Schools Matter: Why Have Some Civil Rights Groups Flipped on Standardized Testing?

Schools Matter: Why Have Some Civil Rights Groups Flipped on Standardized Testing?:

Why Have Some Civil Rights Groups Flipped on Standardized Testing?

By Ken Derstine @ Defend Public Education!

In 1947, as a student at Morehouse College, an eighteen-year old Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote an article for the student newspaper The Maroon Tiger. In the article, The Purpose of Education, he explained his vision of what education should be. He said education should not be about equipping students “with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses”. He continued, education must also be about more than training for a career, stating,

“Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one's self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.” 

On October 28, 2014, eleven civil rights groups sent a letter to President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan urging them to drop the test based K-12 ‘accountability’ system. In it they state,

“While the need for accountability is almost universally agreed upon, there have been concerns raised about overly punitive accountability systems that do not take into account the resources, geography, student population, and needs of specific schools. In particular, the No Child Left Behind law has not accomplished its intended goals of substantially expanding educational equity or significantly improving educational outcomes. Racial achievement and opportunity gaps remain large, and many struggling school systems have made little progress under rules that emphasize testing without investing. We must shift towards accountability strategies that promote equity and strengthen, rather than weaken, schools in our communities, so that they can better serve students and accelerate student success.”

The letter goes on to list eight recommendations – none of which call for high stakes testing.

The organizations signing the letter were:

Advancement Project

Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)

Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

National Opportunity to Learn (OTL) Campaign

National Urban League (NUL)

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF)

National Council on Educating Black Children (NCEBC)

National Indian Education Association (NIEA)

Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC)

On May 5, 2015, twelve civil rights organizations, including some of those listed above issued a press release opposingSchools Matter: Why Have Some Civil Rights Groups Flipped on Standardized Testing?:

New Orleans Warns Other Cities about Charter Takeover | National Opportunity to Learn Campaign | Education Reform for Equity and Opportunity

New Orleans Warns Other Cities about Charter Takeover | National Opportunity to Learn Campaign | Education Reform for Equity and Opportunity:

New Orleans Warns Other Cities about Charter Takeover

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has a very different educational landscape, and it's one that many students, parents, or educators are unhappy about. A recent conference sent out a strong warning to other cities that "relinquishment" reform policies, in which the state takes over local school districts and replaces "failing" public schools with chartered ones, hurts children and communities—and, unfortunately, these takeovers are spreading rapidly across the country. 

The conference brought together parents, students, local education activists, educators, and organizers from other districts where takeover reforms have already been implemented or proposed. Presenters shared both their experiences and new research about with the closing of neighborhood schools and subsequent takeovers, teacher's unions, inequity and segregation in charters, harsh discipline practices, and charter school accountability. They showed the locally produced documentary, "A Perfect Storm: The Takeover of New Orleans Public Schools." The film aptly demonstrates how this charter takeover managed to occur, and why parents and students are so opposed to it. 

 The conference in New Orleans was also supplemented by a lively twitter discussion, under#NOLAedwarning—check out some of the tweets shared below! You can also go here and herefor articles on the conference.

Op-ed Gives Guidance for Progressive School Reform in NYC

Posted on: Wednesday August 5th, 2015

Pedro Noguera, via NYU Steinhardt

Pedro Noguera, a professor at New York University, outlines a clear direction for Mayor de Blasio and progressive school reform efforts in his latest op-ed. Noguera emphasizes that although de Blasio has made progress in some educational areas, he needs to create a clearer narrative of change in order to inspire communities to support and build on that progress. The op-ed lists six crucial areas de Blasio and his administration needs to focus on promoting, including addressing school segregation, working with the teacher's union, collaborating with parents, and stopping the school to prison pipeline.

Noguera argues that articulating a clear platform would help bringMayor de Blasio's supporters together and help him continue the positive changes his administration has already begun to make, such as working with grassroots groups to bring funding for restorative justice, and promoting community schools. 

As the op-ed says of its recommendations:

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it could serve as the foundation for a coherent vision and strategy. The nation is in the midst of a battle over the future of public education. The stakes are high because powerful forces are deter­mined to dismantle this system.

Despite their flaws, public schools continue to be more accessible and stable than other institutions, and they offer hope and opportunity to millions of children across the country. Bill de Blasio has the opportunity to play a leading role in revitalizing and sustaining our schools. Let’s hope that he will seize it.

