Tag Archives: Race to the Top

WHY IS THE DAILY NEWS SO WRONG ABOUT SO MUCH?

Posted on January 19, 2013 | 9 Comments

dailynews

I think we can all agree that the New York print media leaves a stadium parking lot to be desired. At the bottom of the pile is the New York Post which is little more than a daily snuff flick set to words. At the top is the New York Times, the supposed paper of record, whose coverage of current events is as deep as a kiddie pool. Somewhere between the two is the New York Daily News: half snuff, half fluff and all puff.

Take the Daily News’ coverage of the teacher evaluation fiasco between the UFT and DOE for instance. It hasn’t merely been bad or biased in its usual way. It has been downright uninformed. The unnamed author of this opinion piece, entitled Doomed to Fail, seemed to go out of their way to avoid doing even the most basic research on what the UFT and DOE were negotiating, why they were doing so and who played what role.

“What?”, “Why?” and “Who?”, as we were taught in grammar school, are three of the five basic questions journalists set out to answer when writing a story. The fact that the Daily News got 60% of it wrong is nothing short of a disgrace.

What’s worse is that Gotham Schools linked to this piece in yesterday morning’s “Rise and Shine” section. Am I just expressing sour grapes over the fact that Gotham Schools has never, not once, linked to my blog or otherwise acknowledged my existence? Yes it is but I will fry that kettle of fish another time. Much like my banishment from DOE broadband I take Gotham Schools’ derision of this website as a badge of honor.

But back to the appropriately named Doomed to Fail, which could just as easily be a description of the unnamed author’s efforts to write an intelligent piece about a basic bit of education news. The ignorance starts from the very first sentence:

The futile head-butting that passed for negotiations between United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew and schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott on a state-mandated teacher evaluation deal laid bare the fatal flaw in Gov. Cuomo’s approach: letting districts and unions negotiate their plans rather than imposing one from the start.

“Letting school districts and unions negotiate their plans” was not “Gov. Cuomo’s approach”. These negotiations, along with all of the other evaluation talks across the state, are mandated by the federal Race to the Top program.  New York State applied to the federal government for Race to the Top money. One of the conditions that must be fulfilled before receiving this money is the institution of new teacher evaluations. At least part of these evaluations must be agreed upon in collective bargaining (see: negotiation between unions and school districts).

Therefore, it is not Governor Cuomo’s approach. It is President Barack Obama’s and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s approach. This is the “who?” that the Daily News embarrassingly gets wrong. (And Gotham Schools thought worthy enough to hyperlink.)

Third sentence:

Because while the governor set up a basic framework — teachers to be ranked on a four-tier scale based on student test score gains and other performance measures; professional help for those rated poorly; the boot for those who couldn’t improve after two years — he left it to the districts and their unions to work out the details.

Wrong. The governor alone did not set up the basic framework. The framework was agreed upon in collective bargaining between the State of New York (which includes Cuomo, State Education Commissioner John King and State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch) and New York State United Teachers (which includes NYSUT President Richard Ianuzzi and United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew).

Again, the Daily News gets the basic “Who?” wrong.

Furthermore, the framework does not provide for giving “the boot” to “those (teachers) who couldn’t improve after two years.” Instead, teachers who don’t “improve” after two years would be subject to a 3020 (add the “a” to that number if you’re in NYC) hearing in which an arbitrator would decide whether or not to terminate said teachers. A teacher whose incompetence has been vouched for by an independent validator will have the burden of proof at the hearing to show they are not incompetent. A teacher whose incompetence has not been vouched for by an independent validator will have to be proven to be so by the school district.

This is a “What?” the Daily News gets wrong in this case.

Fourth and fifth sentences:

Which, as everyone knows, is where the devil is. Especially given the chronically obstinate UFT.

Sure, Mulgrew says he supports better evaluations. But at negotiation time, he’s all elbows.

Um, Mulgrew was one of the parties that agreed to this framework for “better evaluations” in the first place, a framework that has already been made official in most other school districts in this state. Is this the work of someone “chronically obstinate” or “all elbows” during “negotiation time”?

Essentially, the Daily News is accusing Mulgrew of torpedoing an evaluation framework that he helped create in the first place. Does this count as a “Why?” the Daily News gets wrong? I say it does.

Sentences six through nine:

Even so, it looked like a deal was in reach until early Thursday — hours before Cuomo’s deadline. Then, Mulgrew insisted on a two-year sunset on the evaluation program that would pull the plug just before the worst of the worst would get the ax.

Not to mention brand new arbitration procedures above and beyond the hard-won streamlined process currently in place.

I presume the “hard-won streamlined” arbitration process currently in place refers to the supposed abolition of New York City’s infamous rubber rooms. Whoever wrote this article has never heard of Francesco Portellos who has been languishing in a rubber room for the better part of a year.

