Live Long and Prosper...

Gary Stager wrote,

American public school educators have been insulted, mocked, punished, shamed, blamed and threatened by politicians, Bill Gates, corporations and the media for a decade. Their professionalism has been reduced by name-calling, scripted curricula, “common core” standards and the publication of standardized test scores. Their schools have become the playthings of billionaire bullies and hedge fund managers with public school treasure being surrendered to shady privatizers and charter school conglomerates. American public school teachers have watched more of their students come to school hungry and without proper medical care. They’ve watched public education be dismantled by unqualified clowns in NY, Louisiana, Chicago, Michigan and Wisconsin. American teachers have seen their benefits cut, right to organize eliminated, working conditions deteriorate, supplies dwindle and pensions disappear.

And what have American educators done about this?

The answer of course, is not very much.

Look at what happened in Australia (the subject of Stager's blog post above) when the state (Victoria) PM backed out of a promised raise...25,000 teachers took to the streets.

In the US, however, what did teachers do when the entire staff of Central Falls High School (RI) were fired? What was our response when the US Secretary of Education and the President of the United States cheered that act by the local superintendent?

Silence...except for a few blogs.

What's been our response to this administration's "Race to the Top" where federal money is not provided where it's needed most, but instead is given to those places which open up more charter schools, judge teachers by their students' test scores, and VAM evaluation techniques (none of which are based on research)? What have American teachers said and done about that?

Again, not much except on the blogosphere.

Oh...here's something. The AFT and the NEA, the nation's largest teachers unions, have endorsed for reelection the man responsible for Race to the Top...

Have I missed something? Why are former minor league basketball players, retired computer gurus and former editors of the Harvard Law Review the ones making education policy for the country?

What do...Barak Obama, Arne Duncan, George W. Bush, Michael Bloomberg, Rahm Emanuel, Bill and Melinda Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton Gang have in common?

Answer -- They are the ones who have made/bought or are making/buying education policy in the United States and NONE of them -- not ONE of them -- knows anything about educating children. There are NO TEACHERS among them...not one. None.

Where are the experts? Where are the teachers?

While the leaders of the NEA and AFT are busy helping the corporate interests destroy public education, the rank and file teachers have been overwhelmed with too many tests being used and misused by administrations, states and the media.

While the politicians and pundits have been blaming public education and specifically teachers unions and the "bad teachers" they protect for the collapse of the world's economy, public school teachers around the country have been struggling to keep their heads above water doing more and more for the children under their care with less and less support from the outside world.

While Bill Gates wants to use Skinner-box technology to see whether or not teachers are entertaining their students, those teachers are drowning in a data driven morass created by the greed of edupreneurs and politicians.

Democrats, led by President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan, have joined Republicans in the fight against public schools. Mayors Bloomberg (New York City) and Emanuel (Chicago) are vying for the title of least-public-education-friendly mayor in the country. Bloomberg has been shoving charter schools into public school buildings, displacing public school teachers and children without any hesitation during his never ending term as mayor.

Finally, however, the newcomer Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, not even 2 years into his term, is facing an uprising he apparently didn't expect. Mayor Emanuel figured that teachers would do as they were told, as they have done for the last 2 decades. He figured that teachers would just whine a bit, but then accept the inevitable...and increase their already overwhelming work load for no additional pay. He assumed that he could continue the nation's insulting assault on public school teachers and the weak teachers would simply fall in line.

He was wrong.

On June 11 the Chicago Teachers Union released the results of a strike vote.

Public school educators say they are fighting for smaller class sizes, art, music, world language and physical education classes for students, and fair compensation for being asked to work under more difficult guidelines as determined by CPS.

23,780 teachers, 90% of the members of the Chicago Teachers Union, voted to strike.

What was the reaction of the parent union, the AFT, when the CTU voted to strike if a negotiated settlement couldn't be reached? I went to the AFT website and couldn't find a thing about it. It's possible I missed it...

It's time for teachers across the country to stand up, like our colleagues in Chicago, to those who want to destroy public education. Demand support from our unions. Demand support for public schools.

Our schools have been labeled as failing by people who have never stepped foot in them. The favorite weapon of these 'reformers' is test scores.

