Parasitic “Reformers” Upset as Obey Tries to Save “Edujobs”

What is an edujob?  An edujob is a fancy way that some supposed reformers like to refer to teachers.  It sounds like these are jobs that add nothing to a school and simply are adults getting in the way of a child’s education—what’s sad is that is exactly how many of these so-called reformers feel about teachers. With a new Twilight movie opening last night to the delight of junior high school girls across the country, it’s ironic that the educational vampires are out in force today, looking to suck the life blood out of public education in the name of profit.

So why the Orwellian language?   The answer is simple.  Who with one degree of common sense would push for building more charter schools or Race to the Trough funding for innovation, while at the same time cutting hundreds of thousands of teachers from the schools of this country and jamming more and more students into a classroom?

Congressman David Obey (D-WI) seeing the crisis that some have referred to as a teacherpocalypse has tried to cobble together the funds to save teacher jobs.  His bill would would cut $500 million from the Race to the Top, $200 million from the teacher incentive fund (TIF), and $100 million from the charter school program.  It would also secure $10 billion to save 140,000 teacher jobs in this coming school year.

Congressman  Obey explained his action this way,  “When a ship is sinking, you don’t worry about redesigning a room, you worry about keeping it afloat.”

His point is that without qualified teachers in the classroom, what is the point of education reforms–especially when many of them are designed to track teacher performance.  If you have nobody to track, there is no reason to pay money to track them. Unfortunately, those profiteers who see a $400 billion dollar industry and want a nice healthy slice, are up in arms. Again using Orwellian language they ask people to sign the Stand4Children petition unaware of the irony when students in public school classrooms could be jammed in so tightly next year that there are no room for students to do anything, but stand.

Support Representative Obey’s bill to at least keep public school class sizes at a level that frankly is already too large, to keep qualified and certified teachers in the classroom where the latest study shows they continue to outperform their charter school peers, keep education free from the greedy hands of hedge fund managers, and support keeping public education public.  Call your Member of Congress via the Congressional Switchboard at (202) 225-3121 and let them know you support the Obey amendment for education.

CORE Wins!

After an election on may 21st that saw CORE and UPC each take about 1/3 of the Chicago Teachers Union votes, it all came down to a runoff between CTU and CORE on this past Friday, June 11th. The result was a resounding CORE victory 60% to 40%. For me personally, it means I will be a delegate to the AFT convention and one of 17 elementary school advisers to the union. To the teachers, parents, and students of Chicago I believe it means hope.

The Chicago Public Schools waited until after all the teachers had voted Friday to announce an emergency board meeting for this coming Tuesday. The purpose of that meeting is to clear the way to be able to fire 3,000 teachers in a cost cutting move. The 3,000 teachers won’t find out until the middle of July for the most part, after virtually all teaching jobs are filled. They will then have until September to find a job or lose all seniority, cutting their pay drastically and taking away their tenure. Meanwhile, the children of Chicago can look forward to classes of 35 next year. CORE is taking over in the middle of a crisis and that kind of sucks, but there is nobody I’d rather have lead us through a crisis.

Teachers are going to need to mobilize and that’s difficult. Nobody signed up to teach to be a labor agitator, but unfortunately, we can’t do the job we love unless we do.

Supposed Education Reformers Don’t Do Irony

Following the #RTTT channel on Twitter, I’ve noticed that the neo-liberal education reformers who post on there seem terribly deficient in their ability to notice irony.   Maybe that’s why so many people who seem intent on destroying the public  education system as we know it and exacerbating the differences between the haves and have nots always have happy fuzzy bunny names like Education Equality Now or something.  If you want to understand neo-liberal education reform, you have to follow the money and that means following it into dark alleys.   There’s a reason that Goldman-Sachs has been so active in promoting this garbage.   There’s a great deal of money at stake here if you know where to look.

New York: Some supporters of New York Charter schools have been fuming at the thought of an open discussion about charter schools.  Instead they want to blindly raise the charter cap.  In the New York Post today Thomas Carroll cried union conspiracy. I can’t help wondering if it’s his own misdeeds that have him scared.  The main villain in this drama is State Senator Bill Perkins who has called for a public hearing.  In the hearing notice he says, “The purpose of this hearing is to examine the business of charter schools by reviewing their development as a privatized solution to public education.  Towards this end, we will hear from parents, educators, legislators, elected officials, advocates, charter operators, and other relevant authorities at the city and state level.”  Scandalous.  I can see why those education reformers who keep saying we need more accountability would be terrified of such a hearing.

West Virginia: If anything should have reminded this country of the importance of labor unions, it was the explosion at a Massey Coal Mine in West Virginia a few ago.   There was an excellent writeup of the American Legislative Exchange Council and their role in the Massey tragedy.   What the article leaves out is the soulless right wing’s involvement in the education reform movement.  Do a google search on ALEC and education and you get plenty of that terrific free market anti-union chatter.   Don’t be fooled.   They’re against coal miners being unionized just as much as they’re against teachers being unionized.

Florida: Governor Charlie Crist has been viciously attacked for vetoing one of the most misguided education reforms ever to make it through a state legislature (and that’s saying something).   The SB6 legislation would have ended tenure and seniority as well as a lot of local control and give all teachers a salary based on one standardized test.  The Republican governor said his April 15 veto was not about politics. But he acknowledged an outpouring of opposition by teachers, parents, and local school officials around the state had an effect.  The response to the veto was swift:

Neal Boortz said, “Crist traded improvements for Florida government schools and the welfare of students for support from the teacher’s unions for an independent bid for the Senate Seat. For Crist political power and perks come before the welfare of Florida’s schoolchildren.”

It is very disappointing that Governor Crist abandoned the children of Florida and sided with the teachers union,” Gingrich said. “Florida had a real chance to reform education on behalf of children.”

What nobody seemed to point out in questioning whether Crist was for sale in his opposition to this great piece of legislation was that the bill’s sponsor James Thrasher was already bought and paid for by two out of state testing companies  who gave Thrasher’s lobbying firm up to $190,000 in cash between 2008-2009.  Yep, sometimes you just have to follow the money.

The Solution to Texas Textbooks

To watch my fellow liberals rub their hands and shake their heads in frustration over reports of the Texas Board of Education’s new social studies curriculum could almost be amusing if it wasn’t so sad.   It isn’t that I don’t understand how terrible it is to see people like Cesar Chavez and Thomas Jefferson written out of Texas history books in favor of Focus on the Family and the National Rifle Association.   The problem is that I heard hardly a whimper when education reformers were pushing reform agendas that push reading and math instruction to the exclusion of all else.   Face it, if your child is in an American school in 5 years, she probably won’t be learning conservative Texas style history.   She probably won’t be learning any history at all.

Equally ironic is that there is one defense for a school board that omits the separation of church and state and Ann Hutchinson from American history for political reasons.   That defense is a teacher with a knowledge and passion for history that doesn’t mind spending time to bring in resources to teach students the other side.   A teacher who can bring in outside resources and explain to students why things like the first amendment are such an important part of what this country is about is a godsend to any school that values open minded intelligent students who make up their own minds.

Unfortunately, a parent who might be a bit to the right of your average tea party member could become very upset if such a teacher were to not give Ronald Reagan his proper beatification.  Ordinarily, this isn’t a problem if that knowledgeable and passionate teacher has tenure.  Tenure protects teachers from crackpots in the community and even on the school board by requiring just cause before termination.   It lets them talk about controversial things like evolution and Thomas Jefferson.  That’s why maybe the current assault on tenure is a bit shortsighted.  Tenure isn’t employment for life, but it does allow teachers to teach.

What Doesn’t Work: AUSL

Over the past decade, turnaround schools have been tried hundreds if not thousands of times across the country.  A turnaround is what just happened in Central Falls where all the teachers are let go, a select few are rehired, and the school brings in a new principal and faculty to work their educational magic.  Sometimes, the school is taken over by a charter and sometimes it’s done under a program like AUSL in Chicago.   Today, in a blog posting entitled What’s Possible: Turning Around America’s Lowest-Achieving Schools, The United States Department of Education put 3 slickly produced videos together and pointed them out as proof that the turnaround model works just great.