Mulgrew could not have possibly insisted on “new arbitration procedures above and beyond” the system currently in place. The procedures in place now, as tepid as they are, require the school district to prove the incompetence of a teacher. As we have seen, Mulgrew already agreed to a basic framework with New York State that effectively short-circuits this by placing the burden of proof on the teacher. In short, he couldn’t have proposed anything to make terminating teachers more difficult than it is now since doing so would have violated the basic framework to which he already agreed at the state level.

Again, when it comes to the “Why?” of the failure of these negotiations the Daily News gets it wrong. Hey, at least it was good enough for Gotham Schools.

The rest of the article:

How could a mayor committed to school reform ever accept a system that purported to elevate teacher quality but would vanish before it could actually do some good? He couldn’t. Mayor Bloomberg had no choice but to say no.

Amazingly, some 90% of the approved plans negotiated by the 682 districts around the state sunset after one year, not two — a provision that Bloomberg dismissed as a sham.

He’s got that right.

Perhaps those districts merely felt the need to reevaluate in a year’s time, not go back to the drawing board. But in the city? Don’t count on it.

Here — with contract talks looming and a new mayor set to take office in January — it’s a sure bet that, had Bloomberg buckled, no teacher would ever be let go under tough new standards.

So, here we are: The kids lose. The teachers lose. The city loses. Only Mulgrew, able to say he stood up to a tough-guy mayor, thinks he wins.

Bully for him.

Right. This is your opinion and you’re entitled to it.

Why should your opinion matter when you fail to get the most rudimentary aspects of these negotiations straight, aspects that you could have gleaned from a simple Google search? Moreover, why should you get space in a major market newspaper when you obviously have not been following this story? Finally, why should Gotham Schools find this uninformed drivel poignant enough to hyperlink when there were easily dozens more insightful articles out there to highlight about this and other New York City school matters?

The answers are “it doesn’t”, “you shouldn’t” and “they shouldn’t” respectively.

→ 9 Comments

Posted in An Embattled Career, education reform, Politics, School

Tagged , , , , , , ,

The NRA’s Opposition to Bloomberg and its Implications for Education Reform

Posted on April 14, 2012 | 8 Comments

Members of the National Rifle Association criticized Lord Michael Bloomberg at their annual conference in St. Louis this past Friday. Bloomberg has been outspoken in his support of gun control. While I have little sympathy with the NRA, their criticisms put a finger on something important:

“I think Mayor Bloomberg is the epitome of the nanny state, of the elite executives that want to control everything and control people’s lives,” he (an NRA member) said.

A statement Bloomberg made in February illustrates the arrogant and out of touch way he handles sensitive issues:

“The NRA’s leaders weren’t even interested in public safety,” Bloomberg told The News this week. “They were interested in promoting a culture where people take the law into their own hands and face no consequences for it.”

That is a thick and curious statement. To be sure, “Stand your ground” laws are reprehensible. However, I think the goal of the NRA leaders is to prop up the weapons industry. Saying that they want to promote “a culture where people take the law into their own hands and face no consequences for it” falls short of the mark. The talk about “consequences” feeds into criticisms about Bloomberg’s association with the “nanny state”. He is all about using his power to hold people “accountable” for doing things and making choices with which he does not agree.

The states that have Stand your Ground laws are, by and large, those with a healthy streak of mistrust for the state. In a perverted way, the voters who support these laws do have a concern with public safety. They do not trust the government’s ability to protect them from crime, so they will protect themselves. That is not to say lawmakers and lobbyists believe it. Their goal is to keep guns rolling out of factories. They have clad these Stand your Ground laws in a cloak of rugged individualism as a way to sell them to voters.

Gun enthusiasts are fond of quoting the second amendment, not to mention isolated passages from Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers. The belief is that the Second Amendment allows people to bear arms as a way to protect against the tyranny of the state. Indeed, when you couple Bloomberg’s support for gun control with his support for stop and frisk and his statements about the NYPD being his own personal army, it would seem the gun enthusiasts are onto something.

But it is pretty clear that the second amendment was a way to preclude the need for standing armies. The Founders saw standing armies as tools of monarchal tyranny. Having citizen-soldiers in the tradition of Greek hoplites was seen as the proper way for a republic to defend itself. It seems this is what the Founders meant when they portrayed the citizens’ right to bear arms as a defense against the tyranny of government.

The fact is that, in 2012, we do have a standing army. We also have militarized police forces like the NYPD. No matter how many automatic weapons the populace owns, it will not prevent an organized and well-armed military force from having their way if the time comes.

The fact of the matter is, the government does not need to impose martial law or send tanks down Main Street to oppress us. They are doing a good enough job of that through legislation, executive orders and Supreme Court rulings. While the state has become more draconian over the past 35 years, they have done so at the behest of the corporate. Through the control of the media, finance, technology and every other facet of human life, corporations have organized society in such a way that martial law becomes unnecessary.

So when members of the NRA talk about Bloomberg’s association with the nanny state, they put their finger on something. His support of gun control, his education policy, his quality of life initiatives all represent an arrogant paternalism. However, it is not the paternalism of the state exclusively. It is the paternalism of corporatized government. It is the idea that people cannot run their own lives and need business to organize life for them. That is what charter schools are all about. That is why Bloomberg stops short of criticizing the role of gun manufacturers in the NRA.

People on the correct side of the education reform debate may have to make some strange alliances. One of those alliances will have to be with the states’ rights part of the electorate. As more states promise to sign on to Obama’s Race to the Top we will see more blowback from people, mostly in the south and west, who oppose it on grounds that it is a gross federal overreach. We have seen this play out in South Carolina’s rejection of RTT.

The common ground between advocates of public education and members of the political right is the belief in community input into public schools. The tragedy of mayoral control in New York City is how far it has taken us from democratic oversight of education policy. Since the 1960s, local communities in NYC have been prevented from having any say in the schools that serve them. The last vestige of democracy was the popularly elected Board of Education. That was done away with when Bloomberg created the Panel for Educational Policy, the majority of whose members vote the way Mayor for Life Bloomberg wants them to.

Race to the Top represents the paternalism of mayoral control writ large. The fact that states have to sign on to the program is a subterfuge. It gives the illusion of respecting the idea of states’ rights and the traditional role state governments have played as leaders of their own education systems. In truth, once a state signs on to RTT they have abdicated all control of education policy to Uncle Arne in Washington. They must open up more charter schools and evaluate teachers based on data-driven nonsense, or else they do not get federal funding.

America’s schools have never been so top-heavy before. Starting with the president but working its way down to governors, mayors and principals, school systems have been given over to increasing centralization. This runs counter to every educational tradition in the United States. These are the points we must make in order to reach across the aisle to those on the political right. We all want to give communities more control over education policy, since each community knows best how to serve their unique student population.

This is an alliance fraught with difficulty. It has the potential to founder on issues of class and race. Libertarian-minded voters might not mind the corporate aspects of education reform and all of the million-dollar contracts it entails. Community control in places like NYC means giving mostly minority communities a say in education policy. However, areas of the south have used the concept of local school control as a way to bar minorities from equal educational opportunities. These are the major fault lines that would develop in an alliance between us and the political rights.

It is still an alliance worth exploring. The movement known as education reform has so much traction because it is bipartisan. Only a bipartisan counter-attack would have a chance of standing up to education reform. There is room for such a counter-attack if we stick to the themes that unite us for now.

→ 8 Comments

Posted in An Embattled Career, education reform, Parallel Universes, Politics, School

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Reasons to Listen to the Radio

Posted on March 6, 2012 | 2 Comments

Tonight, Mind of a Bronx Teacher’s guest will be Peggy Robertson of United Opt Out National. The Opt Out movement has been gaining traction recently, especially with Race to the Top metastasizing across the country. Those of us who wish to guide the teacher unions down a more democratic path would be well served to make common cause with United Opt Out. It has the potential to be a powerful tool of civil disobedience.

Check here for how to tune in tonight’s show:

South Bronx School

Then, this coming Thursday (March 8, 2012), I will be a guest on the Mom Madness show at 3pm on Harlem Talk Radio. The discussion will revolve around the new teacher evaluations for New York State and how they might impact the parents of New York City. Arne Duncan was a guest recently, so I hope to balance out the propaganda he spouted about Race to the Top.

You can listen to Harlem Talk Radio online here:

Harlem Talk Radio

→ 2 Comments

Posted in An Embattled Career, education reform, Politics, School, teaching

Tagged , , , , , ,

The Myth of Budget Cuts in American Education

Posted on March 4, 2012 | 3 Comments

The question mark is the biggest education cut of all.

Here is a thought that flies in the face of common sense: there is no budget crisis in education, even in the age of the Great Recession.

Sure, we in New York City are seeing more and more schools being shuttered. Bloomberg has closed over 100 schools in his 10 years as mayor, including 33 this year alone. Schools that have not been closed have seen their budgets drastically slashed, eliminating art, music and after school programs across the city. Students, teachers and parents get the same excuse from the Department of Education every year: a bad economy means we all have to tighten our educational belts.

Experienced teachers are a particular target because they have higher salaries. The public perceives them as making too much money, having too much job protection and being too lazy to provide a quality education to children. Average citizens who have been laid off scratch their heads in wonder over why these dead wood teachers are able to keep their jobs. There have been renewed cries to do away with teacher tenure, despite the fact the new New York State teacher evaluation agreement promises to do just that.

While students and their teachers are being squeezed, there has been more money flowing through the education system than ever before. President Obama’s most recent budget promises an influx of federal education funds. Legions of non-profit groups have showered money on certain schools and think tanks. Businessmen who were never involved with education before are joining the fight for education reform, using their fabulous wealth to impose their vision of what reform means.

On the local level here in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has run a Department of Education known for handing out hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts. Between 2006 and 2009 alone, Bloomberg’s DOE handed out nearly 300 such contracts to select companies, an unheard of number in the history of New York City’s school system. This includes $83 million to Joel Klein’s Wireless Generation to operate the Achievement Reporting and Innovation Systems (ARIS) program, formerly run by IBM. This is despite the fact that half of the DOE’s staff has never used it and much less than that use it on any regular basis.

The new teacher evaluation agreement promises to pour gasoline on this no-bid contract wildfire. At the very least, we know that New York State will administer exams to every student in every grade for every subject. This is a tremendous expansion of the current regime of intermittent statewide testing. These tests will be devised and graded by outside contractors. Principals will also have to use a standardized rubric to evaluate teachers. This will allow principals to enter simple ratings for many different categories, a system that lends itself perfectly to more data mining by outside contractors. To top it all off, there is still the danger that a citywide exam will be part of the evaluations, which would require the city to place an order for another few million exams.

All of this is in a manic quest to evaluate teachers. Not one cent out of all of these millions of dollars that promise to be spent will go to educating a single child.

The State of New York created this state of affairs when they signed on to Obama’s and Duncan’s Race to the Top program. For the past few months, Duncan harangued New York to come to some sort of agreement on teacher evaluations or risk foregoing $700 million in federal education funds. Now that an agreement is in place, it is tough to imagine even one of those 700 million dollars going to the children of New York State. Duncan’s threat basically amounted to “come to a new teacher evaluation agreement fast, or else you will not have any money to pay for a new teacher evaluation.” The students, parents and teachers of New York have been had.

This is par for the course in education reform. The road was paved by Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, but it is being completed by Obama. Chances are that a Republican leader would not be able to get away with such a blatant handover of tax money to private interests. It would be decried for the cronyism it is. Only Democratic leaders could gain the type of public trust required to accelerate the privatization of the education system. Obama, Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Andrew Cuomo and even Mayor Bloomberg are all Democrats (Bloomberg only became a Republican after Rudy Giuliani had become “America’s Mayor” during 9/11. It allowed him to ride Giuliani’s coattails into office.) They are able to clothe their agendas in a concern for poor children. In reality, it is the poor children who are being squeezed the most.

The most blatant example of this is the charter school wave. Another part of Obama’s and Duncan’s Race to the Top is the opening of more charter schools. Bloomberg’s shuttering of over 100 public schools has been followed by the creation of more charter schools. Despite having much lower ratios of students with learning disabilities and English language learners than public schools; despite being able to “counsel out” disruptive students, unlike public schools; and despite their use of non-unionized teachers, charters have less than a 20% chance of outperforming public schools, and more than a 40% chance of underperforming.

Yet, these charters are able to advertise to parents using glossy mailers and subway posters. They are usually able to slap a fresh coat of paint over what used to be a public school. They have nifty corporate logos that inspire confidence in parents. Someone is getting a lot of money from all of this and it certainly is not the child who attends the charter school. In fact, chances are that children will end up paying regressive fines as punishment for acting up in class, like they do in Chicago.

Where does this money go? Just ask Eva Moskowitz, owner of the Success chain of charter schools here in New York. She pulls in nearly $400,000 a year, despite the fact that her schools are located inside the carcasses of shuttered public school buildings.

While Eva and people like her make boatloads of money from a burgeoning privatized schooling industry, there is still plenty of money to be made inside public schools themselves. Bloomberg’s drive to replace large high schools with smaller high schools has given rise to the need for more administrators. In NYC, even the lowliest administrator starts out at six figures. With the proliferation of small school academies, there has been a proliferation of six-figure salaries all over the city. There are people who get into teaching now just so they can get the minimum number of teaching years under their belts to become administrators. This includes graduates of the Leadership Academy, which costs over $70 million to operate. Needless to say, people cut from this cloth have very little knowledge of teaching and very little ability to improve the quality of instruction of their teachers.

As you can see, there is very little evidence of any budget crisis in education. The money is flowing into the system more furiously than ever. Yet, tenured teachers are being fired and their pensions are being squeezed. Children are losing their public schools, their enrichment programs and their sports. The neediest students and the lowliest workers in the education system are seeing their benefits disappear under the guise of necessary budget cuts in a weak economy. At the same time, principals, charter school operators and private contractors are receiving boatloads of government cash.

It is the education world’s version of Reaganomics. Reagan oversaw a vast and naked transfer of wealth upwards from the poorest people to the wealthiest. In the same way, education reform shakes down the most vulnerable people in the system in order to enrich the already enriched.

It has always been a mistake to say that schools are separate entities from the real world. Schools are a part of the real world, subject to the same socioeconomic forces that shape society at large. Just like the Great Recession in which we remain mired has seen a coagulation of wealth in the top tax brackets, the education system has seen a coagulation of wealth at the leadership level. Just like in the economy, education fails when resources do not flow throughout all levels. The education reformers are right: our schools certainly are failing, and it is they who are failing them.