Michelle Newsum, Teacher at Coos Bay (Oregon) School District, continued,

* American kids in schools with less than 10% poverty far outscore all
other nations
* Kids in schools with up to 50% of students living in poverty score
well in comparison to the international average
* Only American students in schools with more than 75% poverty score
below the international average

This trend holds true for virtually all major standardized tests. On the TIMSS, PISA, SAT and NAEP low poverty schools do well and high poverty schools do not.

Stephen Krashen has made this point repeatedly, but as teachers know, it takes as many as twenty repetitions for students to learn something and some may need more. It takes even more repetitions to overcome misinformation such as these comments from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan from 2009 in Atlanta...

...[Education Secretary] Duncan noted while striding through Atlanta’s Grady High School...“You can have all the money in the world, but it won’t make a difference if teachers don’t believe their students can learn.”

...[Duncan] has no patience for teachers and schools that tick off all the reasons that their poor or minority students can’t achieve.

He doesn’t accept the excuses that their parents don’t care, their homes lack books and no one takes them to museums or plays.

Secretary Duncan, in misinforming the American people, doesn't seem to know the difference between understanding that all children can, indeed learn at their own rate, and the fact that the condition of poverty interrupts the education process.

In The Year They Began Calling Poverty and Homelessness an 'Excuse' Mike Klonsky wrote

Duncan has chosen to ignore poverty's downward effect on test scores and focus entirely on what he calls "bad teachers" and "failing schools." Recently confronted by educators teaching in some of the nation's highest-poverty areas about the need to do something about the living conditions of their students, Duncan cynically responded, "poverty is not destiny."

Yes, Secretary Duncan is correct, poverty is not destiny, but as Gerald Bracey said,

[Poverty is] like gravity. Gravity affects everything you do on the planet. So does poverty.

Duncan's assertion that poverty is not destiny, while true, minimizes the role the government has played in increasing poverty over the last 10 years, and the lack of progress in reducing it. He has essentially said that "bad teachers" and "bad schools" are at fault for not reducing poverty in the United States.

The last two years, especially, have see a surge in family poverty.

The poverty rate increased from 13.2% to 14.3% between 2008 and 2009, representing an additional 3.7 million people living in poverty for a total of 43.6 million in poverty in 2009. The poverty rate for children was 20.7% in 2009, representing 15.5 million kids living in poverty. In 2009, over one-third (35.5%) of all people living in poverty were children.

Unlike Secretary Duncan, most people understand that poverty has a deleterious effect on people, especially children.

In 2009, over one-third of black children (35.7%) and nearly one-third Hispanic children (33.1%) were living in poverty. Families (with children) headed by single mothers hit 38.5% in 2009. Of the 6.6 million families living in poverty, 3.8 million of them were headed by a single mom.

Schools can't provide everything needed to heal children from the effects of poverty. Families are the most important part of a child's life. If the family is not functioning properly due to a lack of food, heat, medical and dental care, or emotional support then schools will have difficulty doing their job...especially as money for education decreases and class sizes increase.

In Waiting for a School Miracle, Diane Ravitch wrote

Families are children's most important educators. Our society must invest in parental education, prenatal care and preschool. Of course, schools must improve; every one should have a stable, experienced staff, adequate resources and a balanced curriculum including the arts, foreign languages, history and science.

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved.

The so-called "reformers" are trying to tell us that if we improved the education of children then poverty would disappear. However, it's the opposite which is, in fact, true. The education of the majority of poor children in the United States will improve once their poverty is reduced.

Blaming schools and teachers is the excuse used to cover up the failure of our society to deal with the growing poverty rate in our nation. When the billionaires (Gates, Broad, Walton), their foundations, their mouthpieces (Duncan, Obama, Klein, Bloomberg, et al), along with their state government lackeys (Walker, Scott, Kasich, Snyder, Daniels et al) direct the course of public education in the nation then something's wrong. None of them have ever taught in a public school...indeed, many of them, like Secretary Duncan, never even attended a public school. Their lack of experience in and knowledge of teaching and schools should disqualify them from affecting the direction of education in the United States.

What have any of these people done to reduce our nation's poverty? Susan Ohanian put it best:

When Congress passes No Child Left Unfed, No Child Without Health Care and No Child Left Homeless, then we can talk seriously about No Child Left Behind.

There's too much again...too many important points to be made.

Five myths about America’s schools

Contrary to common myths, 1) our schools are NOT failing, 2) Unions DO NOT defend bad teachers, 3) Billionaires DO NOT know what's best for education, 4) Charter schools are NOT better than public schools, and 5) effective teachers are important, but NOT the magic bullet.


Mr. Duncan, you are a shining example

I've said it before...Arne Duncan is a Sociology Major/Basketball Player. He doesn't know beans about education.

Your lead sentence, “I have worked in education for much of my life”, immediately establishes your tone of condescension; for your 20-year “education” career lacks even one day as a classroom teacher. You, Mr. Duncan, are the poster-child for the prevailing attitude in corporate-style education reform: that the number one prerequisite for educational expertise is never having been a teacher.

Criminalizing Teachers

In an earlier entry I listed this as a P.S. but it's important. Los Angeles schools actually seems to enjoy making teachers look and feel like criminals...

...at the end of the process, our principal looked at all of her evidence and decided that she had failed. After that meeting, our Human Resources representative accompanied her back to her classroom to get her purse, where I and a few other colleagues were waiting for her in case she needed our support. As they arrived, Ms. HR informed us that she was not allowed to talk to us, and we were not allowed to talk to her. A security officer joined them, and then my friend was escorted out of the building as though she’d been accused of a crime.

(A judge later found the principal’s claims of her poor performance in the classroom completely baseless. His 40+ page decision explained in detail how virtually all of the evidence collected against her was either laughably flimsy, or supported her contention that she was, in fact, a very good teacher.)

...Even if there had been merit in the attempted dismissal, she hadn’t been accused of breaking the law. She hadn’t behaved in a threatening or hostile manner. In truth, there was no evidence to suggest she’d done anything wrong. So why call security? What was the point of treating this woman– who had exclusively devoted over two decades of her life to teaching needy kids– like a suspect? What kind of organization would humiliate people like this, in front of their peers and community, for no good reason? I wrote my resignation letter as soon as I got home.

Ten things teachers need to reclaim their profession

1. Allow our teachers to use best practices rather than canned programs
2. Permit teachers to adjust and modify their lessons to fit their students’ knowledge and skills rather than prepare them for high-stakes testing.
3. Test score ‘data’ can only become relevant when interpretation for individual students is corroborated by their teachers
4. Abolish all goal-setting based on annual high-stakes testing scores.
5. Eliminate both scripted and paced lesson mandates
6. Eliminate all punitive policies that pronounce harsh judgments on students, teachers, schools and districts based on unchallenged interpretations of student test scores.
7. Codify regulations against administrative use of direct and/or implied threats of repercussions to those teachers who follow their State Standards for the Teaching Profession rather than curricular and/or pedagogy directives which utilize a script-like pacing without allowing for teacher modification and adjustments to fit the classroom clientele.
8. State Standards for the Teaching Profession should be the guiding principles for all teacher evaluation protocols used by administrators.
9. Teachers should have the freedom without fear of recrimination to express their professional opinions inside and outside of school sites regarding school practices and policies.
10. Develop an enhanced parent-teacher communication protocol complete with translators for second language learner parents who are not fluent in English.

Missing the point on poverty and reform — again

In the current climate, anybody who raises the issue of how poverty affects students runs the risk of being labeled as:

• a defender of the status quo
• someone who uses poverty as an excuse for bad teachers who are protected by bad teachers unions
• someone who believes that certain kids cannot learn as well as other kids.

None of those are true.

Teacher Evaluations Based on Test Scores Will Requires Dozens of New Tests

Bloomberg's school CAO Shael Polakow-Suransky (Class of '08) has marched out the plan in New York City, this one with a price tag of over $60,000,000 for testing companies to develop tests for grades 3 through 12 (twice a year) in math, science, English, and social studies.

These tests come on top of the annual NCLB testing and the end-of-course Regents' Exams. Initial implementation is planned for this Fall, even though no community or teacher input has been sought or received, and no validity or reliability has been established for these tests that the testing industry is still cooking up. And what happened to the new Chancellor? The last time we saw him, Mr. Wolcott was walking his grandson to school and preparing pink slips for 4,500 NYC teachers.

Stephen Krashen sent this to the NY Daily News yesterday, April 9, 2011.

Andrew Wolf points out that "Dennis Walcott is more of the same: Bloomberg's new chancellor once again lacks classroom experience," (April 8).

Here is another obvious case: US Education Secretary Arne Duncan has never taught and has no actual credentials in education. He has no background in education other than administration.

His uniformed view that increased testing is the answer to improving schools demonstrates that, like Dennis Walcott, he "lacks the instructional experience to actually fix what is going wrong in our classrooms."

Stephen Krashen

I've said this before.

[Duncan] realizes that if masters degrees in education meant something then his own qualifications would be suspect. He has no educational training. He has never taught in a public school...has never worked in a public school...has never even attended a public school. It's in his best interest to imply that teachers with masters degrees don't know any more than he does with his bachelors degree in Sociology.

Who else has much to say about education...and has no credentials?

• Eli Broad - "education reformer" Graduated in 1954 from Michigan State University in Accounting.
• Bill Gates - "education reformer" and expert because of his money (would anyone listen to him if he wasn't rich?). He went to Harvard, but dropped out to become a billionaire.
• Michael Bloomberg - current Mayor of NYC. Attended Johns Hopkins University and received a BS in Electrical Engineering 1964. Attended Harvard Business School and received an MBA.
• Barak Obama - current president of the USA. Attended Occidental College, transferred to Columbia University and got a BA in Political Science in 1983. He received his J.D. from Harvard Law school in 1991.

Would Broad let a nurse do his taxes rather than a CPA? Would Gates turn over Software Troubleshooting at Microsoft to a Pharmacist? Would Bloomberg assign an Art Historian as the Chief of Police?

Let's look at President Obama's choices for his Cabinet.

Q: Would President Obama nominate a doctor for attorney general?
A: No, the attorney general is an attorney, Eric Holder (Columbia Law School, J.D).

Q: Would Obama nominate an attorney as surgeon general?
A: No, the Surgeon General is Regina Benjamin, a physician (University of Alabama, Birmingham, MD).

Similarly, the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, is a Farmer.
The Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, is a Banker.
The Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, was an Intelligence Officer.
The Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, is a Nobel Prize winning Physicist.

On the other hand, Education Secretary Duncan is not the only misfit. Other members of the Cabinet have backgrounds which don't prepare them for their jobs. We call this political cronyism.

I don't know if it will work for the Department of Transportation for example. Ray LaHood is a former congressman from Illinois who sat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the House Appropriations Committee. So we can see that he has some relevant experience from his time in the House of Representatives. However, his professional background is not in Transportation...does Mr. LaHood know what he's doing at the DOT?

Wait...according to his biography at the Department of Transportation web site, Ray LaHood

...was a junior high school teacher, having received his degree from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. He was also director of the Rock Island County Youth Services Bureau...

Maybe there's someone qualified to be Secretary of Education in the Cabinet after all.

When people need legal help they hire attorneys. When people are ill they go to physicians.

Education needs educators.


UPDATE:

On April 9, I stated that the rich aren't paying their fair share of taxes...and if they did, we could solve most of the budget problems in the country and around the states. Here's some more information on that issue.

The rich are paying less and less of their fair share of taxes...

My post yesterday about the new Chancellor-to-be in NYC was only one of many on the blogosphere. One that interested me was this morning's blog by Diane Ravitch.

The mayor's selection of Black, and Klein before her, is part of a growing trend to turn education—at every level—over to non-professionals. An article in Crain's reports that nearly half the 28 superintendencies in big-city districts this year were awarded to graduates of the Broad Academy, which specializes in training outsiders. In the article, the executive director of the Broad Center said that the leader of a symphony orchestra doesn't have to be a concert violinist. This is true, if she meant to refer to the business manager of the orchestra. But the conductor of the orchestra (the person who "runs" it) must know how to read music and must know quite a lot about each of the instruments and how to bring them together to produce a beautiful sound. Without that skill set, the symphony will just be noise.

She confirms what I assumed...that more and more top education posts in our large urban areas are going to "outsiders" -- non-educators.

I've talked about this before...would we appoint a biologist as Attorney General? an accountant as Surgeon General? Do nominees to the Supreme Court have to be familiar with Law? Should the Treasury Secretary know anything about economics? What every happened to the idea that a good superintendent of public schools should be an educator and a good manager?

Here are some more articles about the NYC Chancellor pick:


...and my favorite:

The Cathleen Black appointment: A precedent