You can read the entire piece here. 

Op-ed Gives Guidance for Progressive School Reform in NYC

Education Reform: Too Big to Succeed | Vicki Cobb

Education Reform: Too Big to Succeed | Vicki Cobb:

Education Reform: Too Big to Succeed

I'm a devoted follower of Diane Ravitch's blog. She is a tireless aggregator and a commentator on the various aspects of the misguided attempt, through law, to "reform" American education. She posts 7-10 times a day every day, good news and bad, what is happening on the ground as a result of national politicians and state legislators dictating policy and funding for public educational institutions from pre-k through higher ed. It seems to me that the reformers, who are successful businessmen first, want to apply their principles for success in the free market to education. Here are their guiding principles as I understand them and why I believe they are failing:

Disruption Is Good
It is no surprise that Bill Gates, who made his fortune through "disruptive" technological change, supports disruption on established institutions. His outsize influence comes from all the funding he has poured into backing programs that have proven to be destructive. This includes slash and burn closings of public schools that have been deemed failures to be replace by charter upstarts. So how's that working for us? In the all-charter Recovery School District of New Orleans the new schools have now been shown to be largely ineffective. The chickens are also coming home to roost in Chicago. Just read these posts enumerating one failed program after another.

Bear in mind that disruption for children is damaging. Children thrive in secure environments and closing schools willy, nilly and opening new replacements creates a lot collateral damage for students.

Business people believe that disruption opens up opportunities for entrepreneurs and everyone gains from innovation and new enterprises--fodder for the business equivalent of natural selection. I am an example of this. Seven years ago, when I learned that the Common Core Standards require that students read an increased amount of nonfiction, I saw an opening for the genre I've been working in for many years. Children's nonfiction literature has long been considered a stepchild by the children's book industry. So I six years ago I started an organization of award-winning children's nonfiction authors to promote our genre in the classroom, thinking that people would pay more attention to a group of us rather than to any one singular successful author. Our mission is to introduce the educational community to a largely overlooked and underutilized resource of excellent material. Indeed, we are starting to gain traction. However, since I am not a business person, I have failed to figure out how to make money from this enterprise so we have recently reorganized to become a nonprofit. Meanwhile, I watched with (a tinge of envious) dismay as some established education companies took advantage of the disruption to make out like bandits.

Accountability Is Essential

If you read the CCSS, they describe the behavior of an educated person who can read, write, speak, listen and compute. It is important to note that there is no curriculum, i.e. no content, attached to the standards. The focus is on skills, not learning anythinEducation Reform: Too Big to Succeed | Vicki Cobb:

Individual-Level VAM Scores Over Time: “Less Reliable than Flipping a Coin” | VAMboozled!

Individual-Level VAM Scores Over Time: “Less Reliable than Flipping a Coin” | VAMboozled!:

Individual-Level VAM Scores Over Time: “Less Reliable than Flipping a Coin”

In case you missed it (I did), an article authored by Stuart Yeh (Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota) titled “A Reanalysis of the Effects of Teacher Replacement Using Value-Added Modeling” was (recently) published in the esteemed, peer-reviewed journal:Teachers College Record. While the publication suggests a 2013 publication date, my understanding is that the actual article was more recently released.

Regardless, it’s contents are important to share, particularly in terms of VAM-based levels of reliability, whereas reliability is positioned as follows: “The question of stability [reliability/consistency] is not a question about whether average teacher performance rises, declines, or remains flat over time. The issue that concerns critics of VAM is whether individual teacher performance fluctuates over time in a way that invalidates inferences that an individual teacher is “low-” or “high-” performing. This distinction is crucial because VAM is increasingly being applied such that individual teachers who are identified as low-performing are to be terminated. From the perspective of individual teachers, it is inappropriate and invalid to fire a teacher whose performance is low this year but high the next year, and it is inappropriate to retain a teacher whose performance is high this year but low next year. Even if average teacher performance remains stable over time, individual teacher performance may fluctuate wildly from year to year” (p. 7).

Yeh’s conclusions, then (and as based on the evidence presented in this piece) is that “VAM is less reliable than flipping a coin for the purpose of categorizing high- and low-performing teachers” (p. 19). More specifically, VAMs have an estimated, overall error rate of 59% (see Endnote 2, page 26 for further explanation).