Keep in mind that the DOE cherry picked these 3 schools.   They didn’t talk about the Green Dot in Watts where not a single student is meeting or exceeding.  They didn’t talk about the many turnaround failures, or the turnarounds that have had to be turned around again because the first turnaround didn’t work (If you make two 180 degree turns, aren’t you back where you started?).   They picked these three shining stars:

AUSL: This is the program in Chicago that over a thousand parents came out to protest this year.   The idea is that if you take a bunch of first year teachers and put them with a novice administrator somehow there will be educational magic created.  Students who sign on with AUSL agree to work four years at their AUSL school and if they leave early they have to repay part or all of their education.

One of the keys to success for AUSL has been to weed out students.   Yes, schools are supposed to educate everybody, but that doesn’t quite fit the AUSL model where suspensions and expulsions are commonplace.  Those expelled students are sent elsewhere–usually to a lucky public school down the road.  These stats are from PURE (Parents United for Responsible Education):

Drop out rates of course go through the roof at AUSL schools and test scores do go up.  Well, in most cases they do thanks to a large influx of funding.  However, let’s look at the Value Added scores that were developed by University of Wisconsin researchers and compare a student’s year-to-year growth on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test with growth made by demographically similar students from across the district.  These scores are the new buzz in education data:

[Click on the graph to enlarge to full size]

The test scores show Johnson going backwards.  Very few schools in the city appear in the red showing a negative growth, yet despite many resources that public schools don’t have access too and despite getting rid of the bad apples, Johnson is still dropping.   Before the turnaround, the scores at Johnson were actually on the way up.  Now that they go backwards, the Department of Education salutes them.

In exchange for poor test scores, you take students with little stability in their lives and make their school setting unstable.  If they had any close relationships with adults in their building, they’re gone too.   How long do the new AUSL teachers last at their schools?  Out of AUSL’s first graduating class from the program in 2003, six are still in education and one remains at the school they were originally assigned to.

I’ll post about the groundbreaking Green Dot schools next.   Green Dot founder Steve Barr left the organization after a small matter of embezzling $50,000.   If you believe that a school should pay its faculty more than its PR department, I think you’ll enjoy their story as well.

Race To The Top – Sweet Sixteen Preview

What do you expect when you have a basketball player and not an educator leading the Department of Education.

Judgment at Central Falls Part 3

Central Falls Police Sgt. Wayne Solan carries a shotgun at the main entrance of Central Falls High School

[Continued from Part 2]

It was a wet Rhode Island Monday April 28, 2008 when Maida Lopez entered Central Falls High School.   There were already over 40 parents in a chaotic jumble in the main office trying to find their children so they could bring them home from school for the day.   The city of Central Falls has big city problems.  In the 1980s, it was called the cocaine capital of New England, but it was still a postage stamp size town of just over a square mile.   Over the weekend, two teenage boys had been shot and killed including 16-year-old Central Falls student Edelmiro Roman who was found unarmed at the corner of Dexter and Darling Streets, possibly in retaliation for the killing of a 19-year-old boy the night before.  This is life in Central Falls.

I won’t paint the town as overly bleak.  Like anywhere in America, the vast majority of the people here are hardworking and trying to get by.  The town’s median income is only $22,000 and many of the residents are immigrants from all over the world.   Central Falls Guidance Counselor George McLaughlin says, “There is an odd sort of respect in that school for teachers.”  He points out that while kids will sometimes spout an obscenity at a teacher, they will put a “sir” at the end of it.

Central Falls High School has the most transient student population in the state, the highest percentage of students who don’t speak English and a high percentage of special-needs students. More than 90 percent of students live in poverty.  This isn’t to say the students aren’t capable, but when you grow up in this environment, you usually have more important things on your mind than who to ask to the prom.   Teachers are constantly adjusting and readjusting to classes that don’t end the year with many of the students who began the year.   Transient students are also far more likely to drop out and as a result Central Falls has had their graduation rate suffer.

Despite difficult circumstances these teachers are making a difference.   It simply isn’t in the political interests of the district to acknowledge it.   Disraeli is credited with the famous quote,  “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

When Superintendent Gallo points to standardized test scores that supposedly show Central Falls failing she doesn’t point out, on the 2009 NECAP reading scores (teaching year), Central Falls is right in the middle of the state’s large urban high schools. At 56% proficiency they are behind the lower-poverty ones (Tolman, 64%; Shea, 62%; Woonsocket, 60%), tied with The MET and Providence Academy for International Studies, and ahead of Central (51%), Hope Leadership (49%), Hope IT (47%), and Alvarez (44%) in Providence.

The Hope schools are of particular note since they went through a “fire the teachers” restructuring process a few years ago. There is no particular reason to expect the results of Central Falls restructuring to be any different.  Now, I don’t believe that standardized tests show you much outside of household income, but Central Falls ranking among similar schools is never mentioned nor is the fact that these same students at Central Falls only had 22% proficiency on the 7th grade tests, 5 years earlier.

Students at Central Falls do the same things that dedicated teachers in all urban districts do.   They help take over some of the responsibilities that would be taken care of by parents in more affluent communities–including providing clothing, food, and support when parents are unable too.  They make the best of a bad situation and they try and produce scholars.   Sometimes, the burdens are too much and they succeed only in producing solid citizens.   Sometimes, the best you can do is provide a safe place for 7 hours a day where a student can be warm and fed.   The teachers who can do these things day in and day out deserve respect and admiration.   Instead they usually get vitriol.   In the final part of this series, I will explain why Central Falls is so important to the future of education in this country.

[Continued in Part 4]

Judgment at Central Falls Part 1

I have no intention of making this blog an apologist for everything that teachers or their unions.   I’ll admit that like all professions teachers have their own bad apples.   However, when I see a lot of people lose their jobs and every news source in America applaud their firing, I feel obligated to dig just a tad further.   Such, is the case of the mass firing of the entire 74 member faculty and administration at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island.

The facts were spelled out in a very tidy little email that was sent out to many blogs by “Jason”.   Here’s his email:

As I’m sure you’re aware, Rhode Island has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.

Central Falls is one of the poorest towns in the state. It looks like the pictures everyone’s seen of Detroit or Flint. There are lots of boarded up windows, abandoned buildings, decrepit factories with broken windows, etc. It’s an absolutely depressed community. According to Wikipedia, the median income in the town is $22k.

Teacher salaries at the high school average $72-78k. Apparently 50% of the students at the school are failing all of their classes, and the graduation rate is also under 50%. In an effort to turn the school around, the superintendent requested some changes be made whereby the school day would be slightly extended, teachers would perform some extra tutoring, etc.

The union balked and refused the terms, so now she is firing the entire teaching staff of the high school and replacing them. This is yet another example of unions digging their own graves by refusing to negotiate or accept reasonable terms. Sentiment is on the side of the superintendent, at least among the folks I have discussed the issue with.

Jason

Jason was apparently very busy.  His email was printed in Mike Sheldock’s Global Economic Trend Analysis which then was used by pundits in the media to bash the lazy teachers.  I love the irony of a writer using a nearly anonymous email, which credits Wikipedia as a source in an attempt to decry anybody else for being lazy.  Let’s face it, there are a lot of letters in http://www.google.com.   At first, I had a hard time even finding the article because the first source I saw was Mark Whittington who is working very hard to put the Ass  in Associated Content.  While bemoaning the lazy teachers and their bloodthirsty union, he can’t even get the name of the town right.   After all, as teachers they must be lazy and as union members they must be blood thirsty.

Are the teacher’s lazy?  Well, to start at let’s look at the school.   I dug up the NECAP results for the school.   To begin with, I don’t find standardized tests to be the best indicator of teaching.  Alfie Kohn and others have shown with very thorough research that other than measuring parental income, they aren’t terribly useful.  However, I kept hearing about how terrible the test scores were and decided to look for myself.

