Black Journal; 54; Reading', Riting', and Rithmetic, Inc. Part 2

i was good at a hurry fb pics the pay to play the piano recently the us government's office of economic opportunity concluded a yearlong evaluation of eighteen contract education experiments which they had financed and design these projects attempted to improve the education for slow learners and four children in our central city schools are hiring outside corporations on a contract basis to help educate the

children they're reluctant verdict was that these experiments had failed tonight vi journal will present the second of the two part examination of a similar experiment in education it is not financed by all wheel and therefore was not included in their survey it differs in two important white's first it is more ambitious the contractor must provide an entire course of study not just math or reading secondly the program is designed as a four year experiment it has three more years in which to prove itself and this is the bag her elementary school in gary indiana a very important educational experiment is underway in this wall black school at six hundred and i need students the traditional system of education was failing so badly here but the black control gary school board made a drastic decision they hired an outside private corporation to run the school our money back guarantee basis either the company does better within three years

than the school had done previously or it won't get paid unique and controversial project is operated by behavioral research laboratory or maybe are out the project has aroused huge debate among gary terms and created considerable friction between the teachers union concerned about the role of security for its members and the school administration are happy to have her the program is specifically geared to each individual child and so unable santa's progress at his own pace the r l feels this is particularly beneficial to the black child who will then encounter success in school which in turn will create a desire to learn in the past traditional schools have designed their programs for the average white middle class child this is a deadly form of

institutional racism which ignores a special needs and problems of black children the backer experiment is favored by most but not all parents in the dairy community and some bad actor teachers have criticisms of the project part to reading writing arithmetic incorporated will deal with the teacher morale and with some of the criticisms of accomplishments of the experiment critics of the project fear that dr else technological approach which substitutes program matures for teachers may produce a generation of unimaginative robots are able to express their own feelings are opinions and the introduction of the profit motive is equally alarming will entrepreneurs begin competing for lucrative contracts by offering more and more economical systems which will have to be less and less personal lives or are these risks we must take to provide black children with the basic tools they will need to survive in a racist society the fact that black children

are used as guinea pigs that they can be into a five by looking across the nation we have a tie to one school that of course this is the federal government has no way of helping those children at the same time i i don't think that any new program that comes out have to necessarily be tried on black children to decide whether or not it's a good program or whether it can help underachiever for low achievement jacob more social studies teacher like many of the manicured teachers has mixed feelings about the experiment all of those programs as it exists now have shown him made over what it was at it's a new show rival at vanity fair i do that feel that it would have been played an apron dominant play by community law

remain or are you what supporters feel the desperate situation call for desperate measures german autism deeply committed to protecting children closely i would repeat that fbi ought to be successful children after that kind of relationship i don't think that showed in our ponds and in a larger game or chess game about their electrical parts because they were fixing their apparent advantages to this experiment children are benefiting from the individualized materials that are tailored to their own needs now encounter a more difficult assignment only when they're ready to master them success then bill's self confidence and they are anxious for the next challenge not frightened by it and i think that success creates

motivation and i think that most children who attend public schools are confronted with constant failure and because they're confined with constant failure they're not motivated they're frustrated new veterans of the fact that we have done this pre testing and the fact that we have done a placement testing allows us to zero in on specific needs and therefore he does not have any workers too easy for him or doesn't have any work is too difficult for him before he has work that he can handle and is highly motivated by day i am a ramblin mind here and here and now what i want you to do let's see if you can do these

problems again for me here if you need to get a mixture sheet of paper and delayed and if they had a little more food and stab you with this one while watching it was that it had that is a trendsetter ms mitchell praises this girl for the iowa feels the social reinforcement motivates the child to strive for further success and its rewards were on at the end of the first year of the program and independent outside consulting firm called the center for urban redevelopment in education or cure tested the children in their report and the accompanying price waterhouse statement they found that thirty five percent of the children achieve month for monthly gains in

both reading and mathematics as called for in the contract they found that thirty one point five percent achieve gains in math only and six point four percent achieve gains in reading only hurts open senate met andrew then issued this press release calling the program a success and stating that seventy two point five percent of the children had achieved mild form of gains in reading math all about he got this figure by adding up the percentages in all three categories based on this gary release the national press newspapers magazines and television reported the problem of unqualified success without bothering to analyze the data but the teachers union accused met andrew of blatantly distorting the facts well i think they administration of the school year and the administration of behavioral research did a very good job of relief and the dead that was obtained from the school of course we all know