That being said, not only is the assumption that teacher quality is a fixed characteristicIndividual-Level VAM Scores Over Time: “Less Reliable than Flipping a Coin” | VAMboozled!: 

Plan for charter takeover of worst public schools crafted in secret | The Charlotte Observer

Plan for charter takeover of worst public schools crafted in secret | The Charlotte Observer:

Plan for charter takeover of worst public schools crafted in secret

N.C. Rep. Rob Bryan, a Mecklenburg Republican with a leadership role in education, has been working for weeks on a bill he hopes will eventually transform public schools.

It would start small, with a pilot Achievement District plan that would force five of North Carolina’s most persistently low-performing elementary schools to close or be taken over by charter operators. But Bryan hopes the trial will prove successful enough to inspire a bigger shift. He cites charter takeovers of district schools in New Orleans and Tennessee as models.

“I think the question is how long are kids allowed to be in failing schools,” he said Thursday.

THIS HAS ACTUALLY BEEN IN THE WORKS FOR A LONG TIME. IT JUST HASN’T BEEN ON THE PUBLIC RADAR.

State Rep. Rob Bryan, R-Mecklenburg

If you haven’t heard of this plan, it’s because the bill hasn’t been introduced or discussed in any public forum. There’s nothing about it in public records yet.

Instead, Bryan has been crafting his proposal behind closed doors, talking to lawmakers, educators and advocates of his choosing. In a process that has become common, he plans to substitute his bill for another one introduced in February, circumventing a spring deadline for introducing new legislation.

“This has actually been in the works for a long time. It just hasn’t been on the public radar,” Bryan said.

Chris Fitzsimon, executive director of the Raleigh-based N.C. Policy Watch, calls that process a travesty. He agrees with Bryan on only two points: The schools in question need help, and Bryan’s proposal could reshape public education.

“This is a fundamental change in the way public schools operate,” Fitzsimon said Friday. “To put this together behind the scenes, in secret, in the last few weeks of the legislative session is an outrage.”

If the bill passes and money is included in this year’s budget, the five schools targeted for takeover would be selected by Nov. 15. The handoff could take place as early as the 2016-17 school year, though the state Board of Education could choose to defer some until 2017-18 and others to 2018-19.

Tennessee and New Orleans

Bryan, a lawyer who chairs the House education appropriations committee and serves on the K-12 education committee, says he’s been talking with Gov. Bill Haslam and education officials in Tennessee, where an Achievement School District was launched three years ago. Twenty-nine schools in Nashville and Memphis will be part of that district this year, up from six the first year.

The charter operators that take over low-performing schools in Tennessee are charged with moving them from the bottom 5 percent to the top 25 percent in about five years. The staterecently released data for 2014-15, noting that students in the targeted schools “have earned double-digit gains in math and science proficiency and have grown faster than their state peers.”

Reading scores, however, declined, in the achievement schools and statewide.

Bryan called the latest numbers “on the whole, pretty impressive.”

But Tennessee education blogger Gary Rubenstein looked at the same data and calculated the percentile for the six schools that have been in the program for three years.

“Four ... are still in the bottom 5 percent while the other two have now ‘catapulted’ to the bottom 6 percent,” he concluded.

WE ARE NOT AWARE OF ANY OTHER DISTRICTS THAT HAVE MADE SUCH LARGE IMPROVEMENTS IN SUCH A SHORT TIME.

Researcher Douglas Harris on the post-Katrina charter takeover of New Orleans public schools

New Orleans has seen the nation’s biggest charter takeover. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, charter operators took over most of the schools from a district that had been among the nation’s most dysfunctional.

“New Orleans essentially erased its traditional school district and started over,” Tulane University Professor Douglas Harris writes in the fall 2015 edition of Education Next.

Harris, who is director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, reports that the switch led to significant gains in student performance over the past decade: “We are not aware of any other districts that have made such large improvements in such a short time.”

But that doesn’t mean other locations can expect to replicate those results, Harris said: “There are good reasons to think the conditions were especially ripe for success in New Orleans: There was nowhere to go but up.”

How it would work

Bryan says his plan has been repeatedly revised: “I think we’re on version 26 now.”

Lindsay Wagner, a reporter for N.C. Policy Watch, reported on Bryan’s plan last month in aPlan for charter takeover of worst public schools crafted in secret | The Charlotte Observer:

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article30508572.html#storylink=cpy

CURMUDGUCATION: Fighting Democracy

CURMUDGUCATION: Fighting Democracy:

Fighting Democracy

There are two questions coming out of the discussions about New Orleans and its privatized school system.

1) Did student achievement actually improve?

2) If that improvement did happen, was it worth the price?

The answer to the first question is "Probably not" (though the careful secrecy and hoarding of data makes a definitive answer difficult), but we can still move on to the second question without a definitive answer to the first, because the price in NOLA was the suspension of "local control," which is another way to say "democracy."

On twitter and in the blogs, reformsters like to frame the struggle as one between the rights of students and the preservation of the institution. "I won't sacrifice the needs of students to preserve the privilege of the school system," is a familiar construction.

But the school system is an arm of democracy.

Granted, democracy has some problems these days. We can get angry about outside interests taking over the Douglas County school board (check out the new documentary Education, Inc for a closer look)-- but only 17% of the voters actually voted. Large cities like Chicago and New York have long since mastered the art of subverting democracy. And that's before we get to the areas where politicians have come up with new and creative ways to keep the non-white and the non-wealthy from voting.

But the solution to a problem of Not Enough Democracy is not Less Democracy.

When certain areas of the country worked to disenfranchise black citizens, the best solution, the right solution, the democratic solution was NOT for wealthy, connected folks from outside those CURMUDGUCATION: Fighting Democracy:

With A Brooklyn Accent: Underlying Conditions Which Give Traction to "Black Lives Matter"

With A Brooklyn Accent: Underlying Conditions Which Give Traction to "Black Lives Matter":

Underlying Conditions Which Give Traction to "Black Lives Matter"

Black Lives Matter, as a movement, emerged from police killings of unarmed Black men and women. But powerful underlying trends that have been around for some time give the movement traction. Among these trends are:

A drug war which has led to levels of incarceration of non-violent Black drug offenders which have destroyed entire communities and are utterly disproportionate to the actual role of African Americans in the nation's drug business.

The militarization of the nation's police, as a result of both the drug war and the "war on terror" which have led to young people of color being pinned into their own communities, and occasionally their own housing projects, by aggressive policing.

The widespread adoption of the "broken windows" theory of policing, reinforced by data driven methods of evaluation police performance, which lead police to aggressively confront people of color when walking, driving, taking public transportation, entering or leaving schools, if it appears that non violent With A Brooklyn Accent: Underlying Conditions Which Give Traction to "Black Lives Matter":

K-12 Connectivity Heatmap Shows State Schools in Need of More Bandwidth | EdTech Magazine

K-12 Connectivity Heatmap Shows State Schools in Need of More Bandwidth | EdTech Magazine:

K-12 Connectivity Heatmap Shows State Schools in Need of More Bandwidth

According to the report by CDW•G, 63 percent of schools don't have enough bandwidth to meet the current needs for digital learning.

A new K–12 connectivity heatmap shows which states are ahead of the broadband curve and which are lagging behind.

The data comes from a report by CDW•G, which surveyed 400 K-12 IT professionals about the connectivity of their schools. What emerged was an overview of the connectivity preparedness of schools across the nation.

According to the report, schools in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington have the most connected classrooms.

The report also presents a few sobering facts about schools’ preparedness for a coming bandwidth crisis.

Of the schools surveyed, 63 percent don't have enough bandwidth to meet the current needs for digital learning, as outlined by the White House's ConnectED initiative. Last November, President Barack Obama touched on this statistic during the ConnectED to the Future summit.

“I’ve said before, in a country where we expect free Wi-Fi with our coffee, the least we can do is expect that our schools are properly wired,” Obama said.

The average school with connectivity has about as much throughput as the average American home, but the school’s connection serves 100 times as many users.

On top of that, bandwidth needs aren't slowing down. The growing importance of streaming video and always-on educational software has caused bandwidth demands to grow approximately 50 percent each year, according the report.

Along with the report, an infographic shows the chorus of technologies involved in connecting classrooms to secure, high-speed Internet connections.K-12 Connectivity Heatmap Shows State Schools in Need of More Bandwidth | EdTech Magazine:

L.A. Unified's 'teacher jail' policy ends up punishing students - LA Times

L.A. Unified's 'teacher jail' policy ends up punishing students - LA Times:

L.A. Unified's 'teacher jail' policy ends up punishing students

 In 2012, the entire 110-member staff of Miramonte Elementary School was pulled off campus after accusations of molestation were leveled at two teachers. Mark Berndt pleaded no contest to charges involving feeding semen-laced cookies to blindfolded students; charges against the second teacher were ultimately dropped (and he has since left the district). Everyone else spent the rest of the school year cooling their heels in a new, not-yet-opened school.

John Deasy, who was then superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, justified the move by saying he was concerned there might be a culture of sexual abuse at Miramonte. All staff files were scrutinized. But in only a couple of cases were there previous allegations of abuse; a few other teachers were found to have broken minor, unrelated rules, and most of the staff returned to Miramonte the following year.

At first this looked like nothing more than an honest effort to protect children, after Miramonte administrators had rebuffed earlier complaints. But it was the start of a troubling series of teacher suspensions at other schools that disrupted students' education and that notably did not involve their safety. These suspensions with pay during often lengthy investigations are known as “teacher jail”; teachers largely spend the time at home while substitutes who often are less qualified take their places.

With classes beginning Aug. 18, the many admirers of Hobart Elementary teacher Rafe Esquith are wondering whether he'll be there to greet a new batch of fifth-graders after four months in teacher jail. His case, and those of others before him, raise troubling questions about whether the teacher investigation system is causing too much disruption at L.A. Unified schools.

In 2014, two beloved teachers at separate high schools were reassigned to teacher jail for eight months over allegations of possible financial improprieties involving field trips. Both were finally returned to the classroom. That was also the year that a popular science teacher, who taught at the arts high school named for Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, was yanked from the classroom because two students had designed projects for a science fair that appeared to a couple of people as too similar to weaponry. (One project, a standard at science fairs across the country, was a milder version of a catapult-like invention that President Obama had tried out and praised at a White House science fair.) While he was in limbo, the teacher missed out on one of the most important months of the school year — the period of intense preparation for the Advanced Placement tests — replaced by a substitute who didn't know L.A. Unified's 'teacher jail' policy ends up punishing students - LA Times:

‘Kids Count’ Data: States Such as Texas and Arizona Have the Highest Youth-Population Growth Yet the Worst Outcomes for Kids - The Atlantic

‘Kids Count’ Data: States Such as Texas and Arizona Have the Highest Youth-Population Growth Yet the Worst Outcomes for Kids - The Atlantic:

More Kids, More Problems

Many of the states with the fastest-growing youth populations are also the ones that produce the weakest outcomes for kids.

It seems that America’s biggest nurseries are failing at their job.

Those “nurseries”—the states with the largest-growing youth populations—tend to produce the worst outcomes for kids, judged by such measures as high-school graduation, access to health insurance, and exposure to poverty. The states that produce the best outcomes for kids tend to be either stagnant or declining in their youth populations.

That means the United States is increasingly relying on the states that are most struggling—and often making the least effort—to equip their kids to succeed and ultimately build the country’s future workforce and consumers. “The fact that we have so many kids living in parts of the country where the outcomes aren’t as good … is something we are going to pay for later,” says the demographer Bill Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program who recently analyzed the youth-population trends for all 50 states.

These conclusions are based on a comparison of Frey’s analysis with the latestKids Count data book from the Annie E. Casey Foundation (which is among the sponsors for the series that produced this piece). The foundation ranks the condition of children in the states across 16 quantitative indicators in education, health, family, and the economy. From these individual assessments, it synthesizes a cumulative rank of well-being for children in each state.

States whose youth populations are growing the most tend to produce the worst outcomes for kids.

Comparing that ranking with Frey’s analysis—which looked at changes in the 20-and-younger population for each state between 2000 and 2014—produces results that are ominous for the nation’s future economic vitality and social stability.

The 15 states that the foundation ranked as producing the best outcomes for kids are mostly clustered in New England (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut), the Midwest (Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin) and the mid-Atlantic (New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia). But in nine of the 15 highest-ranked states, the number of young people declined from 2000 through 2014, Frey found. Only in Utah and Virginia  did the number of young people increase by at least 5 percent.

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The 15 states that Casey ranked as producing the worst outcomes for kids are clustered in the Sun Belt (ranging west from South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to Texas, Nevada, and California) and the Appalachia region (West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky). In nine of the 15 lowest-ranked states, the number of young people increased between 2000 and 2014. The increase reached double digits in six of those states.

Overall, nearly 37 million young people—representing 45 percent of Americans under 20—now live in the 15 states at the bottom of the Casey foundation list. Just 15 million youth, representing only 19 percent of that same age cohort, live in the top 15 states. Moving forward, this discrepancy may only widen: Of the 15 states that experienced the largest percentage increases in their youth populations, nine rank in the bottom 15 and just one is in its top 15.