In 2005-2006 the 7th grade students who fed into the high school achieved the following results on their 7th grade NECAP test for reading:

0% – Proficient with Distinction
22% – Proficient
36% – Partially Proficient
42% – Substantially Below Proficient

In 2009-2010 when many of those same 7th graders had moved to 11th grade, they achieved the following scores:

8% – Proficient with Distinction
47% – Proficient
29% – Partially Proficient
15% – Substantially Below Proficient

I didn’t cherry pick that data.  I looked at reading because math is really limited to one or two classes a day, while most classes impact a student’s reading skills.  I chose the years I chose because high schoolers are tested in 11th grade and that was the easiest way to track the same group of students.   There are some flaws in this methodology, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming that when you go from 22% proficient students to 55% proficient students in 5 years, you’re making amazing progress.

I do put more stock in what the students and their families have to say, let’s take a look at who was quoted in the newspapers:

“They are very sweet,” said André Monteiro, 19, a senior. “They help us out and get the job done. They treat us with respect.”

“It’s not fair,” said Angela Perez, who has a daughter at the high school. “They shouldn’t be punished because the students are lazy.”

“The teachers care so much,” said Perez’s daughter, Ivannah Perez, a recent Central Falls graduate. “I’ve seen them stay after school. I’ve seen them struggle. It’s the students. They don’t want to learn.”

“It’s sad,” said Jessica Lemur, another senior. “They stay when we need help. They love us. I was shocked when I heard the rumors.”

Those quotes are from the Providence Journal, but it still doesn’t stop the majority of the comments below the article from complaining that the teachers are lazy and don’t care about their students.

“What you are doing is wrong,” said Kelyn Salazar, a junior, said. “After all they have done for us, it’s not fair. They are pushing me to reach my potential. As a freshman, I didn’t care. Now, I’m an honors student.”

“Very seldom have I heard students say how much their teacher demands of them or how hard they have to work,” she said. “When my daughter was in eighth grade, she was told that she could become a hairdresser. I asked her, ‘What about becoming a professor, an engineer, a teacher?’ They never mentioned those.”

Of course, 8th grade isn’t in high school so I have to wonder if the child is more intelligent than the parent.  Even the Providence Journal pointed out that, “Perhaps the most vocal opponents of Gallo’s plan were the students, who couldn’t understand why Gallo was taking away the teachers they loved.”

So all the students were supportive of the teachers, right?  Shouldn’t that count for something?   Not all the students backed the teachers.  A group of 20 students held a protest supporting the firing of the teachers.   They were part of Providence’s Young Voices–a group that is backed by groups like drug company Merck.  They’re from 5 miles away from Central Falls and though they’re not from the town in question, they’re two handlers shrewdly got them on camera.  The students’ conclusion?  We don’t know these teachers personally, but we’re sure they’re lazy.   They will be the focus of Part 2 of this little morality play.

[Part 2 continues with a look at Young Voices]

Education Reform and the Status Quo

• “Education is the most important problem facing the United States today”
• “Only the massive upgrading of the scholastic standards of our schools will guarantee the future prosperity and freedom of the Republic.”
• “The chronic shortage of good scientists, engineers, and other professionals which plagues us today is the result of time wasted in public schools.”

The above three quotes come from the father of the atomic submarine, Admiral Hyman Rickover in 1958.   In 1962 Rickover wrote the book Swiss Schools and ours:  Why Theirs are Better. He showed how much more was  expected of students in Russia, Switzerland, Holland, and England and why the United States was doomed to failure unless it fixed it’s chronically failing education system.  The students who were in American schools at the time are between about 50 and 65 and somehow we’re still not under Swiss domination.