that you can make statistics do what you want them to do and of course they did exactly that rhyme present as fatima twenty operas and the children having achieved much for much against any way well are they took a certain number of children who actually made my four month gain in being and mathematics and then they took a certain number who made yankee mean molly and then the number who made gang command they made those together and what they came out fairly twenty operas for the town the fashion was that they actually use the data to their advantage and faded family to help prevent made gains and of course this would put win over the wire and new media that they need to help prevent the children achieve gary superintendent of schools mcandrew dismissed <unk> accusation you know i you know i guess that's a semantic different you know i think the main thing which i

tried to say in the press release was the final paragraph or i said as i've just said hear that it is too early to draw firm conclusions about the success of vinegar it looks encouraging to me what i don't want to get involved in sort of ear splitting about whether we're talking about x percent or why percent i think we will know at the end of another year or two whether or not it's good for kids i think it's going to be and i think all signs point that direction and all i would say to our critic says no let's wait let's see i'm quite sure one thing and that is that we are doing better than we did before because in fact we could've been much worse although that your report criticized backer for lacking discipline during the first year that problem has been improved under sherman knowles enlightened administration i think children at the center are highly motivated because socially enforcement which means that we emphasize the positive things that a child does rather than the negative things that you i

think it's also important as positive reinforcement negative reinforcement and punishment punishment punishment would be there which is you know a kind of conventional school where they're using corporal punishment and they're using the panel well i'm opposed to corporal punishment there aren't border regulations in gary about the music corporal punishment that is possible under certain circumstances i would have to say it but that would violate a daily in our schools and that corporal punishment to some degree you're shooting every elementary school in gary with one exception that's all except as an actor i think well corporal punishment as effective for short term kind of involvement and so short that you might even be talking about five to ten minutes it doesn't satisfy long term needs because it doesn't meet the chalk inside and to that extent it's not effective not that riesling with children and counseling with children have a great deal of them as a more of a longer of

that ej and they knew him back or do you think there's something else you might have done and just came back with anything else you could do it is there someone government control or oh what'd you think oh she'll warriors in that way that keeps you what do you think and do you think that every time somebody hit union strike that what

do we got an innocence about a huge huge strain that what might happen when we don't want to talk to you a number that i think that i mean we're grown a person and so my disability it does happen but you think it happened then other people very quickly is call or write you know like in your own private life when he doesn't do better than later one of the benefits of a black chancellor is that he may serve as a model for the black child through this experience that i was able to respond and grow because blacks are dealing with blacks and sharing the same experience of course the relationship comes naturally now

what do i do yeah i was very soon after the very few chinese talk and you say that's a gentleman that i'm very much like the lightning till you were around the teachers union is a persistent critic of the project and their cartoon that picture dr al was a slick businessman sweet talking a naive school board into signing a performance contract center irons comments performance

contract a i play it is really is not the answer to the need for public education when you get out big business confirmed with felony quick than selling hardware and software and of course this is their prime interest where they can do that and go away with teachers feel it with the problem and have to attempt to do something about unfortunately at that accrue reducing the size of the instructional staff has gone hand in hand move what we've been trying to do an instructional and i think that teachers unions have been afraid that either performance contracting or individualized instruction means pre say reducing a certain structural stuff that is not necessarily true that's what's happened back there because for one thing we're trying to demonstrate the children can learn that we have effective programs instruction and that these programs will cost less to operate because after all school districts are running out of money all over the

country and of course the main way to reduce educational expenditure just reduce the number of people being at church administrator i think that the year teachers union other employee groups who have taken a very dim view of that term performance contracting and done so far very good reasons they are concerned about hucksters as they call its online they are concerned about whether that will use the kid does to further some kind of experiment song on i think they're also concerned frankly about job security for their members and sometimes that doesn't come out sometimes it comes out that the three economists at a logical battle we're waging and i think there's some truth to that but i also think there is so much more mundane aspects and that is if you could prove for instance that the performance of children could be improved in such a way that it did not necessarily require as many professional teachers working in a school as we've always thought that would be a very

fundamental kind of discovery and i think the implications for teachers union other organizations are very clear job security is important however from a teacher point of view the quality of education for those children is also the number one thing you're talking about from two different things from a personal point of view and then from an educational point here that i don't think that their teachers their jobs first rather than the education of the children when the aisle first took over back or they transferred ten teachers out our twenty one most sorry aids and apply the savings may to purchase a program materials they shifted the focus from teachers the materials as a result didnt morales suffer tess as mr allen i think the teachers feel that they are in the line that they must either producer hi liane