Several chasms separate kids’ experiences across these states. For one, the share of children in poverty is lower than the national average (which was 22 percent in 2013) on all 15 states topping the list. Meanwhile, the share of children in poverty exceeds the national average in all 15 states at the bottom, including Texas (25 percent), Arizona (26 percent), and Georgia (27 percent). Results for high-school graduation rates and access to health insurance follow similar patterns.

Several chasms separates kids’ experiences across these states.

Another chasm that separates the highest and lowest-ranked states is diversity. Nonwhites represent a majority of kids under 20 in just two of the 15 highest-ranked states, while they account for a majority of the under-20 population in eight of the 15 lowest ranked states (including Georgia, Florida, Texas, and ‘Kids Count’ Data: States Such as Texas and Arizona Have the Highest Youth-Population Growth Yet the Worst Outcomes for Kids - The Atlantic:

THE LATEST FROM KIDS COUNT Data Center from the Annie E. Casey Foundation

KIDS COUNT Data Center from the Annie E. Casey Foundation:

KIDS COUNT Data Center from the Annie E. Casey Foundation:

Addicting Info – The Wizard Behind The Curtain: Citizens United Lawyer Behind Detroit’s Emergency Manager Laws

Addicting Info – The Wizard Behind The Curtain: Citizens United Lawyer Behind Detroit’s Emergency Manager Laws:

The Wizard Behind The Curtain: Citizens United Lawyer Behind Detroit’s Emergency Manager Laws

According to Richard McLellan’s Board of Trustees web page for Michigan State University’s College of Law, The Detroit Free Press once wrote:

“He’s seldom seen in the state Capitol, and less likely to be noticed. Take a look at someone who may well be the most influential person in Michigan you never heard of.”

You know all that negative talk folks get into, once in a while, about invisible illuminati-types actually running the world like puppet-masters from a dark ceiling above the stage? McLellan lends credit to that plausibility and is proud of it, boldly sharing the quote for all to see on his trustee page.

But Richard McLellan is not just influential behind the scenes in Michigan, where he envisions a “super agency” 20 years down the line, after busting up the Detroit Public Schools “monopoly” with school of choice programs and charter schools beginning under the Engler administration, he’s influential nationally, too, and his name is worth noting.

“Now,” McLellan stated in Nov., 2014, “the pendulum is swinging back to… much more control and command of Detroit schools,” and the same thing is happening on a larger, economic/political level across the country.

He has strong ties to the weakening of our democracy overall and certainly in Michigan, with a list of devious, notorious associates the likes of which John Dillinger would be envious. And he’s become the unsavory Gov. Rick Snyder’s go-to man in Michigan, as well, coming together in what should be known nationally as “The Great Michigan Public Schools Caper.” His work has contributed to lending democracy a death-stroke both nationally and locally and nowhere knows that better than Detroit.

(Image courtesy of Facebook)

McLellan’s professional and political career is lengthy. It is filled with affiliations and memberships to an assortment of organizations and posts, complete with accolades and friendly pats on the back, most of which you can get in a nutshell, here, as a starting point for further research, should you so desire. However, McLellan kicked off his career quickly by working for then Michigan Governor William Milliken as an administrative assistant after earning a BA from Michigan State University in 1964 and a law degree three years later from the University of Michigan. He’s been active in the Republican Party for decades. Even in his undergrad he worked as chairman for the MSU Romney Volunteers in 1962.

This guy is a system politician through and through – you know, the corrupt, twisted system everyone’s always complaining about? McLellan is the embodiment of that system. He’s helped uphold it and furthered its grip on the country for decades, yet many still don’t recognize his name.

How has he furthered the grip of our corrupt, racist system over the country and Michigan? Well, for starters, his law firm has extensively, time and again, represented both political candidates, and more specifically, their SuperPACS. McLellan’s also served on Sen. John McCain’s National Steering Committee of Lawyers back in 2008 and as Chairman of the Michigan Lawyers for Bush-Cheney in both 2000 and 2004. That should tell readers exactly which camp McLellan pitches his tent in. He is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Federalist Society’s Michigan Chapter, which according to its website is:

“…a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.”

Wikipedia also states the Federalist Society is “one of the nation’s most influential legal organizations.”