• “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people”
• “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

These quotes are from a Nation at Risk, which was published by the Reagan administration in 1983.   They looked at why test scores had dropped dramatically from 1963 on the SAT test and concluded that if we didn’t fix our education system immediately.  This is considered a watershed moment in modern education reform and a report was prepared in 2008 on the 25th anniversary that chided the nation for failing to implement the report’s recommendations.    What people fail to recognize is that in 1990, when George HW. Bush’s Secretary of Energy Admiral James Watkins commissioned Sania Laboratories to document the study with actual data they broke down the scores into subgroups and discovered that while the overall scores did decline, the scores of all the subgroups had increased.  When the systems scientists broke down the SAT test scores into subgroups they discovered contradictory data. While the overall average scores declined, the subgroups of students increased.  This is known as the Yule-Simpson effect in statistics and simply means that more minorities and lower income children were taking the SATs.  The report came out with little fanfare and was basically buried by people with a vested interest in showing how poor our schools were.

The students in school in 1983 are roughly between 30 and 44 today and speaking on behalf of my generation, I am delighted to say that we still haven’t ruined the country yet, although we did come awfully closes between 2001 and 2008.  My point is not that the tradition of education reform goes back to 1958 because anybody who has ever sat through an education history class knows that it goes back a lot longer than that.   My point is to show that wrongheaded education reformers warning that the sky is falling go back a long way.  In truth, the strength of our country has been our public education system whose rapid assimilation of a constant immigrant population into good citizens is a wonder of our modern world.

The only two sure ways to improve the quality of education is to improve the quality of the students and the teachers in our schools.   If people believe that the current wave of “reformers” like Michelle Rhee will do anything, but lower the quality of teachers then they are sadly mistaken.   Make teaching a desirable job and people will want to do it and work hard to succeed.  I predict there will be a mass exodus of teachers when this economy does finally turnaround.   Schools are too dependent on people working on their own time for free, for people capable of doing other things to stick around where they feel disrespected.

Improving the quality of students isn’t a case of taking the good ones out of the public schools setting like charter schools attempt to do either by selective enrollment or by quickly dismissing students who don’t “fit in” the way that KIPP does.  The countries that educate their children the best are those with the lowest rates of child poverty and the best child medical care regardless of parental income.  Sadly, we continue to lose sight of the real problem.   Schools don’t fail children, countries do.

Michelle Rhee’s Double Standard on Sex with Children

In the February issue of Fast Company magazine, Michelle Rhee was asked about the 266 teachers that she laid off this past October.   Her jaw dropping response was, “I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school,” Rhee says. “Why wouldn’t we take those things into consideration?”

Since the layoffs teachers, parents, and students have been complaining about quality teachers being laid off, but Michelle Rhee’s statement opens up a whole new can of worms for the district.  Michelle Rhee’s comment leads one to only three conclusions:

1. There were known pedophiles teaching in the DC schools and rather than going after them in court or at the least firing them for inappropriate contact with students, the disrtict merely let these people go merrily on their way to other schools and other school districts where they can again be around children.   Even if the district won’t hire them back, there are plenty of private and charter schools that will.  Plus they would be free to get other jobs that keep them in the proximity of schools.  She has done exactly the sort of thing that people have rightly complained about Catholic bishops doing–taking known pedophiles and instead of doing something about the problem moving them on to a new parish.

2. Michelle Rhee has slandered the names of the vast majority of the teachers who were let go.   She has said in the past that many were excellent teachers.  However, if you are hiring a teacher and you have two candidates.   One of them is good, but the other one is slightly better.   However, the one that is slightly better has a 2% chance of sexually abusing his students–are you really going to take that chance?  She has done irreparable harm to many good people and good educators.

3. On the other hand, it may simply be that Michelle Rhee doesn’t think sexual abusing minors is a big deal.  This is an appalling thing to say and perhaps an unfair accusation.  However, I do feel the need to bring it up because of her recent engagement to Kevin Johnson who has not only been accused of sex with minors, but records show that he paid one girl who filed a complaint against him $230,000.   Rhee has been accused of helping to kill investigations into the charges against Johnson.  Now, if I’m wrong here and Rhee believes that it is wrong and her future husband was wrongly accused, how dare she wrongly accuse others.

At worst this woman is aiding and abetting the sexual abuse of minors.  At best she is slandering the name of good people in a way that ultimately will destroy their career and their lives.   A woman like this should not be making decisions that affect our children.  A woman like this should not be allowed around children.