and i know that i have a lot of pressure i mean i know that i'm not free to say everything that i want to say being as i'm in this experiment program i feel a lot of things that i say i must have a great deal of resignation about the things that i am as to say about the program are not fair as far as i'm concerned i think the morale is quite low at the spine and i wouldn't i would be at liberty to speak now and when i fell the war managers better than that the only reason why peter would be transferred from the back or kind of system would be at her request because she simply had philosophical or other disagreements with what were doing and a teacher can manage the kind of political system that we've developed teachers abandoned her expert

opinion two teachers were declared for love because they ask questions and i think that for this morales are maybe peaches the olive though that gal who knows you might be next about three months ago two months ago i received a letter from my administrative get any care and then this letter that was told i was to be a surplus teacher and it was ironic that only a week prior to my receiving this letter i had objected to test results and not being able to see the test results and ben acker and then the next thing i knew i had a surplus and so you need to turn who would transfer out of panic or school this path you would be put into a surplus pull that were they would have a choice that they would have paid in

previous years and of course to have a job is more important than to be floating around as offensive to an art teacher who have anywhere from two to four years experience in gary at an elementary school in record than a therapist teaches that if they're being used to serve the two i think that there are several reasons for new teachers unions have been critical of the program i think that the most obvious one is that this kind of program changes the rules of the people involved the teacher is no longer somebody who stands up and hunger group for fifty sixty seventy minutes and delivers instruction by were the wall rather the teachers become more of a facilitator to facilitate individual warrants going on the classroom she heard instead of delivering one lesson plan to thirty children has to interact with thirty different children during given class period i think this calls for for quite a change in thinking on the part of

an instructional personnel you know this is isn't america could survive if they produce for the products and education industry second only to defense until expenditures continues on unchanged despite its quite failures now performance contractors have introduced a radical new concept they're saying it is possible to evaluate the success of the school by means of a test performances of each student don't pay as if we fail they say corporations should be responsive to the clients need and teachers school boards administration's show and can be held accountable by their clients so i think that a school system and its teachers administrators and board members and all of the other employees want to be responsive to the needs and problems if you will the consumer which of the kids in their care not that accountability on for i don't believe in singling out teachers and say you know you and you alone if things don't work i'm also a little bit concerned about are enormous emphasis

on accountability and the public sector what we've seen recently some glaring examples of the lack of accountability and the private sex i think what we can bailout lockheed nationally as we have done one would question whether or not we are asking everybody in this country legally accountable and i'm a teacher at a public school that's been held accountable of course should be able to have the resources that they think they need in order to produce on that site i in the case of the hackers gold they do have unlimited resources and of course they have all kinds of materials that i don't think they have a limit on what they can order and of course in a situation like that i'm not sure if the teachers are held accountable as they could be we have been using the present methods of education and i would say that we have been paying upwards of thirty forty million dollars just in this city and other

cities paying even more and to pay that large sum of money and i certainly understand their kids be failures i can't think of any other business which has been stay operation with that record tents have been made to sabotage be our al in every conceivable that you can think of since the day they started the system is trying to get every corner to the franchise and to kill the alp because b o i l represents in dollars and cents a matter of education which can be afforded by the communities to adequately prepare minority groups they can't compete successfully in the society this

is about money the backer experiment as obvious merits and enjoys enthusiastic support from the black controlled theory school board and for many parents in the community is probably too early to determine how effective the program will be despite the favorable publicity to the counter that determination will have to wait until nineteen seventy four when the dr no contract is concluded and when the school was handed back to the very school board expert at the rand corporation have recently completed an evaluation of medicare and other performance contract it's cold they called then a credible listen most interesting experiment in the united states which gave low marks for all other such projects further they had high regard for the spirit of confidence in attitude of the baca faculty but they said the test result of the unanswered the question of whether the arrow would bring all students up to the national norms in three

years they felt that it be our ailes attitude toward the teachers have been more diplomatic friction could've been minimized amid the controversies surrounding the project it is easy to lose sight of the main goal well for an education of black children for black parents who are impatient with the false promise of equality free education that is relevant the bag or experiment may offer a hopeful beginning but above all one point must be emphasized aid program will have to meet the special needs of all black children are they care for the

eye in the race day they and

again our day he saw dan you're well only noon when