BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
X-WR-CALNAME:www.indybay.org
PRODID:-//indybay/ical// v1.0//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:Indybay-18844698
SEQUENCE:19003999
CREATED:20210905T224000Z
DESCRIPTION:SF Labor Day Action Against Port  Privatization For Fisher's Stadium & 
 Privatization Of SF Malcom X Academy By Fisher Controlled KIPP Charter 
 School Chain\nBuild The Stadium In Pacific Heights!\nRally at John Fisher's 
 Pacific Heights mansion\n3757 Washington St.\nSan 
 Francisco\ncommitteeforlaborparty(at)gmail.com\nhttps://www.facebook.com/masslaborpartyusa/\nhttps://foramasslaborparty.wordpress.com\n\nNo 
 Excuses Schools: Bad Theory Created KIPP by Amateurs &  Backed By SF 
 Billionaire GAP A’s Fisher Family\n\nStacy’s husband Scott sold the 
 Fishers on creating business fellowships for KIPP school founders who would 
 take the brand nationwide.  
 \n\nhttps://tultican.com/2021/09/04/no-excuses-schools-bad-theory-created-by-amateurs/?fbclid=IwAR01W8anaIt5Go8vCfu-Fas7H6JOq7xmfeLLRoDAf1vEqDyFZaO7AjWeBDg\n\n\n4\nSEP\nBy 
 Thomas Ultican 9/4/2021\n\nVanderbilt Professor Joanne Golann recently 
 published Scripting the Moves. It is a book which expands on her research 
 into no-excuses charter schools. Beginning in March of 2012, Golann spent 
 18-months doing an ethnographic study of a representative school employing 
 the no-excuses approach. She discovered many unintended consequences.\n\nIn 
 2019, the leader of the Ascend Charters, Steven Wilson, wrote,\n\n“And 
 even when No Excuses was best realized at Ascend, its ceaseless structure 
 was doing little to prepare our students to function autonomously in 
 college and beyond.”\n\n“Princeton sociologist Joanne Golann, in a 
 groundbreaking ethnography of one high-achieving No Excuses school, 
 identifies the “paradox” of the school’s success: ‘Even in a school 
 promoting social mobility, teachers still reinforce class-based skills and 
 behaviors. Because of these schools’ emphasis on order as a prerequisite 
 to raising test scores,’ she argues, teachers end up stressing behaviors 
 that would undermine middle-class students’ success.”\n\n“Golann ends 
 by asking: ‘Can urban schools encourage assertiveness, initiative, and 
 ease while also ensuring order and achievement? Is there an alternative to 
 a no-excuses disciplinary model that still raises students’ tests 
 scores?”’\n\nIt is not just Ascend. In an August 2021 post at Princeton 
 Press, Professor Golann reported,\n\n“In March, Noble, the largest 
 charter network in Chicago, apologized to its alumni for its 
 ‘assimilationist, patriarchal, white supremacist and anti-black’ 
 discipline practices. Last June, Achievement First promised not to ‘be 
 hyper-focused on students’ body positioning,’ and ended its requirement 
 for students to sit with their hands folded at their desks. KIPP, the 
 nation’s largest charter school network, retired its founding motto, 
 ‘Work hard. Be nice,’ explaining that it ‘ignores the significant 
 effort required to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being 
 compliant and submissive, supports the illusion of meritocracy, and does 
 not align with our vision of students being free to create the future they 
 want.’ (KIPP began plans to change the motto in 2019.)*\n\n“The Wall 
 Street Journal described KIPP’s statement as ‘woke 
 nonsense.’”\n\nBad Practices at No-Excuses Charters Came from Amateur 
 Founders and Funders\n\nPerhaps the best known no-excuses charter schools 
 are the KIPP schools. Two Yale graduates David Levin and Michael Feinberg 
 founded KIPP in 1994. They were both members of Wendy Kopp’s first cadre 
 of Teach for America (TFA) teachers who had five weeks of training; no 
 education classes and no teaching experience. After the founding, Feinberg 
 stayed in Texas to run KIPP Houston. Levin moved back to New York and 
 founded KIPP Academy in the South Bronx.\n\nTo put it succinctly, two guys 
 with recently minted bachelor degrees and a 5-week summer seminar founded 
 the first no-excuses charter school.\n\n Professor Golann explained how 
 they gravitated to the model,\n\n“After a difficult first year struggling 
 with classroom management, Levin and Feinberg were beginning to improve. 