Who will be the Franklin Roosevelt that brings a New Deal to the children of the United States?

It certainly will not be Obama, Duncan, Cuomo or any other so-called Democrat. Their push to force all children (except their own) to take bubble-in exams for 13 straight years will serve to turn learning in the United States into a series of decontextualized bits and sound bites. As Chris Hedges so eloquently writes, it is designed to ensure that our children go on to be non-thinkers and passive vessels, ever ready to be directed by their higher ups on what to do next.

There is no better way to solidify the savage inequalities that currently exist in our society than to create an education system that replicates those inequalities. There is no better way to perpetuate those inequalities than to train the poorest children among us to not be able to think past the next bubble to fill in.

Education reform is about training children to accept injustice as a fact of life. It is about training students to ignore that inner part with which we are all born, the one that looks at the world for what it is and has the audacity to say “something ain’t right.”

Something certainly is not right. The economy is so bad that the poorest schools have to cut their art and music programs, yet there is $83 million for the ARIS program? Teachers are harassed as lazy, tenured do-nothings, but Eva can make $400,000 a year for making glossy fliers and kicking out children she does not feel like educating?

Yes, education reformers seek to install moral blinders on children so they become incapable of seeing injustice when it is so blatantly in their faces. I am sure they would love nothing more than to give all the students who show up to protest Bloomberg’s school closings a few more bubble exams so they become as vegged out and amoral as most adults.

→ 3 Comments

Posted in An Embattled Career, education reform, First Hand: Occupy Wall Street, Politics, School

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Towards A New Activism

Posted on February 18, 2012 | 11 Comments

History does not often repeat itself. While the gap between the wealthy and the poor has widened to a degree not seen since the Gilded Age, the reasons for those gaps each arose out of their own peculiar circumstances. This means that it is tough for those who want to fight back against what is happening today to look for historical models. Instead, a totally new approach must be conceived.

Start first with President Obama’s payroll tax “holiday” from this past Friday. Even though it does not destroy Social Security, it shows the way to its destruction. Social Security has always been self-funded. The only problem it ever faced was that it worked too well, causing the federal government under mostly Republican administrations to raid its surpluses in order to pay for the bonehead policies of today, like tax cuts for the wealthy and imperialist war. This “holiday” will temporarily cut off the revenue stream to social security, necessitating that Congress approve the funds to make up the shortfall at a later date. This gives Congress the authority, if they so choose, to deny those funds. In essence, it sets a precedent of putting the continuation of Social Security in the hands of Congress. The supposed “firewalls” that protected the program are being chipped away.

The fact that a Democratic president oversaw such a plan is blasphemous. Social Security is one of the last bulwarks of the New Deal, put into place by a president who shaped Democratic values for generations to come. Now we have a Democratic president who has sold those values out every chance he has gotten. It is tough to see what new values he has put in their place aside from those of the Republican Party.

The public schools in New York got another taste of Obama’s values this past Thursday with the new teacher evaluation agreements. These agreements arose out of New York State’s application for Race to the Top funds, the school reform program instituted by President Obama. Despite Obama’s assurances that RTT is a break from the Republican No Child Left Behind Act, it is merely an acceleration of its standardized testing, charter school-opening vision. The closing of 23 public schools in New York City will surely give birth to more privately run charters. The new teacher evaluation system will give rise to a massive testing and rating regime handled by private corporations.

That has been the common theme of everything Obama has done as president. Whatever benefits the corporate is good. What is good for workers, including the working poor, is destroyed.

Part of the condition of New York receiving RTT funds was that it had to institute new teacher evaluations. As of Thursday’s agreement, those evaluations will be based 40% on the test scores of their students. Subjects and grades that do not currently have testing will need to have them, a boon to the testing companies. The ratings of each teacher will need to be calculated and compiled by outside companies, like Rupert Murdoch’s Pearson, which will surely turn educational statistics into a new boom industry. This is the real Obama stimulus package: sell off parts of the public sector in order to create new industries in the private sector.

Despite the fact that only 40% of teacher ratings will be based on test scores, a teacher will be rated ineffective overall if found deficient on that 40%. Two ineffective ratings will be grounds for termination. You read that correctly. Thanks to Obama, not only is Social Security on the road to extinction, but tenure for New York teachers has been effectively destroyed. Seeing as how New York usually serves as a template for the rest of the country, this will surely mean the destruction of tenure for teachers in other states as well. Obama did what Scott Walker in Wisconsin was trying to do for so long. All Walker needed was a Democratic president to help him.

But of course, Obama could not have done any of this alone. He faces an intractable Republican opposition that has veered so far to the right that Mussolini himself would be jealous. In New York, his RTT could have never destroyed tenure the way it has done without the active complicity of the teachers’ unions. It was Michael Mulgrew, head of the UFT, who lauded the new teacher evaluations as a great deal. What he got for his teachers in that deal remains a mystery. For teachers in New York City, he agreed to allow only 13% of teachers rated ineffective to have access to any sort of due process. Those lucky teachers will most likely be chosen by the union, allowing the Mulgrews of the world to destroy any teacher that challenges the hegemony of his Unity caucus over the UFT.

The Democratic Party and labor unions, institutions that were supposed to have the backs of workers through thick and thin, have put a giant knife through those backs instead.

There really is no precedent for any of this in American history. Those of us who wish to fight back cannot look to historical models to guide a current plan of action. At a fundamental level, the protestors at Occupy Wall Street sensed this. They were not all about marching in the streets like the radicals of the past. Instead, they built a community from scratch based upon open debate, enlightenment and sharing of resources. Their method was an opting out of the profit system. As the walls close in on the American workers all around us, opting out is becoming their only option.

For teachers, a national opt out movement against standardized testing is already afoot. In their book Tinkering Towards Utopia, David Tyack and Larry Cuban sought to explain why so many education reforms of the past have failed. Their conclusion was that these reforms never had the support of classroom teachers. Even though laws were passed and policies were instituted meant to bring about reform, they went nowhere once they filtered down to the classroom level. Either they were impractical or so removed from reality that teachers had no choice but to opt out of them. This, I think, is the only hope of the new teacher evaluation regime being defeated.

The new regime promises to put all curricula and all ratings (students, teachers and schools) in the hands of private companies. Instead of ceding this type of power to the Murdochs of the world, what if teachers threw their bodies on the gears, so to speak, and said “No”? What if they refused to prep their children for standardized exams in favor of teaching kids how to think? What if they told their students and parents to stay home on test days? What if, instead of building the data factories that Obama has mandated, teachers turn their schools into the types of places of learning that they want to see? What if the testing companies had no answer sheets to scan and, therefore, no way to compile data on “effective” and “ineffective” teachers?

Something as bold as this cannot be done through the union. They will never allow teachers to organize communities to this end. Instead, teachers must work outside of the union. They must build their own apparatuses and institutions that allow a grassroots type of organizing. They must build a regime within a regime, one more in touch with the needs of students, teachers and even administrators, so that the union itself becomes irrelevant. Throughout the past 35 years, the Democratic Party and labor unions have been shaping circumstances that leave workers behind. The only solution is for workers, starting with teachers, to shape circumstances of their own in order to leave the people who have sold us out behind.

→ 11 Comments

Posted in An Embattled Career, Politics

Tagged , , , , , ,

The State of the Union Conference

Posted on February 4, 2012 | 4 Comments

Earlier today, I attended the State of the Union Conference in downtown Manhattan, not far from where I teach. It was organized by the progressive edcuators at the Grassroots Education Movement. As the name of the conference would indicate, a large part of the day was spent assessing the United Federation of Teacher’s complicity in the destruction of public education. I was heartened by the large turnout of teachers and parents. The auditorium was brimming with people, as were all of the individual seminars. I also got to meet many of you, the gentle readers of this blog, and really was taken aback by the support and kind words you had for this little website. All around it was a great day.

The first person I met was Norm Scott. Norm has been a public school activist for a long time, sort of the dean of progressive educators, and it was an honor to meet him. (Check out Norm’s blogs at Ed Notes Online and Norm’s Notes).

After a short introduction in the auditorium, we were allowed to choose from a list of seminars. All of the seminars sounded good and it took me a while to choose to attend the one about the history of the teacher unions. It was conducted by GEM members Michael Fiorillo and Peter Lamphere. I took notes on this here laptop and picked up some very good tidbits on the role of the teacher unions throughout history. Given my history background, it has become impossible for me to wrap my mind around an issue without knowing the history behind it.

The discussion that took place on the heels of seminar was fascinating. There were so many teachers in that room, including old veterans who remember the strike of 1968 and what things were like before the strike. It was no surprise to hear the same themes from back then recapitulated today. I contributed my two cents about the age of corporate fascism in which we currently live. I could have sworn I heard some groans when I started dissing Obama and Clinton.

The second seminar was conducted by Brian Jones on the history of school segregation in NYC. Much of the ensuing discussion revolved around fighting for local control of school boards and bringing in more minority educators. Underneath the surface of this discussion was a tension, really as old as education activism itself, between those who want to focus on the race issue and those that want to focus on socioeconomic class. To me, this is a rift that threatens to divide public education activism. It will be the subject of my next blog entry.

I was not able to stick around for the third seminar. My one regret was not getting more contact information for the people I met. For those interested in staying in contact and keeping the good feeling of today’s conference going, I put my email address in the sidebar of this website. It is theassailedteacher@gmail.com.

Thank you to everyone who organized the State of the Union conference. I am sure this is the first step in a new stage of the battle to retake our public schools.

→ 4 Comments

Posted in An Embattled Career, education reform, teaching

Tagged , , , , , ,

Take Action: Sign the Petition to Get Rid of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education

Posted on January 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

Picture from New York City Public School Parents website: http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2011/02/arne-duncan-dumb-and-dumber.html

With the backlash against SOPA, we see how effective online activism can be.

Sign the petition here.

Full text of the petition. (Original Link)

Dear President Obama,

We, the undersigned, a cross section of the nation’s teachers and their supporters, wish to express our extreme displeasure with the policies implemented during your administration by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Although many of us campaigned enthusiastically for you in 2008, it is unlikely that you will receive continued support unless the following three dimensions of your administration’s education initiatives are changed:

  1. The exclusion of teachers from policy discussions in the US Department of Education and from Education Summits called under your leadership.
  2. The use of rhetoric which blames failing schools on “bad teachers” rather than poverty and neighborhood distress.
  3. The use of federal funds to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores in the evaluation of teachers and as the basis for closing low performing schools.

Because of these policies, teachers throughout the nation have become discouraged and demoralized, undermining your own stated goals of improving teacher quality, upgrading the nation’s educational performance, and encouraging creative pedagogy rather than “teaching to the test.”

We therefore submit the following measures to put your administration’s education policy back on the right track and to bring teachers in as full partners in this effort:

  1. The removal of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and his replacement by a lifetime educator who has the confidence of the nation’s teachers.
  2. The incorporation of parents, teachers, and school administrators in all policy discussion taking place in your administration, inside and outside the Department of Education.
  3. An immediate end to the use of incentives or penalties to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores as a basis for evaluating teachers, preferring charter schools to existing public schools, and requiring closure of low performing schools.
  4. Create a National Commission, in which teachers and parent representatives play a primary role, which explores how to best improve the quality of America’s schools.

We believe such policies will create an outpouring of good will on the part of teachers, parents and students which will promote creative teaching and educational innovation, leading to far greater improvements in the nation’s schools than policies which encourage a proliferation of student testing could ever hope to do.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

→ Leave a comment

Posted in An Embattled Career, Politics

Tagged , , , , ,

Obama’s War on Knowledge

Posted on January 29, 2012 | 1 Comment

Obama reveals his plans to destroy all learning.

One of my favorite blogs is On The Edge. Susan, who is the author, usually chooses the right stance over the popular one. Yesterday, she posted an article about Obama’s plan for higher education reform. It is essentially Race to the Top for universities, where federal funding will be tied to whether or not universities will be able to lower tuition. This means, of course, slashing pay for professors and the proliferation of online courses as a way to cut costs. The article paints a grim picture of universities ending up totally beholden to private interests. Susan ends her post with a chilling comment, “watch them try to do away with tenure on the college level.”

Teachers, whether in grade school or university, are the guardians of knowledge for the young. Oftentimes, they are the only pipeline youth have into the world of important ideas. The standardized testing craze in public schools has already been taking knowledge out of the hands of teachers and putting it into the hands of private testing companies, which are usually owned by even bigger corporations like News Corp. What this will amount to, once education deform has thoroughly ravaged public education, is a very narrow elite deciding what is important for people to know and what is not. This is the same story with the media, where a handful of corporations decide what gets aired and what remains invisible. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which by no means has been defeated, promises to be a major first step in allowing corporations say in what remains on the internet and what gets disappeared.

Taken together, public schools, the media and the internet pretty much account for all of the ways people interact with the wider world. Our entire matrix of knowledge is shaped by these things. Those whose only knowledge of the world is gleaned from their public school education are usually not informed at all, especially since the relevance of that education wanes as people get older. Those that bury their heads in the television for news usually come away with a shallow understanding of what is happening, leaving them with little but flimsy talking points. The internet might be the best place of all for news, but it is only useful if the person doing the surfing is able to discern the small amount of good information from the vast amount of garbage. Although all of these things are either under attack or totally beholden to corporate interests, there was always a silver lining in the background: the college professor.

Even if every other source of knowledge has been bastardized by corporate interests, college professors hold out the hope of intellectual integrity. This does not mean that every professor is a bastion of reliability. Anyone who has seen the movie Inside Job knows that many professors are for sale and will hide behind the supposed intellectual rigor of their work in order to push a corporate agenda. Yet, on the whole, college professors at least have a pretense to rigor and a desire to help their fields of study evolve through solid research and analysis. Through journal articles and popular books, professors filter their findings down to the population at large. History professors provide a public service by researching recent history, interpreting their findings and shedding light on the politics of today. It is tenure that gives professors the freedom to value truth over fads. Unlike public school teachers, professors are not so pliable to outside interests, especially the interests of the rich and powerful. In certain cases, professors are able to speak truth to power in a way few others can.

Doing away with tenure for college professors will mean the total commodification of knowledge. There will be literally no way the average person can interact with the world around them without it being filtered through a corporate reality first. Hopefully, college professors across the country can overcome their traditional lack of stomach for pitched political battle and defend what promises to be the final frontier of free expression and the pursuit of truth.

Maybe they can start by becoming more involved in the debate over education reform. The ones not for sale need to shout louder and farther than the economists and education researchers who have whored themselves out to the corporate elite a long time ago.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in An Embattled Career, education reform, Politics

Tagged , , , , ,

Arne Duncan: The Fish Rots from the Head

Posted on January 12, 2012 | 5 Comments

Arne Duncan is pure rot.

So Secretary of Education Arne Duncan came dangerously close to calling New York City a “laggard” for failing to implement a new teacher evaluation system. His exact words, as quoted by the New York Times, were “New York has a chance to be a national leader, or a laggard…” Laggard was an early 1900s way of referring to a student who falls behind. Back then, the word had a similar function to the word “retard” today. In reference to students, it was not a nice word. In 1909, the book Laggards in our Schools: a Study of Retardation and Elimination in City School Systems was a popular screed of early education reform.

If there is a “crisis” in education, then look no further than at the top to the Secretary of Education. Arne represents everything that is wrong with education deform. He works for the lobbyists in Washington who want narrow national standards, standardized testing, charter schools and the ability to fire veteran teachers. The Race to the Top program he has been busy pushing requires any state that signs on, like New York, to implement these deformer policies on condition of receiving federal dollars. It is the quintessential “my way or the highway” approach that defines every effort at education deform. There are “no excuses”, as the deformers are fond of saying. If the teachers of New York do not want to abide by their new evaluation system, then we are “retards”.

Yet, if a teacher were to treat their students this way, there would be cries from every corner to fire them. Teachers get fired for saying the wrong thing on facebook or giving the wrong grade to the wrong kid. The Secretary of Education, on the other hand,  gets a free pass when he threatens to withhold millions of dollars from the schools of millions of children, then stops short of calling the state in which those kids live “retards”.

People generally assume that schools are havens from the cruelty of the real world. The fact that so many people call for teachers’ heads on platters when they step out of the tiniest bounds of Puritanical ethics proves this. The reality is that schools are created by the real world and reflect the values of that world. It is a cynical world where an elite group of people can set all the rules, whether it is which test to give or what the labor laws shall be. If you fail in this real world, you are a “laggard” or a loser. There are no excuses, as the education deformers love to say. Your failures are your own fault.

People, hypocrites generally, talk about making our schools great. Yet, in all of the years they have had to make bold reforms, they have come up with no greater guiding philosophy than to bring the same mediocre mindset of the corporate world (the “real world”, that is)  to schools. It is a lack of imagination to say the least and their standardized exams and Common Core Standards will ensure that their own utter dearth of creativity will be internalized by the current generation of students suffering through their “reforms”.

The truth is, you cannot have a great education system when you are guided by  dogmatic ideologies. You cannot have a great education system when you have a Secretary of Education who is beholden to these ideologies. Punishment, name-calling and shame are not sound educational strategies. The crisis in education is a crisis of imagination and creativity at the very top of the system. Until we reform who the reformers are, we will never have great schools.

→ 5 Comments

Posted in An Embattled Career, education reform

Tagged , , , ,

Deformers Trying to Deform a Deformed Law

Posted on January 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

(Picture from the Failing Schools blog)

The “tougher” teacher evaluation regime that looms over us all in New York must be agreed upon by the unions and districts. It is one of the stipulations of getting Race to the Top money.

Governor Cuomo’s agonizing State of the State address (you can watch it here), which was a load of self-serving hokum, did not give any actual particulars about the special committee the governor will appoint to help deal with the teacher evaluation question. It seems like Cuomo is stalling for time so he can find the best middle way to take. In other words, Andrew is doing what is best for Andrew’s political future.

But, as Gotham Schools reported yesterday:

“education reform groups are asking Gov. Andrew Cuomo to install a “shot clock” on future talks… When the clock expires, a teacher evaluation system devised by the State Education Department would go into effect, according to the plan outlined in a letter signed by 13 reform organizations from across the state and country.”

Translation: the deformers want to circumvent the law by putting a deadline on all teacher evaluation negotiations. If that deadline is not met, then an evaluation system of the state’s design will be implemented instead. Of course, the union would not be in on any plan the State Education Department might make, but I’m sure a lot of Rhee and Educators 4 Excellence money would. So all school districts like our own beloved Bloomberg’s New York City would have to do is sabotage the negotiations with the union, miss the deadline and, voila, they will get the type of anti-teacher evaluations they want anyway.

The post on Gotham Schools has the text of the letter the deformers wrote the governor.

It’s really amazing. The deformers love to say poverty is not destiny and throwing money at schools will not make it better. Now here they are trying to convince the governor to screw teachers so the state does not lose its valuable Race to the Top money. All of the sudden the deformers are concerned with throwing money at the system. Next they will be calling for smaller class sizes, as long as those classes are taught by inexperienced and inexpensive teachers. The deformers will do anything for our kids as long as it involves getting rid of those kids’ most veteran teachers.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in An Embattled Career, education reform, Politics

Tagged , , , ,