might be, are by definition untested and risky. By this definition, the Tea Party is anything but a conservative movement. On the contrary, its members clearly hate the established order. The Tea Party is a radical, revolutionary movement much like the Bolsheviks who similarly wanted to sweep aside the existing order. While the Bolsheviks were left-wing radicals, the Tea Party consists of right-wing radicals.

Why is the speaker of the U.S. House stepping down?

... The Boehner era has been one in which Republicans have accepted no responsibility for helping to govern the country, in which they have opposed anything and everything the president proposes. What’s more, it has been an era of budget blackmail, in which threats that Republicans will shut down the government or push it into default unless they get their way have become standard operating procedure. it has been an era of budget blackmail, in which threats that Republicans will shut down the government or push it into default unless they get their way have become standard operating procedure. All in all, Republicans during the Boehner era fully justified the characterization offered by the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, in their book “It’s Even Worse Than You Think.” Yes, the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier” that is “ideologically extreme” and “unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.” And Mr. Boehner did nothing to fight these tendencies. On the contrary, he catered to and fed the extremism.

https://www.facebook.com/peter.ellertsen/posts/1622234318037608?pnref=story Sept 26 at 12:48 p.m. As border staters, Peter, we know a thing or two about the idiocies of state politics, but Illinois make politics in KY and TN look like masterworks of efficiency, wisdom, and sweet reason. The clowns in Illinois beggar even the most vulgar of descriptions!

Generally I agree with you (altho' I'll match Ray Blanton with Blagojevich any day of the week)! But I also see Gov. Rauner as nationalizing state politics -- i.e. injecting extremist slash-and-burn, obstructionist tactics into a legislative process that had historically balanced Chicago, suburban and downstate interests in an unedifying but thoroughly pragmatic way. To misquote Rakove a little, he's like "nobody nobody sent." Nobody sent him -- he bought the election on his own dime. What Cook County regular Democrats and downstate Republicans always had in common was they were very practical-minded. Rauner doesn't have to be.

xxx added at 1:43 p.m.

Adds: Speaking of national politics, a piece by John Cassidy on the New Yorker website today comparing House Speaker Boehner to Kerensky. Some ironic similarities between Rauner's legislative tactics, the U.S. House Republicans and the Bolsheviks that brought down the Kerensky government in 1917. Plenty of differences, of course, but the similarities are thought-provoking. http://www.newyorker.com/.../john-boehner-a-man-out-of...

6:08 p.m.

Have you read "It's Even Worse Than It Looks" by Mann and Ornstein? The title is a little over the top, IMO, but it struck me as a balanced, sober analysis that makes a similar point -- the Tea Party wing of the GOP is an outlier pursuing obstructionist tactics that undermine the political system in much the same way way the Bolsheviks undermined Alexander Kerensky's provisional republic in 1917. At the risk of telling you what you already know, here's a link to a New Yorker review with a good summary and links. http://www.newyorker.com/news/hendrik-hertzberg/naked-truths

Hendrick Hertzberg May 30, 2012 "Naked Truths" that the emperor in question is not just buck naked but scrofulous and syphilitic

Thomas E. Mann, a luminary of the ever so slightly left-of-center Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein, an ornament of the somewhat more firmly right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_print.html April 27, 2012 -- Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

Rich Miller of Capitol Fax wrote in his weekly syndicated newspaper column http://capitolfax.com/2015/09/28/roads-to-nowhere/

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/how-gop-radicals-made-the-speakership-unappealing/407563/

Norm Ornstein Sept. 27 How GOP Radicals Made the Speakership Unappealing

It was inevitable that these two forces—radicals flexing their muscles, demanding war against Obama from their congressional foxholes, and leaders realizing that a hard line was a fool’s errand—would collide violently. The party outside Congress, including at the grass roots, has itself become more radical, and angrier at the party establishment for breaking promises and betraying its ideals. When polls consistently show that two-thirds of Republicans favor outsiders for their presidential nomination, it is not surprising that Ted Cruz would call his own Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, a liar on the Senate floor. Even insiders like Marco Rubio and Chris Christie have been eager to treat McConnell and Boehner like pinatas.

By any reasonable standard, John Boehner is a bedrock conservative—opposed to big government, pro-life, and in favor of big tax cuts. Boehner would have been placed at the right end of his party a couple of decades ago. But as a realist operating in the real world of divided government and separation of powers, he became a target within his own ranks. Now he is almost at the left end of a party that has gone from center-right to right-center to a place that is more radical than it is conservative—what Tom Mann and I called “an insurgent outlier.” On the verge of losing complete control, Boehner bailed. Boehner, with a month to go, may try to avert a shutdown and make the job of his likely successor, Young Gun Kevin McCarthy, easier. That won’t last long. In the new tribal world of radical politics, the first constitutional office has lost its luster.

Basswood Research, which has done extensive work for the Rauner campaign, surveyed 800 likely Illinois general election voters September 14-15 and found quite a bit of support for Rauner and a whole lot of opposition to House Speaker Michael Madigan. The poll, which had a margin of error of +/- 3.5 percent, found that 45.5 percent approve of Gov. Rauner’s job performance, while 40 percent disapprove and 14 percent don’t know. Not great. But a whopping 71 percent agreed with the statement: “Bruce Rauner is trying to shake things up in Springfield, but the career politicians are standing in his way,” while just 21 percent said that wasn’t true. Another 55 percent agreed that “Bruce Rauner is working to find bipartisan solutions that will help fix Illinois’s budget mess and improve the struggling state economy,” while 34.5 percent said it wasn’t true. President Obama’s favorables (50 percent) were higher than Gov. Rauner’s (47 percent) in the poll, but Obama’s unfavorables (45 percent) were higher than Rauner’s (40 percent). Only 11 percent approve of the job being done by the General Assembly, while 73 percent disapprove. House Speaker Michael Madigan’s favorable rating was only 21 percent, while his unfavorable was 60 percent. Only 19 percent had no opinion of Madigan either way, which means that Madigan is quite well known to voters. An overwhelming 76 percent agreed that “Mike Madigan controls the Democratic legislators in Springfield,” while a mere 10 percent disagreed and 14 percent weren’t sure. If you trust these poll results, then the public is largely siding with Rauner and views the General Assembly as unlikeable obstructionists tools of the House Speaker. So, a well-crafted, well-funded message which ties legislators or legislative candidates to Madigan could be disastrous.

Coming to a downstate Illinois school district near you? All-charter "achievement school districts" that aren't tied to a geographical jurisdiction

Diane Ravitch, whose blog is essential required reading for anyone who wants to keep up with public education issues, has a post today that traces out-of-state-money behind a proposed "achievement school district now under consideration by the state legislature in North Carolina. She links to a post from North Carolina that connects some of the ideological and financial dots between various charter school shills and bagmen in New Orleans, Tennessee, Oregon, Oklahoma and Illinois. I don't recognize these names, but I think it might be a good idea to post this to my blog just in case.

Sounds innocuous, doesn't it? What's not to like about a charter school district that promises achievement? And what does a bill in the North Carolina state legislature have to do with Illinois?

Good questions, both of them. But before we get to them, let's pick up on something Governor Rauner let slip the other day. It may give us another dot or two we can connect.

During a media availability outside Monday afternoon outside his office in the Thompson Center state office building in Chicago, Rauner reiterated his belief that the Chicago Public Schools are in trouble because of the "teachers union having dictatorial powers, in effect and causing the financial duress that Chicago public schools are facing right now," according to the Chicago Tribune. Leaving aside the fact that his sentence doesn't quite scan grammatically (which, in fairness, may be the Trib's fault rather than Rauner's), it provides a context we need for what came next -- and why it was practically ignored.

Apparently in answer to a question on another issue in the day's news, Rauner also said: "... he opposed proposals to create an elected school board in Chicago, something the CTU backs, citing Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s efforts to challenge the union. Chicago is the only school system in the state with an appointed board of education and Rauner said he believed voters in other school districts should have the option of choosing an appointed school board."

(I'm quoting here from the post on Capitol Fax, BTW, since the Trib puts its stories behind a paywall.)

Interested yet? The man is talking about appointed school boards downstate. But ... but ... but ... how could that happen? If you think closing a rural high school is contentious, try closing down a rural school central office.

But there is a way. And it's being discussed right now, as we speak, in North Carolina. Says Lindsay Wagner of NC Policy Watch: "The proposal [is] to create an ‘achievement school district’ that wrests control of low-performing schools away from local school boards and into the hands of charter operators."

If North Carolina adopts the proposal, and odds are it will for a variety of reasons, it have statewide application. When a state creates a special school district of this nature, "low-performing" schools -- on the high-stakes standardized tests favored by the school reform lobby -- can be reassigned to a statewide charter district operated by a private-sector contractor. There is precedent for this in Tennessee, and Ravitch finds it troubling. In today's post she says:

The sad irony is that the “achievement school district” in Tennessee, the model for this proposal, has been a dismal failure. it promised to move the state’s lowest performing schools to the top 20% in the state. Of the original six schools that were taken over because they were among the state’s bottom 5%, all are in the bottom 6% or lower. None has met the goal of dramatic–or even modest–test score gains.

Could an "achievement school district" come to Illinois? It's hard to say, but I think it could. We have "low-performing" schools downstate, and in the past we have had downstate school districts on a "financial watch list." So we have precedent for state intervention in downstate schools, and with achievement school districts we have a mechanism for splitting individual schools away from the messy realities of the communities where their children live.

And we have troubling hints like Rauner's little aside during Monday's availablity on the 16th floor of the Thompson Center. According to a 2012 story on the progressive Alternet website, online charters, "virtual classrooms" and privatization are among the real hot items in the charter school world. And Rauner is part and parcel of that world. Stay tuned.

Gov. Rauner's office: Shakin' up the Illinois State Museum, one bobcat at a time

Cross-posted from my blog Hogfiddle today under headline Shakin' up the Illinois State Museum -- add 1 and yesterday, July 15, under headline Shakin' up Springfield, one constituent letter at a time:

Wednesday, July 15

Just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside to know how much your opinion is valued!

Last week I wrote Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner in opposition to his plans to close the Illinois State Museum. Today I got back this message:

That puzzled me at first, but then I looked up the letter -- a form that I sent to the governor's office and members of the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability, who review plans to close state facilities. In it I said:

According to a July 2 article on the Daily News website of Science magazine, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Angela Perri, zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, hypothesizes that animal bones from a Hopewell burial site now housed at the State Museum in Springfield belonged to young bobcat which was buried with a shell bead necklace around its neck. “This is the closest you can get to finding taming in the archaeological record,” she told David Grimm, online editor of the AAAS magazine. Perri suggests that the necklace may have been a collar, and the animal may have been “a cherished pet” that was orphaned, adopted by human beings and nurtured as a small kitten. If this hypothesis can be proven, it would be important evidence of how wild animals were domesticated. However, Governor Rauner’s budget threatens that possibility.

“Unfortunately, further work on the bobcat may not be possible,” said Grimm of the AAAS. “The museum where the bones are housed is facing a shutdown due to state budget cuts, and Perri says she can no longer access the samples.”

Dr. Perry is not the only scientist who has made use of the State Musuem. Rainer Schreg, professor of pre- and early history (Ur- und Frühgeschichte) at Heidelberg University in Germany, visited an archaeological dig in Pike County in 2010 and presented a paper on his work in Germany while he was here. Dr. Schreg said recently, the museum “makes an important and multi-faceted public contribution, which is closely linked to research that is fundamental to the understanding of history and landscape in the Midwest. It is nonsense [Blödsinn] to cancel something like this." (My translation.) Science depends on the free exchange of information among scholars worldwide, and closing this museum at this time would cut off an avenue for our archaeologists and historians to exchange ideas with their peers. It would also, as Dr. Schreg suggests, damage our reputation worldwide.

We have heard plenty about the State Museum’s economic impact and its educational value, both for family groups who visit during school vacations and for students who tour Springfield during the spring. And it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of these things. But the museum’s value for scholarly and scientific research is also considerable, and it is placed in jeopardy by any effort to close the facility, even temporarily.

So, in all fairness, I guess they did read the letter. They just didn't read it with comprehension. They must have skimmed through it till they saw the word "bobcat," and sent out the bobcat letter without any further ado.

Link (not lynx) here to Facebook. When I posted Rauner's letter to Facebook, I got back some classic comments. Follow this link to see them.

Thursday, July 16

Text of a letter I just submitted to the Hon. Bruce Rauner, governor of Illinois, in response to his message of July 15:

Recently I wrote urging you not to close the Illinois State Museum, and I got this message back: “I appreciate you taking the time to reach out to my office about bobcat hunting in Illinois. … Please know I value your opinion and thank you for sharing it with me. Hearing from people in Illinois gives me a better idea of what is impacting local communities across the state. Knowing those opinions helps me make decisions for you in Springfield.”

I guess it’s nice to hear you say you value my opinion and it helps you make decisions about my local community, but I wasn’t talking about bobcat hunting. I wrote to tell you that closing the State Museum will damage our reputation in the international scientific community.

So, since apparently no one on your staff bothered to read my first letter, I will try again: DO NOT, repeat NOT, CLOSE the ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM, repeat ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM. If you do, it will make further research on artifacts in the museum collection, including a juvenile bobcat skeleton found in a Hopewell culture burial site, inaccessible to scientists worldwide, including the anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany whom I referenced in my first letter. If you close the museum, it will look like a CHEAP POLITICAL STUNT, repeat CHEAP POLITICAL STUNT, retaliating against a community that voted against you in last year’s Republican gubernatorial primary. And I know you wouldn’t want to give anybody that impression.

For background, including my original letter and a screen grab of Governor Rauner's full response, see post immediately below dated July 15 --

permalink http://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2015/07/shakin-up-springfield-one-constituent.html.

I suspect that the original, in which I discussed the bobcat skeleton at some length (for such a short letter), was run through word recognition software in the governor's office and the form letter for the bobcat bill was assigned to me on the basis of a word frequency count. Hence my repetitions in the second message.

How Chicago contract talks, teacher evaluations, consumerism and school privatization intersect "as we shift from citizenship values to consumer values"

It came on the last day of the fiscal year, as Illinois was sliding into a state government shutdown and contract negotiations between the Chicago Teachers Union and the city schools were at an impasse. And it was hidden in the comments to a statehouse political blog item about teacher evaluations -- one of the CTU's sticking points. So it was easy to overlook with all the other news.

But it was one of the best explanations I've seen -- anywhere -- of how consumerism, corporate school "reform" and punitive teacher evaluations based on standardized test metrics are destroying the public schools.

The blog is called Capitol Fax at http://capitolfax.com/, and owner-publisher Rich Miller has been covering Illinois politics and government since fax machines were cutting-edge technology back in the 1990s. It is a far better source of information than the Chicago Tribune, the Sun-Times and the downstate metro dailies put together, although it aggregates from all of them.

This morning Miller wrote, "The Chicago Teachers Union believes that mass layoffs are coming to the school system, so they agreed to no cost of living raises in contract negotiations, but stuck firm on their evaluation demands." Quoting the Trib, he explained that the CTU contends a glitch in the Chicago Public Schools' four-tier rating scale for teacher evaluations will lead to more classroom teachers' ratings being downgraded, and "in the context of potential mass layoffs, that downgrade could mean lots of teachers lose their jobs."

This led to a spirited exchange in the comments section. (Many of Miller's readers are political players themselves, and their comments tend to be civil and incisive.) One came from a frequent commenter who calls himself VanillaMan, whose partisan leanings aren't always easy to sort out but who can be counted on for a thoughtful response to the issues -- as well as, on occasion, delightful parodies of popular song lyrics. I'll quote it in full:

- VanillaMan - Tuesday, Jun 30, 15 @ 9:59 am:

Teachers are human beings teaching little human beings. After decades of hearing horror stories about monsters in our classrooms, we’ve began applying standards. After decades of hearing how much education costs, we’ve started coupling those standards with performance measurements used in business.

We aren’t talking about manufactured productivity. Teaching 20 children every day, rain or shine, in illness or in health, among all 21 human beings, and expecting some kind of performance measurement out of it, is foolhardy.

Yet that is what we’ve been doing to teaching over the past few decades, thinking that somehow we’ll get better education out of it. We now have a huge retiree generation sucking up our budgets, who haven’t had children in school in a decade or two, who have no connection with their neighborhood schools, except through their tax bills. Consequently, they don’t see any value in what teachers are paid, how schools are [run], or what home conditions are effecting school children. We have a growing population of adults without children who can only relate to society’s education issues abstractly and from memories.

So as we shift from citizenship values to consumer values, tax payers are no longer willing to sacrifice towards community schools. All these performance measurements and all these standards applied over the years are opening salvos in a society no longer committed to unquestioning community sacrifice.

As our society shifted towards consumerism, school boards resolved conflicts and controversies with increasing oversight, bureaucracies and legalese. The results are seen today. Schools cannot turn out education like iPhones. There will always be a student or a teacher displaying human shortcomings. Yet the consumer market values being embraced by our society today, expects schools to produce education like these kids are Toyota Corollas.

Consumer mentality is telling us that we need to privatize education. That we need to make public schools compete. That we need vouchers. On and on. What is really the problem is that our people are no longer willing to accept themselves or their neighbors, as human beings.

Human beings need citizen rights because when your money runs out, consumer market values won’t let you buy them.

Why fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests can never assess critical thinking -- an incisive blog post by Peter Greene explains why language arts tests aren't designed to do that

Peter Greene's "Curmudgucation" blog is a real jewel. A language arts teacher in western Pennsylvania, he bills himself as a "grumpy old teacher trying to keep up the good classroom fight in the new age of reformy stuff." Even if I weren't kind of a curmudgeon myself, I'd check him out every day.

But today he outdid himself in a post headlined "Is There a Good Standardized Test?" Here's what I wrote about it when I shared it on Facebook:

This is by far the best explanation I've seen of what standardized testing can -- and cannot -- do. We used an ACT product at my open-admissions college to assign students to developmental English classes, but we allowed our instructors to reassign kids who were obviously ready for ENG 111 in spite of their test scores. The bubble test was OK -- as long as a real live human being in a classroom could override it -- but only as one part of a system for assessing lower-order cognitive skills. Anybody who thinks PARCC, Smarter Balanced, etc., can measure critical thinking, uh, isn't using a very high level of critical thinking.

But I'm not concerned with what I said. Here's what Greene said about a hypothetical "A, B, C, D or none of above" test question about comma usage:

... the skill of answering questions like this one is not the same as the skill of correctly using commas in a sentence. Proof? The millions of English teachers across America pulling their hair about because twenty students who aced the Comma Usage Test then turned in papers with sentences like "The development, of, language use, by, Shakespeare, was highly, influential, in, the Treaty, of Ver,sailles."

I would only add that English teachers across America also pull their hair out over whether an "Oxford comma" should follow the penultimate item in a series. I don't use them myself, but I've got to admit they avoid sentences like "I owe all that I am to my parents, Mother Theresa and the pope." Not even the experts agree about commas.

Greene continues:

The theory is that Comma Use is a skill that can be deployed, like a strike force of Marines, to either attack writing a sentence or answering a test question, and there are certainly some people who can do that. But for a significant portion of the human race, those tasks are actually two entirely separate skill sets, and measuring one by asking it to do the other is like evaluating your plumber based on how well she rewires the chandelier in your dining room.

In other words, in order to turn a task into a measurable activity that can be scaled for both asking the question and scoring the answer, we have to turn the task we want to measure into some other task entirely.

That's important. Let's repeat it:

... in order to turn a task into a measurable activity that can be scaled for both asking the question and scoring the answer, we have to turn the task we want to measure into some other task entirely.

Something like that is true in all the social sciences, and the science of testing -- or psychometrics -- is no exception. If we're trying to measure something that can't be measured -- like quality of life, for example -- we have to turn it into something we can measure -- like family income or education level. But it isn't always an exact fit. Some rich folks are miserable, and some highly educated people fall below the poverty line. Adjunct professors, for example. It's the same with test questions -- they're not always a good fit with the skills they seek to measure.

So we're talking about more than commas here.

When I taught developmental English at Springfield College in Illinois, I came to realize that reading is a complex, intuitive set of behaviors that vary from individual to individual. As the National Council of Teachers (NCTE) explains in its position statement on the subject:

As children, there is no fixed point at which we suddenly become readers. Instead, all of us bring our understanding of spoken language, our knowledge of the world, and our experiences in it to make sense of what we read. We grow in our ability to comprehend and interpret a wide range of reading materials by making appropriate choices from among the extensive repertoire of skills and strategies that develop over time. These strategies include predicting, comprehension monitoring, phonemic awareness, critical thinking, decoding, using context, and making connections to what we already know.

PARCC and Smarter Balanced say they can assess these skills and strategies with a new kind of bubble test. But they can't, because they can't measure them. Instead, they test for related things like vocabulary, comprehension, identifying the "main idea" of a passage, repeating words that "support" or give "evidence" for the main idea, grammatical conventions and punctuation. Ah, yes, punctuation (no doubt including our friend the Oxford comma). All of this stuff is valuable. I used to teach it, and I used to test for it. Most of it, arguably, has something to do with reading.

But it isn't reading.

And the fill-in-the-bubble tests don't assess reading. At best they assess lower-order cognitive skills that may correlate with what a skilled reader does when he or she picks up a book or a magazine -- or a bubble test.

Greene acknowledges that standardized tests can work fairly well to assess lower-order thinking skills that correlate with rote memory. And I agree with him 100 percent, based on my experience with using a bubble test to assign incoming freshmen at SCI to developmental English and another bubble test for "assessment" of something called "value added" by giving it to graduating sophomores.

Our vendor, ACT, was one of the best in the business. And our diagnostic test, the one we used to screen kids for baseline writing skills, wasn't bad at all. But our developmental teachers routinely identified two or three kids out of a class of 15 to 20 who were in fact ready for English 111 even though their standardized test score didn't reflect it. I think our system worked, but it worked because we had an experienced teacher, a living, breathing human being in the classroom to correct for the test's limitations.

Our sophomore "value added" testing program was so badly flawed, mostly due to sampling errors that were unavoidable at a small two-year college, that I can't pretend to evaluate the ACT product we used. For all I know, it may have been OK. Unlike the Common Core testing consortia, ACT has been in the business a long time and has collected an extensive pool of data over the years.

Greene asks if we can use fill-in-the-bubble tests in general "to see if students Know Stuff like the author of The Sun Also Rises or the contents of the Treaty of Versailles." Probably, he answers. Maybe, he says:

... At least as long as we stick to things that are simple recall. And while knowing a foundation of facts can keep us from saying ridiculous things (like "Hitler and Lincoln signed the Treaty of Versailles" or "American students have the worst test scores in the world"), there's a good argument to be had about the value of simple recall in education.

But, he warns:

There's a reason that people associate standardized tests with simple recall and rote learning-- because that's the one thing that standardized tests can actually measure pretty well.

But more complex knowledge and understanding, the kind of knowledge that really only works its way into the world by the use of critical thinking and application -- that kind of knowledge doesn't make it onto a standardized test because it can't."

Lawsuits over high-stakes standardized tests? Attorney suggests test vendors and U.S., state education departments better shape up

Is it time yet to sue over high-stakes standardized tests? Maybe not quite yet, but a prominent school attorney says lawsuits are all but inevitable unless the standardized "test consortia and our federal and state governments should take a deep breath" and take a closer look at what they're doing.

Miriam Kurtzig Freedman is a former teacher and hearing officer for the Massachusetts Education Department. Since 1988 she has been with the Stoneman, Chandler & Miller law firm of Boston, "a full service labor, employment and education law firm engaged in the representation of public and private employers and public schools."

In a recent post to her blog at http://www.schoollawpro.com, Freedman suggests the Common Core tests should not be used to evaluate teachers because they were designed to measure student "college- and career-readiness," a very different purpose that calls for different kinds of testing.

"If we continue on this track of creating high stakes for teachers with tests designed for a different purpose, we may well end up with unintended consequences, including distrust of the system, questionable accountability, and lawsuits," she said.

Freedman's post was reprinted today on Diane Ravitch's education blog at http://dianeravitch.net/2015/04/16/freedman-are-the-common-core-tests-valid/.

Freedman's beef isn't with all standardized testing. It is with the new language arts and math tests being given this year as part of the federal government's Common Core initiative, and with their use to evaluate teacher effectiveness when they weren't designed to measure that.

"As an attorney who has represented public schools for more than 30 years, I am concerned about this multipurpose use," she said. "It may not get us what we need — a valid, reliable, fair, trusted, and transparent accountability system. The tests at issue include the PARCC and SBAC, two multi-state consortia that are funded by the U. S. Department of Education and private funders. They were charged with developing an assessment system aligned to the CCSS by the 2014-15 school year."

Freedman's concern is with the validity of the tests as a teacher effectiveness assessment. "Validity" is a technical term, and she defines it as used in this context/

"At its core, [validity] is the basic, bedrock requirement that a test measure what it is designed to measure," she said. "Thus, if a test is designed to measure how well 3rd graders decode [written texts], we judge the test according to how well it does that. Can students decode? If it is designed to be predictive; say, to measure if students are ‘on track’ or progressing toward college or career-readiness, we judge it accordingly. Either way, we must ask if a test whose purpose is to measure what students learn or whether they are ‘on track’ can also be used to measure something else — such as how well teachers teach?"

Her answer, in a word, is no.

"Clearly, these tests’ purpose is to (a) measure student progress on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and college or career readiness, (b) give teachers and parents better information about students, and (c) help improve instruction," she said. "No mention is made of gauging teacher effectiveness."

Freeman's analysis is worth reading in detail. She unpacks the statements of purpose on the PARCC and SBAC websites, and suggests their tests are not being used appropriately -- validly -- when they are used to evaluate teachers' performance for purposes of retention and/or remediation.

"If we continue on this track of creating high stakes for teachers with tests designed for a different purpose, we may well end up with unintended consequences, including distrust of the system, questionable accountability, and lawsuits," she says.

Let's repeat that. It's important.

"If we continue on this track of creating high stakes for teachers with tests designed for a different purpose, we may well end up with unintended consequences, including distrust of the system, questionable accountability, and lawsuits."

Freeman suggests the test-makers and the state and federal bureaucrats "should take a deep breath and do two things":

• "First, the consortia should remind the public that the purpose of these tests is to measure student achievement on the new CCSS and career and college readiness, provide better information to teachers and parents, and improve instruction.

• "Second, the states (with federal approval and encouragement) that intend to use these results also to evaluate teacher effectiveness must inform the public explicitly about how they intend to validate the tests for this new purpose. They need to provide solid proof that their proposed use, which differs from the stated purpose of these tests, is valid, reliable, and fair. The current silence is worrisome, not transparent, and unwise."

Freeman's conclusion reads like a shot across the bow.

"This test validity issue needs to be fully aired and resolved satisfactorily before we can begin to tackle the larger issues about the multiple uses of testing," she said. "Otherwise, in our litigious land of opportunity, the ensuing battles may be costly and not pretty. Let’s not go there."

Perhaps it reads like a shot across the bow because it is a shot across the bow.

"Corporate guy" and school board member compares standardized test scores to real-world corporate metrics, concludes high-stakes test school ratings are a "complete farce and damaging to 'my team'"

Damon Buffum of Fairport, N.Y., a local school board member and engineer with Cisco Systems, has what is simply the best and most knowledgeable brief discussion I've seen in 10 years of reading this stuff why metrics borrowed from industrial engineering simply do not work in an educational setting. This especially stands out:

... I've been on the school board for 2 years now (5 total but in different districts). I can firmly say, there's is almost nothing similar between the education and corporate world. Children are not binary, families are not a controlled environment and educational "output" is not easily or fully quantified in the short term (and may not manifest itself until years later).

But the whole thing is worth reading. (So is the article in today's New York Daily News that Buffum linked to, and which I'll link to below.) Buffum's piece was posted to his Facebook page and widely shared. But it didn't quite go viral, so I'm archiving it here:

Full disclosure: I'm a Corporate Guy. For the past 26 years I've worked for large, multinational, corporations. I've worked for my current corporation for the past 19 years and I drink, sleep, and live a corporate (professional) life. I use data extensively. It shows me the current status of my business, the trends over time, the strengths and the gaps. I can then apply resources to improve areas that show the need for improvement.

As a leader of a professional team, I use multiple measures for my evaluations (as I'm also evaluated). These measures include business metrics and stakeholder feedback, but primarily come from direct observation. I spend time with my team, we discuss goals and objectives, I watch them execute, and then I give them feedback on what I saw and provide a couple of comments on things that could be considered. I always say, "you can't be a hitting coach in baseball and never watch your players swing the bat".

So I've been on the school board for 2 years now (5 total but in different districts). I can firmly say, there's is almost nothing similar between the education and corporate world. Children are not binary, families are not a controlled environment and educational "output" is not easily or fully quantified in the short term (and may not manifest itself until years later).

However... Leadership, development and evaluation principals are consistent across any professional. Effective leadership involves creating a shared vision, common and clear goals, trust, regular communication and feedback, coaching for improvement, professional enablement and direct observation of every individual. There's mutual buy-in and accountability to this relationship. As a "Manager", my most important asset is the team that I support. Their professional capabilities, confidence and enablement is what makes me successful and what makes the organization work. Without my team, we would be nothing. My role, as a manager, is to enable them, communicate with them, give them regular feedback and support and, occasionally, provide constructive feedback to do a course correction.

Sorry for being wordy.. but the current Teacher evaluation being implemented (and being reformed) in NY is a bunch of *&#$. It does not adhere to anything I've ever known and is the exact text book of "what not to do" if you want to be an effective leader or stay in business. It is bad for the individual, bad for the organization and, ultimately, bad for our children.

This article [linked below] explains the details. As a Board member, this rating system is, indeed, a complete farce and damaging to "my team". I'm against it.

Buffum links to a New York Daily News op-ed piece blasting Governor Cuomo's new teacher rating system. Written by Arthur Goldstein, an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, it argues, convincingly, that the "tests are rigged to produce whatever results the pols want — and right now they want public schools and teachers to look bad," and concludes: "It’s a disgrace that members of the Assembly and Senate, who have no idea who my kids are or what they need, are charged with not only telling me what to teach, but also judging me on factors having nothing to do with whether or not I’m doing my job well."

Why do civil rights groups support high-stakes standardized testing?

Back in 2013 Diane Ravitch connected some of the dots. In a August 29 post headed "Do Civil Rights Groups Want More High-Stakes Testing?" she traced some of the funding of a group called the Campaign for High School Equity, which says waivers to No Child Left Behind "are allowing too many schools to avoid the consequences of being low-performing" and advocates closing schools with low test scores. Like so many other aspect of school "reform," the dots connect back to Bill Gates.

Among the CHSE's member organizations and/or grant recipients are respected organizations like the Urban League, NAACP, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the League of United Latin American Citizens. Ravitch asks:

Why are they in favor of high-stakes testing, even though the evidence is overwhelming that NCLB has failed the children they represent? I can’t say for sure, but this I do know. The Campaign for High School Equity is funded by the Gates Foundation. It received a grant of nearly $500,000. Some if not all of its members have also received grants from Gates to support the CHSE.

Ravitch has the details, with a link to CHSE's website for their side of the story, on her blog at http://dianeravitch.net/2013/08/29/do-civil-rights-groups-want-more-high-stakes-testing/. CHSE is only one of many pro-corporate school "reform" organizations, and its grants are only one piece of the puzzle. I wouldn't necessarily say groups like the NAACP and LULAC have been co-opted. But I think the evidence strongly supports Ravitch's claim that high-stakes standardized testing does not in fact help the communities they serve:

When CHSE demands more high-stakes testing, more labeling of schools as “failed,” more public school closings, more sanctions, more punishments, they are not speaking for communities of color. They are speaking for the Gates Foundation.

Whoever is actually speaking for minority communities and children of color is advocating for more pre-school education, smaller class sizes, equitable resources, more funding of special education, more funding for children who are learning English, experienced teachers, restoration of budget cuts, the hiring of social workers and guidance counselors where they are needed, after-school programs, and access to medical care for children and their families.

Is this the future of school privatization?

Is this how corporate school "reform" will play out? As charter schools in Albany, N.Y., discovered teaching is hard work, especially in low income neighborhoods, they closed their bright new campuses and now the public schools have to take up the slack. A story in Capital New York, a magazine and website that covers politics, government and media in Albany and New York City, suggests that may be the case.

Charter schools in Albany opened several years ago to a lot of hoopla about how they'd "[herald] a new beginning for children living in grinding poverty and stuck in a long-troubled school district," to quote the Capital New York story by state government reporter Scott Waldman. But now, dogged by persistent low student test scores and graduation rates, as well as investigations into shady financial practices, they're closing one by one.

Says Waldman:

In total, Albany taxpayers have spent more than $300 million on the city’s charter schools in the last decade, Albany school district spokesman Ron Lesko said. Many of those schools have now been closed.

“We didn’t need to spend scores of millions of dollars to find out that the work our teachers and staff do and the staff in Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo and New York City, and every city in poor communities in America is doing is hard work,” he said. “There is no quick and easy fix and privatizing education is no answer and that’s been proven here.”

The failure in Albany has shown the disruption that charters can cause to public school systems and surrounding neighborhoods. The Brighter Choice middle schools set to close were built just a few years ago, near the foundation’s headquarters. Half of a city block was leveled and residents were displaced from their homes.

The closure of those schools has created an administrative nightmare for the Albany city school district, which must now establish an entirely new middle school in the next six months to handle the almost 400 charter school students who were enrolled in the failed Brighter Choice schools.

Waldman said the charters initially brought great promise to Albany. But over time the promise faded as financial irregularities were discovered and, more importantly, the charter schools failed to measure up academically.

Privately, Albany city school district officials have acknowledged that charter competition has spurred changes to the public school curriculum, the addition of extracurricular activities and more intense focus on student achievement. Some Albany schools also extended their school day and provided students with uniforms.

In many cases, charter schools have also provided stability to students who come from unstable home environments, offering them clean uniforms, two or three meals a day and a safe building that was open to them for up to twelve hours a day, including weekends and much of the summer. One Albany charter, the Kipp Tech Valley Middle School, regularly sends students to some of the northeast’s top boarding schools on full scholarships.

For a time, Albany’s charters created such a highly competitive market for students that forced the public school system to run advertisements on public buses, and to sell off schools that it no longer needed.

Now, the Albany city school district is again looking to create space for hundreds of charter students returning to the system. Lesko said the district is interested in purchasing the soon-to-be shuttered charter schools, just as it did with the former New Covenant Charter School building.

Meanwhile, the taxpayer funds that paid for the charter schools, often through leases far above market rates, has essentially evaporated.

Why does (my) vote matter? Today's blog post by a Chicago public school activist tells why

Fred Klonsky's blog, "Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data," is like a little shaft of sunlight that brightens up my day. He's a tireless advocate for rank-and-file teachers and all-too-often disadvantaged students in the public schools, and a strong supporter of Ald. Jesus "Chuy" Garcia's long-shot campaign to upset Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Today he posted an account of the first day of early voting in Chicago's April 7 mayoral election, and it was an instant classic. He quoted Chicago icon Studs Terkel -- "take it easy, but take it" -- in a column that belonged to the ages as soon as he put it up on the World Wide Web.

"It just took a minute," Klonsky said. "Just a minute until the paper tape rolled up the voting machine and my vote was cast."

Then he added:

It was then that it occurred to me.

I just cancelled out Ken Griffin’s vote.

Griffin is the richest man in Illinois. He is currently fighting with his soon to be ex-wife over child-support but he has given millions to Governor Private Equity [Rauner] and Rahm.

But I cancelled out his vote with mine.

He still has his millions, of course. And he is still powerful. He can still buy politicians.

But his vote for Rahm means nothing.

Because I cancelled it out.

It turns out that I was not the only one who was compelled to vote on the first day of early voting.

“What number was I?” I asked the poll judges.

“31.”

“Is that good?”

“Best first two hours ever.”

We'll see how it all shakes out April 7. Garcia is still a very long shot, and Griffin is still worth more than $6 billion. He and his private equity fund cronies like Gov. Rauner and Mayor Emanuel still have political resources the rest of us can never hope to match.

But we can still vote against them. It's our right.

"Take it easy," as Studs Terkel used to say. "But take it."

For the record (April 10), here's how it shook out: Garcia lost. Emanuel had 55 percent of the vote, and Garcia lost. According to a very good analysis in Crain's Chicago Business, Emanuel did especially well in the city's wealthiest wards, but easily carried the African American vote as well.

But Klonsky's vote still mattered.

Best, but probably not the last, word on Rauner

Comes now a commenter in Capitol Fax blog post with the best image I've seen so far for Governor Rauner, reacting to a thoroughly slanted writeup of one of his public appearances in Normal.

"Ignoring sound advice," http://capitolfax.com/2015/03/17/ignoring-sound-advice/. As follows:

- VanillaMan - Tuesday, Mar 17, 15 @ 6:51 pm:

He didn’t talk like this when he was a candidate, did he? So he knows what he is saying now won’t win him any friends or elections. Why is he doing this?

Every day this governor continues behaving like a parakeet fighting it’s reflection in a mirror, is another day we all go without any real governing. Our problems are not only being actively mishandled, we’ve witnessed both political parties mishandling them.

Rauner is making the fiscal situation worse by being so unbelievably dense!

I would edit out the apostrophe, but otherwise it's pitch perfect.

Context: During Rauner's "turnaround tour" -- at what the hard-right Illinois Policy Institute billed as a "town meeting" at which the governer outlined "some of Rauner’s ideas he shared with other groups, including right-to-work zones, lifting restrictions on prevailing wage and project labor agreements and other issues.in the Normal City Council chambers."

Protesters interrupted him with an Occupy-style "mic check,"

Gov. Rauner, Mayor Emanuel admit they're willing to write off school kids as they push corporate school reform agenda

What do charter schools and corporate school reform mean for school children whose daddies can't clout them into elite magnet schools?

Governor Bruce Rauner and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have both let it slip they don't particularly care and they're willing to write them off. Emanuel let it slip to Chicago Teachers Union leader Karen Lewis, according to a Facebook post put up today by the Firefighters for CHUY Garcia campaign committee:

"KAREN LEWIS: When I first met (Rahm), we had dinner together, and he said, "Well, you know, 25 percent of these kids are never going to be anything. They’re never going to amount to anything. And I’m not throwing money at it."

Apparently not all CPS kids are financially worth it to Mayor Emanuel, and he's only willing to "throw money" at exactly 75% of them.

Vote for Chuy Garcia for Mayor of Chicago on April 7. It's time to stop throwing our money away on Rahms "Problems."

Compare what Governor Rauner told public school advocate Diane Ravitch three years ago. On Jan. 16, 2014, she posted this account to Diane Ravitch's blog: http://dianeravitch.net/2014/01/16/candidate-rauner-in-illinois-supports-charters-lower-minimum-wage/

I had a personal encounter with Bruce Rauner. Two years ago, I received the Kohl Education Award from Dolores Kohl, the woman who created it, a great philanthropist who cares deeply about the forgotten children and annually honors outstanding teachers. After the awards ceremony, Ms. Kohl held a small dinner at the exclusive Chicago Club. There were two tables, 8 people at each table. I sat across from Bruce and of course, we got into a lively discussion about charter schools, a subject on which he is passionate.

As might be expected, he celebrated their high test scores, and I responded that they get those scores by excluding students with serious disabilities and English language learners, as well as pushing out those whose scores are not good enough. Surprisingly, he didn’t disagree. His reaction: so what? “They are not my problem. Charters exist to save those few who can be saved, not to serve all kinds of kids.” My response: What should our society do about the kids your charters don’t want? His response: I don’t know and I don’t care. They are not my problem.

This was not a taped conversation. I am paraphrasing. But the gist and the meaning are accurate.

Benedictine's last basketball game -- as good an epitaph as we'll probably ever get

When Benedictine University announced the closure of its traditional undergraduate program in Springfield at the end of the school year, the local newspapers could hardly be bothered to write it up. Maybe that's giving BenU's administration the recognition they deserve as they slink out of town in the dead of night. But it was left to an out-of-town sportswriter covering an away game in Columbia, Mo., to record the Springfield college's passing. It was a graceful and entirely fitting epitaph.

Loss to Columbia marks end of program for Benedictine-Springfield

Thursday, March 5, 2015 | 11:56 p.m. CST

BY JACOB BOGAGE

COLUMBIA — Nikki Bull-Eguez was trying to plan a fundraiser in September 2014 for the Benedictine-Springfield University athletics department — something pretty routine until she got a response she didn’t expect.

“Hold off on this,” an administrator told the athletics director.

That was weird, she thought at the time. The Bulldogs started an athletics department three years ago, which included 11 respectable programs. But they needed facilities. They needed equipment.

When the men’s basketball program started, the campus didn’t own a physical basketball, according to coach Ian Mckeithen. McKeithen went out recruiting players anyway. He landed Stephan Shepherd, then a forward at Riverside Community College in California as one of his first recruits.

“He came and saw me and he was real genuine, and I felt like I could trust him,” Shepherd said. “I liked the town. It was cool. There was a good vibe.

“But it was really weird. We didn’t have anything (at Benedictine-Springfield). No trainer. The meal times to get food were really weird. My (junior college) looked like a university.”

Bull-Eguez was assigned to fix those early deficiencies. She worked for a year to push Benedictine-Springfield into the AMC, home to Columbia College and Stephens College.

The Bulldogs needed trainers. They needed to fill teams with NAIA-caliber athletes, rather than walk-ons. Sure, Benedictine-Springfield was a small college, but it could — and would — compete, she thought.

The men’s basketball team won 15 games a year ago. The women’s team was making gradual improvements. The volleyball program was looking up, she said.

“Everything we were trying to do as a department was to better ourselves in this conference, to give us a stronger foothold,” Bull-Eguez said.

But that email, the one about the fundraiser, was eery. She mentioned it to a coworker. Then faculty members started talking.

“That to me was a little suspicious because I wasn’t trying to spend money. I was trying to raise money,” she said. “That’s when the staff started to talk a little more and we started to put two and two together. Something was changing. We weren’t quite sure what, but we knew there was some type of change coming. Then Oct. 23 was when we found out.”

Benedictine-Springfield wasn’t just going to cut its sports program, as Bull-Eguez had feared. The college was closing its doors.

The Bulldogs men’s basketball team played its final game — ever — Thursday night: an 82-43 loss to Columbia College in the American Midwest Conference tournament.

The women’s team folded midway through the year. Spring sports baseball, softball, golf, soccer and cross country will play out the end of the school year.

After the spring 2015 semester, the Springfield campus will cease its undergraduate program and instead offer online adult-education classes, the Board of Trustees announced.

“In a changing and evolving higher education environment, in order for the university to grow, we must make hard decisions,” Benedictine system president William Carroll said in a news release. Benedictine also has campuses in Lisle, Illinois, and Mesa, Arizona.

“It is necessary that we recognize where the need is and act accordingly for the long-term survival of the Springfield branch campus and for the Springfield community,” he said.

Students with junior standing will have the chance to finish their degrees at the Springfield campus, an option called “teach-out,” before the university closes completely. It will lay off 75 of its 100 full-time employees.

Thirteen positions in the athletics department, though not all of them full time, will be eliminated, Bull-Eguez said.

Former AMC member Mid-Continent University closed its doors a year ago. Sweet Briar University in Virginia announced Tuesday it would close permanently in August.

“I’ve never seen this before,” said AMC Commissioner Will Wolper.

He reached out to an old colleague earlier in the week, the commissioner of the Old Dominion Athletic Conference, the one Sweet Briar will leave, to chat about changes in higher education. “It’s unfortunate, for sure,” he said.

He’s begun talks with other institutions about joining the AMC in the coming years. At 12 teams after Benedictine-Springfield leaves, the AMC is still at a healthy size, he said.

“I felt like we fought to get in this conference,” Bull-Eguez said. “We went through a year of them looking at us and I always took it as a privilege of our university being a part of this conference.”

That’s little solace for the 11 basketball players whose careers with the Bulldogs ended Thursday night.

When McKeithen subbed out his five seniors with a minute left in the game, guard Clavontae Brown pulled his jersey over his head and sobbed. Shepherd draped a towel over his head and bit a paper cup of water.

The Bulldogs stayed in the visiting locker room for 40 minutes after the game ended. Nobody wanted to leave.

McKeithen’s eyes were glazed over and red from tears. His players stood in the hallway waiting for the bus to meet them at the front of the building.

Columbia coach Bob Burchard brought the Bulldogs to midcourt at the end of the game and asked the crowd to give them a standing ovation.

“That’s from the heart,” he said.

Meanwhile, Quintin Norris, the Cougars’ video coordinator, was waiting in the hallway to hand McKeithen a copy of the night’s game film.

“Why bother?” asked a nearby security guard. “It’s all over.”

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/a/186019/loss-to-columbia-marks-end-of-program-for-benedictine-springfield/

Ohio high school students taking 6th-grade PARCC standardized math test

Hear that train a comin', comin' round the bend … -- "Folsom Prison Blues"

If you want to see why the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) standardized tests are likely to be a train wreck, just watch these Ohio high school students taking a 6th grade-level online practice test.

Or link here:

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=327363847461483

Here's what the kids said about the video -- and their experience with a standardized test that will be given to 6th-graders in Ohio later this spring:

Brooke on the right and Megan (myself) in the middle are both seniors, Melanie is in the middle and is in 10th grade. We are taking the practice Math PBA PARCC test for sixth grade.
Brooke is in Calculus which is only available on the track of honors math classes meaning during freshman year she started in Geometry, although students can get on the track and double up on math classes for a year and get up to calculus.
I took a quarter of calculus but dropped it because I did not need it for college and am taking statistics.
Melanie is in honors classes but is a sophomore, she had more of a fresher memory to middle school math since she's younger. This test was hard for ALL three of us. We recorded our reactions to taking a few sample questions of this test.

Posted to Facebook Feb. 14 by the Ohio chapter of Badass Teachers (Ohio BATs). In lieu of a mission statement on the About Us page: "BATs is full support of authentic teaching and public schools; giving teachers and parents back their voices in legislative decisions regarding students!" This video, 13:27 minutes long, will certainly help do that.

LATER: The national Badass Teachers Association has uploaded it to YouTube (see embedded video above), with this note: "What happens when an Honors Calculus student, an Honors Algebra 2 student, and a Honors Statistics student meet with the 6th grade online version of the practice PBA PARCC Math Test? (BTW, One of these gals has a goal to be a teacher!)"

Accountability, assessment, English majors and whether 'tis nobler to take arms against a sea of troubles or to master the competencies in Common Core Reading Standards 1, 2 and 4

An article by Michael Godsley, a high school English teacher in San Luis Obispo, Calif., sums up what "college readiness" standards, accountability, assessment and the politicization of the K-12 curriculum since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 have done to the old idea of studying English and the humanities in order to be "exposed to great thoughts and deep advice, and the opportunity to apply them to [one's] own life in [one's] own clumsy way" -- which is more or less why I decided to switch my major to English in grad school.

Godsley's point is that NCLB, Common Core and the "teaching to the test" they have imposed on classroom teachers "emphasize technical skills like analyzing, integrating, and delineating a text" to the exclusion of literature and thus impoverish the K-12 curriculum.

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By the way: There's still time to write the U.S. Senate Education Committee, which is conducting hearings on NCLB and standardized testing, at FixingNCLB@help.senate.gov. They are hearing a lot from proponents of testing, testing and more testing. They need to hear from the rest of us.

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You can read the whole thing on The Atlantic magazine's website. I'll just quote a couple of Godsley's vignettes. They tell a story. First this:

I remember when, 10 years ago, my students spent an hour sharing their favorite lines from Father Zossima’s sermon in The Brothers Karamozov and how and why it affected their own lives. One student was visibly moved by the idea that suffering for a loved one might be a blessing available only in a life on Earth, not in heaven. A few different students called it "their favorite class ever." This morning, my student-teacher—a college student I’m training to be a classroom educator—used a hip-hop poem as a primary text and started the class by saying, "Today we’re going to practice Reading Standards 1, 2, and particularly 4" in reference to the anchor standards that the students had on their desks. If this sounds a little dry, I’m partly to blame—for a month, he’s been watching me ask the students to explicitly reflect on their progress in each of these technical areas. In any case, with habits like these, he’s sure to land a permanent job in the fall.

Then this, a few paragraphs down:

Later, a kid who reminds me of the teenager I was in high school—a boy who is at different times depressed, excited, naive, and curious—asked me why I became an English teacher. I smiled in self-defense, but I was silent …, not knowing what to say anymore.

I like vignettes, and I like stories. I like the way they get a point across. But I don't like this story.

Michael Godsey, "The Wisdom Deficit in Schools" The Atlantic website 22 Jan. 2015 http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/01/the-wisdom-deficit-in-schools/384713/.

Dear Senate Education Committee: It's time to put NCLB, Common Core in the time-out corner

Here's my letter to Congress asking a moratorium on the standardized testing in No Child Left Behind. NCLB is up for renewal, and I've been sharing material on how to lobby Congress about it on my Facebook page, but I'm also posting here because I want to link to a couple of other websites.

Not sure how much good it'll do … but, hey, they asked for input …

With the Elementary and Secondary Education Act(ESEA) up for reauthorization this year, U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., is convening hearings that begin today. Alexander, chair of the Senate Education Committee, has issued a press release vowing to "fix the No Child Left Behind law, wrapping up six years of committee work and sending a bill to the Senate floor within the first few weeks of 2015." He's also asking for public input at this email address:

FixingNCLB@help.senate.gov

Here's mine. I sent it in this morning:

Dear Senator Alexander

I am writing to urge you and the Senate Education Committee to draft legislation: (1) declaring a moratorium on all high-stakes standardized testing; and (2) specifically rescinding the accountability testing requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act until a national education policy can be worked out with input from teachers and child development specialists in addition to the corporate school reform advocates and standardized test vendors who now dominate the field. However benign their intent may have been, NCLB and the testing component of the Common Core initiative are seriously flawed, and their implementation has done serious damage to children and educators, especially in low-income school districts.

As a college freshman English teacher (now retired), I am familiar with the kind of “college-readiness” standards Common Core purports to address. But the sample essay questions I have seen from the PARCC tests in media accounts are so poorly designed that they do not validly measure anything – except perhaps the haste in which they were cranked out by people who obviously were not familiar with in-class essay writing processes. They ask students to write about so many unrelated issues that I couldn’t have argued a coherent thesis in the time given, and I spent my entire career as a writer, editor and writing teacher. I understand the situation is worse in the math components of PARCC, and the whole concept of testing younger children for college-readiness has been called into question by child development specialists. It’s time to put NCLB, Common Core and PARCC in the time-out corner and replace them with a humane, educationally valid system.

You won’t remember me, but I covered your gubernatorial administration and met you as a cub reporter in Oak Ridge, Tenn. I remember how you helped us move past a dark period in Tennessee government and strengthened our system of education. As chairman of the Senate Education Committee, you in a unique position to do the same with regard to national education policy, and I trust you will do the right thing again.

 Peter Ellertsen
 Springfield, IL (13th CD)

PARCC, if you're not familiar with the alphabet soup of school reform, stands for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. It's part of Common Core.

How -- and why -- to write Congress

Here are some tips from Peter Greene, a language arts teacher in western Pennsylvania who writes a delightfully curmudgeonly blog called "Curmudgucation: A grumpy old teacher trying to keep up the good classroom fight in the new age of reformy stuff." He writes:

You do not have to be brilliant or super-articulate. Just speak from the heart. Don't write Moby Dick in email form. Keep it brief (aka "readable") and if you have a lot more to say, send several emails. If you just have a sentence or two and can't figure out how to add to that, just send that. If you've read something that really said it for you, email a link to the piece and write "Read this. I believe it's true."

But whatever you do, don't sit silently hoping that Congress does the right thing. You can bet the farm that DC is swarming with lobbyists and "activists" who are making certain that their point of view is heard up close and personal. We know that the unions that are supposed to represent the teacher point of view are unlikely to do so.

It's on us. It's time to speak up. It's time to speak your truth. Will they hear us and listen to us? Who knows, But I do know this-- there is no possibility that they will hear us if we don't speak.

Greene's readers are mostly teachers, but you don't have to be a teacher to lobby your elected representatives.

So I'd add this: It's kind of a fill-in-the-blanks approach:

1. Tell them what you want 'em to do. Like "stop the @#$%ing standardized tests." But that's me talking. You can read Alexander's press release and decide what you want to say.

2. Briefly state why you're interested in the legislation.

You don't have to be a teacher for your voice to count. I didn't have to worry about K-12 mandates, but I graded lots of essays -- and these PARCC essay "prompts" (i.e. the questions) sucked. So that's what I wrote about. If you're a student, or you've been a student and you have an opinion on just exactly what standardized tests measure (or don't), share it. A lot of parents write in, too. If your children aren't in school yet, here's a Washington Post story on standardized testing in kindergarten. It's scary.

Finally, whether you're a teacher, a student, a parent or whatever, it doesn't hurt to let them know you're a voter. I just mention my congressional district when I sign my name. I think it's a polite way of letting them know I'm watching. In fact, I'm going to send copies of my message to Illinois' senators and my U.S. representative, too.