 They attributed their success to intensively studying and imitating the 
 methods of effective teachers in their schools. Their most influential 
 mentor was Harriett Ball, a charismatic and celebrated forty-six-year-old 
 African American teacher who stood over six feet tall and who worked down 
 the hallway from Levin. From Ball, Levin learned that what worked, in 
 addition to songs and chants, was ‘instant and overwhelming response to 
 any violation of the rules.’” (Scripted page 120)\n\n\nThe story of 
 KIPP’s growth is intertwined with another no-excuses school founder, 
 Stacy Boyd. She was working for Chris Whistle’s Edison Project when a 
 Boston Dentist hired her to be the first principal of the Academy of the 
 Pacific Rim (APR). Boyd hired her friend Doug Lemov to teach at the school 
 that she ran while also finishing her MBA. When Boyd married Scott Hamilton 
 and moved to San Francisco, Lemov took over at APR.\n\nScott and Stacy met 
 while working at the Edison Project. They were moving to San Francisco 
 because Hamilton was now working for two of the richest people in the 
 country, GAP founders, Don and Doris Fisher.\n\nIt was 1999 and “sixty 
 minutes” did a puff piece on KIPP. All of the sudden the possibility of 
 going national arose. Feinberg’s first call was to his friend Stacy Boyd 
 who knew something about developing large organizations. Stacy’s husband 
 Scott sold the Fishers on creating business fellowships for KIPP school 
 founders who would take the brand nationwide.  \n\nThe San Francisco 
 billionaires who are obviously astute business people started pouring money 
 into an education system being developed by people with limited knowledge 
 and experience. They would have never turned over leadership at the GAP to 
 people with little background and limited experience. Somehow, many of 
 America’s financial elites believe that they understand education well 
 enough to know how to improve it, and don’t recognize that they are 
 amateurs.\n\nBesides no-excuses charter schools, billionaire education 
 amateurs have spent lavishly to finance TFA. At the beginning of the 
 millennium TFA was struggling, but then the money started flowing. In her 
 book Chronicle of Echoes, Mercedes Schneider recounted, \n\n“Despite the 
 financial and organizational issues and bad press, Kopp managed to scrape 
 by and carry TFA with her into the new millennium. TFA faced insolvency a 
 number of times – until corporations and foundations began funneling 
 money into the struggling organization. In 2001, TFA’s net assets totaled 
 over $35 million. By 2005, TFA’s net assets totaled over $105 million. 
 Finally, by 2010, TFA’s net assets had increased almost tenfold from 2001 
 to $350 million. And in 2011, the Walton Family Foundation gave TFA $49.5 
 million ‘to help double the size of Teach for America’s national 
 teaching corps over the next three years.” (Chronicle page 47)\n\nTFA 
 teachers are unqualified to lead a classroom. However, Professor Golan 
 notes, “It is not that Dream Academy did not have the option of hiring 
 more seasoned teachers; they deliberately chose not to do so, which may be 
 surprising given that teachers significantly improve in effectiveness 
 during their first years of teaching.” (Scripted page 139) Teachers with 
 experience and training were not as likely to embrace their no-excuses 
 scheme. (Dream Academy is the pseudonym Golan chose for the school in which 
 she was embedded.)\n\nStacy Boyd’s friend, Doug Lemov, started gathering 
 no-excuses techniques and wrote them into a book called Teach Like a 
 Champion. Today, this compendium of methods serves as a handbook for 
 no-excuses schools. One of the main objectives of the handbook is 
 efficiency. It brings the early 1900s Taylorism into the classroom.\n\nIn 
 the post “Teach Like its 1885.” published on Jenifer Berkshire’s 
 blog, Layla Treuhaft-Ali wrote, “Placed in their proper racial context, 
 the Teach Like A Champion techniques can read like a modern-day version of 
 the *Hampton Idea,* where children of color are taught not to challenge 
 authority under the supervision of a wealthy, white elite.” In addition 
 to its racist implementation, the no-excuses model certainly elicits images 
 of 19th century school discipline.\n\nNo-excuses Model a Disaster in Public 
 Schools\n\nThe Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD) was launched 
 in 2011 by the Commissioner of Education, Kevin Huffman, a TFA alum and for 
 a short time Michelle Rhee’s husband. He brought in fellow TFA alum Chris 
 Barbic – the founder of the no-excuses charter school YES Prep – to run 
 ASD. Golan observed,\n\n“Unlike typical no-excuses charters, in which 
 families must apply and agree to certain commitments, these charters had to 
 accept all students from the zoned neighborhood, which resulted in low 
 levels of commitment from families to the school’s disciplinary 
 practices, along with a student population that the school was unprepared 
 to serve (e.g., students with special needs, students with high levels of 
 residential mobility).  (Scripted page 173)\n\nBy 2016, the lofty goal of 
 raising the bottom scoring 5% of the state’s schools into the top 25% was 
 a complete flop. Even with concentrated test prep, most of the schools were 
 still in the bottom 5%.\n\nSome Conclusions\n\nTwo important points:\n\nOn 
 page 64 of her book, Golann references University of California San Diego 
 Professor Hugh ‘Bud’ Mehan. From the two graduate school classes I had 
 with Bud, I learned something about what good ethnographic studies looked 
 like and it is clear that Golan’s scholarship is excellent. The book is 
 well written and takes the reader inside the study. Anyone interested in 
 education policy would profit from reading it.\nWithout the unbelievably 
 large amounts of money being spent by billionaire amateurs to drive 
 education policy, there would be no TFA or no-excuses charter schools.\nI 
 will end with one last quote from Professor Joanne Golann’s Scripting the 
 Moves:\n\n‘“Ultimately no-excuses charters schools are a failed 
 solution to a much larger social problem,’ education scholar Maury Nation 
 has argued. ‘How does a society address systemic marginalization and 
 related economic inequalities? How do schools mitigate the effects of a 
 system of White supremacy within which schools themselves are embedded?’ 
 Without attending to these problems, we will not solve the problems of 
 educational inequality. ‘As with so many school reforms,’ Nation 
 argues, ‘no-excuses discipline is an attempt to address the complexities 
 of these problems, with a cheap, simplistic, mass-producible, 
 ‘market-based’ solution.’” (Scripting page 174)\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2021/09/05/18844698.php
SUMMARY:SF Labor Day Action Against Port Privatization for Fisher's Stadium & Privatization of Malcom X Academy
LOCATION:3757 Washington St. San Francisco
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2021/09/05/18844698.php
DTSTART:20210906T190000Z
DTEND:20210906T200000Z
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR