In the ongoing effort to learn what is happening in the states under the guise of “reform,” here are reports from readers in Michigan:

This is a pretty good list. Let me expand a bit: as with much of the country, we had a huge wave of victories by “tea party” backed candidates in the 2010 election cycle, where anti-government folks consolidated control in the state Senate and took back control of the state House. They started by embracing the new governor’s priority for a business tax cut, giving up to $1.7 billion in tax reductions to business but effectively raising taxes on lower income families and removing about $1 billion in funding from education at all levels. (School operating funding is centralized in Michigan, and is determined each year by the legislature.) Schools now face this dramatically reduced funding level as the “new normal,” and funding for next year does not even keep up with inflation.

Against this backdrop, what we have here is a strange alliance of so-called “reformers” with local reactionaries who campaigned on the promise to “downsize government” and in particular to “get government out of our schools.” Last summer, a package of bills that was designed to “reform” teacher tenure by eliminating seniority and making tenure nearly meaningless was rammed through the legislature with considerable help from Students First (which spent some $1 million in media buys to secure key Senate votes). Added to the bills at the last minute and never discussed in committee was a huge new teacher evaluation outline. While there is still discussion about what model will become the mandatory state evaluation “tool,” already in law are requirements that at least 50% of a teacher’s evaluation must be based on value added measures using “objective measures of student growth” (i.e. test scores). Other factors must be included, but there is no minimum weight for anything other than test scores.

Bills were introduced, and passed, that removed most caps from the number of charter schools in the state and effectively removed numerical and enrollment caps from fully online “cyber” charters. Most Michigan charters (70-80%) are managed by for-profit management companies, and amendments to require non-profit EMOs were uniformly defeated. Many of the for-profit charter managers here were formed with both ideological and religious motives, to layer on top of the financial interest.

Most recently, a “parent-trigger” bill came back to life after languishing in the Senate for several months, and a spate of bills have been introduced that would water-down the state graduation requirements because they are too “college-prep” in focus.

While ideas from ALEC and national lobbying groups have played a role and provided a lot of money, much of this legislation was a product of state politics and a huge ideological shift here. It remains to be seen what will happen in the next cycle.

And here is another:

Readers of this blog are reporting on what is happening in their state, and the extent to which corporate reform has intruded into the schools. The toxic combination, when in full flower, consists of legislation to ban collective bargaining, so that there is no group strong enough to fight against budget cuts and anti-teacher legislation; of anti-teacher legislation and of legislation that allows for-profit corporations and privatization.

Washington State has been a holdout. Voters have three times rejected referenda to permit privately managed charter schools, despite the fact that the Gates Foundation is based in Seattle. Last fall, the state’s PTA came out in favor of charters, which may or may not have anything to do with the receipt of a generous grant from you-know-who.

Parents and teachers in Washington State have been working together to defend their public schools against privatizers. The Seattle chapter of Parents Across America is vigilant. Keep your eye on them.

Here is a report from that state:

Education Reform Now, a corporate reform group funded by Wall Street and other financial elites, is now involved in the Chicago teachers’ collective bargaining issues. ERN spent millions in New York state last year to attack teachers’ job protections. In the linked article, the group says it is not coordinating with the Mayor’s office, but this seems unlikely as its robo-calls are parroting what the school superintendent has said publicly.

Teachers must struggle to maintain their salaries, their pensions, their academic freedom in district after district. But the big-monied supporters of corporate reform can parachute into any district and bring millions of dollars to attack the teaching profession and to advance the privatization agenda.

Isn’t it strange that you never see a group like “Education Reform Now” or “Democrats for Education Reform” or “ConnCAN” or “50StateCANN” advocating for smaller classes or more librarians or a reversal of budget cuts.

I might begin to think they wanted real reform if just once in a while they supported something that benefited hard-working teachers and community public schools, and not their self-interested agenda of privately-managed charters.

Diane

A reader, who is a professor of education, writes in response to the ongoing discussion on this blog of the galvanic skin response monitors:

This response to my request for information suggests that Wisconsin has the worst, most anti-teacher, anti-public education reforms:

I asked readers to report on the destructive reforms imposed in their state. No one has tried to collect this information or to pull it all together into a national picture.

Everyone seems to think that their own state is off on a binge of legislation that is anti-union, anti-teacher, and anti-public education.

From what I observe, this is a national “movement,” and it has two sources: 1) ALEC model legislation, which provides templates for conservative state legislators, on how to destroy unions, dismantle the teaching profession, and eliminate public education; and 2) Race to the Top, which promotes obsessive testing and evaluation as well as privately managed charter schools.

If the hammer blows came only from the right (ALEC), it would be bad enough. But when you add to them the harmful policies of Race to the Top, and the cozy relationship between Arne Duncan and the rightwing governors, it creates a terrible, almost desperate situation, because it means that both parties are allied in a campaign to private public education and to deprofessionalize it.

I got so many responses to my question–what is your state doing in the name of “reform”–that I can’t reproduce them all. But I will report on a few and invite readers to look at the comments following my post “Reformers vs. Democracy” and “Add Your State to My List.”

When you review the dozens of comments, which come from states across the nation–from Maine to Florida to California to Hawaii–it gives a devastating portrait of the effects of the “reforms.”

This is indeed a national movement. It is harmful to children, to teachers, and to education.

Diane

California has cut billions of dollars from its education budget over the past decade. There are classrooms with more than 40 students, with many of them non-English-speaking. It is very hard to teach a large class when there are children who don’t understand the language of instruction and when the students no longer have needed services because they were cut too, such as guidance counselors, librarians, social workers, etc.

Under Governor Schwarzenegger, the state had a board of education dominated by charter advocates. California now has nearly 1,000 charters, most of which are unregulated or only lightly regulated, because the state lacks to capacity to supervise them.

The good news is that Governor Jerry Brown is trying to restore the once-valued status of public education in the state. He is not hostile to charter schools; after all, when he was mayor of Oakland, he created two of them himself. But he knows that charter schools are not a systemic response to the needs of this huge state or to a state school system that counts millions of children who are poor, have disabilities, and/or don’t speak English.

Governor Brown is asking the voters of California to approve a tax increase to restore some of the funding that was taken away from the public schools. In the present political climate, in which some political figures want to starve government, this is a bold move. If California turns it down, it would be tragic. It would mean that the people of that state don’t care about the future of its children.

California has another great asset in its State Superintendent Tom Torlakson. He is a former science teacher with a Navy background. He is one of the most enlightened–if not THE most enlightened state education chiefs in the nation. He understands that rebuilding the public system is a high priority.

California also has more than its share of corporate reformers. They pump millions into charters and they tout the accomplishments of any charter that gets high test scores, regardless of how it was done. They pushed the nation’s first “parent trigger” law through the legislature in 2010, to enable 51% of the parents in any public school to vote to privatize it. The “parent trigger” demand came from an organization–Parent Revolution– funded by the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and the Walton Revolution. The head of Parent Revolution was appointed to the state board by Governor Schwarzenegger and he was one of the board members ousted by Governor Brown. Not a single public school has been converted to charter status since the parent trigger law was passed, but other states have adopted similar legislation (egged on by ALEC). Even the Los Angeles Times (no foe of the corporate reformers) admitted that the parent trigger law had flopped.

So California is a paradox. From the perspective of students and teachers, the schools are in terrible trouble because of unending budget cuts. Even districts like San Diego, which have been trying to lead their own reform efforts, have suffered grievous layoffs that cripple true reform.

But the state has more than its share of privateers, many trained by the Broad Foundation of Los Angeles, many others in the financial sector or the world of high-tech, where entrepreneurs revel in instant solutions to problems. The big money is on the side of the privateers.

And the question in California, as elsewhere, is whether and how public education will survive the onslaught of big money.

The one thing California has going for it in the near term is wise political leadership. That’s more than I can say for most of our states.

Diane

We know the answer to that question.

It doesn’t start in high school.

It doesn’t start in middle school.

It doesn’t start in elementary school.

It starts before the first day of kindergarten.

Yet our elites blame teachers for the very existence of the achievement gap.

They think that teachers “cause” the gap.

They think that teachers alone–without any additional help–can close what they didn’t open.

I got an email from a young teacher. She studied language acquisition and literacy. She was a student teacher in kindergarten. She said she could see which children had been to preschool and which had not. She wrote as follows:

“…if there have been many studies on the achievement gap including ones showing the gap as young as 9 months of age, why isn’t anyone intervening? Why is our government trying to close a gap a decade after the child is born? Perhaps, more research needs to be done. Perhaps, someone just needs to say, “Hey, this is a problem that we might be able to fix.” Could you imagine though, if we delayed the gap by a few months or a year? If we closed it when it started to show? If we took baby steps, slowly closing it as it started instead of trying to force shut a wide gaping divide? I just don’t understand why we aren’t going this route.”

I don’t understand either.

I don’t know why the politicians think that more testing will close the gap.

Why do they think that testing children in kindergarten will make them smarter?

Why don’t the billionaire philanthropists invest in a model preschool program to demonstrate how to close the gap?

Why don’t they invest in 0-5 programs to show how to close it?

Educators could tell them–and the Congress, and the U.S. Department of Education–so much if only they would listen.

Diane

I am no expert in special education. I would like to get the views of experienced teachers about what is the best means of assessing the progress of students with disabilities. My assumption would be that the range of disabilities is so broad that one-size-fits-all will fit no one. My assumption is that students with an individualized learning plan need an individualized assessment plan. I have spoken to many teachers of children with high needs who are in despair because of the imposition of inappropriate tests. One teacher wrote to tell me that some of her students literally break down in the classroom when it is time to take the standardized tests.

This letter sensibly asks what’s best. Will students be neglected if they are not tested? Will expectations for them disappear in the absence of testing? What do you think?

Philadelphia matters because it is a harbinger of privatization across the state of Pennsylvania. As the letter below notes, some 25 districts in the state would qualify as in need of dramatic action–i.e., privatization–under the terms of a bill now under consideration in the Legislature. This scenario reflects a process we have seen in other states. First, the state cuts the budget, then the districts find that they can’t maintain their programs or meet their budget, then the state declares a fiscal emergency, and the final act in the process is to hand the schools, the students and the tax dollars to entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs will cut still further, replace teachers with computers, and offer a bare-bones schooling which is worse than what was provided before.

How anyone thinks this is good for our nation or our children is beyond me.

Governor Corbett and the Republican legislature have cut more than $1 billion from the public schools’ budget in the past two years, at the same time that legislators are pushing to add money for vouchers and charters. Privatization groups are pouring money into Pennsylvania political campaigns and waiting for districts to be declared failures so they can get for free what taxpayers have created over the past century.

I will be writing more about Philadelphia, where a management consulting company was brought in to recommend “reform” (i.e., privatization). That company–Boston Consulting Group–received over $1 million to produce a slick document (called “The Blueprint”) that could have been created for free by educators, though it would have reached different conclusions about the needs of the schools.

The odd thing about the management consulting company’s report is that it showed steady improvement in Philadelphia on test scores and safety, and a graduation rate no different from that of other urban districts. So why did it propose drastic action? Why turn public schools over to private interests? BCG did what similar “reform” groups have done. It set lofty goals and said that its proposal was the best way to achieve them. Did it offer any evidence that its proposals would indeed achieve dramatic progress? None.

What the report did not acknowledge is that the Philadelphia schools have been controlled by the state for a decade. Nor did it acknowledge that Philadelphia engaged in a massive privatization experiment that failed a decade ago. Why not consider the option of a democratically elected school board ? It is hard to imagine that it would be worse than the present non-democratic leadership.

Thousands of parents came out to a public meeting to oppose the Philadelphia plan. Their activism might make a difference.

Here’s the deal: If the privateers win this battle, they will take Philadelphia back to the mid-nineteenth century, when philanthropists ran the schools as charity schools. Families depended on the good will of the rich to provide basic schooling for their children.

This is not what great nations do.