“It has played a significant role in moving the national debate to the right on the Second Amendment,campaign finance regulation, state sovereignty, and the Commerce Clause.”

McLellan’s hammered his stakes in long ago.

Over the years, the puppeteer’s worked with a virtual who’s who list of the most loathed and least trusted politicians of the last 40 years, on both the state and national levels: from Gerald Ford to George H. W. Bush, John Engler to Bill Schuette, George Romneyto Rick Snyder, Colin Powell to Dick Cheney, John McCain to George W. Bush. McLellan’s worked with them all.

Now, McLellan works primarily as a lawyer at McLellan Law Offices PLLC, and is lauded with accolades such as “Lawyer of the Year” by such publications as Super Lawyers, The Best Lawyers in America, Lawyer’s Weekly and Law and Politics. Among other roles, he also keeps an adjunct position at MSU. In addition, he works with three public interest law firms, one of which is the infamous Mackinac Center for Public Policy – what Right Wing Watch calls “the largest conservative state-level policy think-tank in the nation.”

If that doesn’t speak volumes to you, start paying more attention.

McLellan isn’t just working with the Mackinac Center’s law firm, he is actually both a founding member and board member of the Center.

He gets more interesting than that, too, with ties both nationally to Citizens United, as well as the destruction of democracy in Michigan with the Emergency Manager laws and the dismantling of the public school systems, the ripples of which reverberate Addicting Info – The Wizard Behind The Curtain: Citizens United Lawyer Behind Detroit’s Emergency Manager Laws:

What Can We Learn from a Debate Over Pizza Parties in School? - Living in Dialogue

What Can We Learn from a Debate Over Pizza Parties in School? - Living in Dialogue:

What Can We Learn from a Debate Over Pizza Parties in School?

By John Thompson.

Before the test-driven, competition-driven school reform movement, educators had plenty of issues to argue over. We didn’t face nearly as many controversies that we had to fight over. Educators might occasionally express our opinions in an intemperate manner, but our disputes were no more divisive than the debates in other professions.

Some of our most forceful advocates have long claimed that education’s normative culture was so permissive that it could kill public schools. But, those jeremiads were largely rhetorical. Dissenters might be so livid about the allegedly progressive views that supposedly made us soft-headed that they would threaten to take their ball and go home. But, rarely would they become so angry that they would actually promote the destruction of public education and our values regarding the free exchange of ideas.

Over the last generation, however, persons who believe that the education “status quo” is too progressive, too soft-hearted, and too slow to shut down debates have often committed to the corporate reform ideology. Because of the claim that school systems are so irreparably broken, the accountability-driven movement has a twenty-year record of taking dramatic action, mandating top-down “transformative” reforms, and then considering the evidence afterwards. They’ve consciously and openly set out to destroy that status quo in the faith that “disruptive innovation” will magically replace the old system that was supposedly too rooted in progressivism.

A discussion in the Teacher’s Lounge recalls the debates of the pre-reform years. I read it as an illustration of what was and what remains good about the education culture that is now derided as the status quo.  It also offers insights into why some independent-minded educators, having failed to persuade the majority of their colleagues that they have a monopoly on the truth, turned to market-driven reform in order destroy the school cultures that they found wanting.

Henry Svec asked for teachers’ thoughts about throwing a pizza party for middle school students who get an A, but excluding those who do not reach that level. He hit a nerve and the question apparently prompted more than 1,200 responses. A wide variety of differing opinions were expressed, but Svec may be the only debater who believed that those who disagree with him are mortal enemies of public education.

The discourse over rewarding and punishing student performance started with examinations of the merits of external versus intrinsic motivation for learning and it led to an extended debate over the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) program (which is an increasingly popular approach for replacing suspensions to maintain order in schools). The exchange brought in consultants, as well as practitioners. Most posters seemed to embrace “shades of gray,” or nuanced ways to increase the benefits or reduce the unintended harm incentives and disincentives.

Some posters (like me) remain committed to authentic instruction and focusing on the joy of learning. We stressed the importance of teaching students to be inner-directed.  At the risk of being called “progressive,” we resisted behavioristic shortcuts that undermine the nurturing of internal loci of control.

Others, who seemed to represent the majority views, believed in grading as the appropriate accountability system. The grade, itself, might be seen as the reward. These educators speculated about ways of grading on What Can We Learn from a Debate Over Pizza Parties in School? - Living in Dialogue: