Listen to a good panel discussion, featuring Joanne Barkan of Dissent. She wrote the great article “Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools.”
Archives for the month of: September, 2012
I hate to see anyone give up when they love their work. When you read this essay, however, you will undertand why the pressure got to be too much for this teacher.
Do you think we could persuade Bill Gates and Eli Broad and Arne Duncan to read it too?
Maybe they could help figure out how to keep people like this teacher in the schools. We need her.
We don’t need people taking potshots and making her job harder.
This post is very provocative. It may or may not have relevance to the readers of this blog, because so much of it refers to a British context and pertains to higher education. But what is relevant is the discussion of the conflict between democracy and free market efficiency.
As I read it, I thought about the argument for mayoral control: “It may mean giving up democracy, but it is more efficient.” Look to Cleveland, Chicago and New York City, and what you see is that democracy has been abolished with no increase in efficiency or effectiveness. What we have instead is one-man control, no-bid contracts, school closings, indifference to the views of constituents, and no improvement in educational quality.
Here is the heart of the matter:
…the nub of the matter is captured by his analogy with democracy — “the worst system except for all the others”. The ‘problem’ with democracy (as Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore might have put it) is that it’s inefficient. Much simpler, cheaper and more efficient to have a benevolent dictator (like Mr Lee and his successors). Likewise, our justice system is mightily ‘inefficient’ — all those lawyers, trials, juries, assumption of innocence until proved guilty, etc. Much simpler to be able to lock up baddies on the say-so of a senior policeman.
But in both cases we tolerate the inefficiencies because we value other things more highly: political liberty and freedom of expression in the case of democracy; the belief that a system of justice should be open, impartial and fair in the case of our court system.
Like democracy, public universities are also ‘inefficient’ — often, in my experience, woefully so. And only some of that inefficiency can be defended in terms of academic freedoms; much of it is down to the way university culture has evolved, the expectations of academic staff, poor management (rather than enlightened administration), and so on — things that could be fixed without undermining the really important values embodied by the idea of a university. The advent of serious tuition fees in English universities will have the effect of highlighting some of the more egregious deficiencies — poor (or at best uneven) teaching quality, little pastoral care, archaic pedagogical methods, etc. But any attempt to remedy these problems is likely to be seen as interference with cherished academic freedoms, and resisted accordingly. Already, however, students are beginning to ask questions: why, for example, should they pay £9,000 a year for crowded lectures, ‘tutorial groups’ of 50 or more, zero pastoral care and — in some cases — lousy social facilities? Why should complaints about the crass incompetence of a particular lecturer be ignored by the Head of his department? (These are gripes I’ve heard from students recently, though not at my university.)
The problem isn’t helped by the crass insensitivity of many of the new ‘managers’ in UK universities — people who may know how to run a business but haven’t the faintest idea of how to run a university. There’s no reason in principle, though, why one cannot have universities that, on the one hand, function as liberal, critical institutions which cherish and protect freedom of thought and inquiry while at the same time providing excellent ‘customer service’ to their paying students.
A reader writes to add to an earlier list of “five liberal pundits”
Add NY Times columnist Tom Friedman and former Tribune editor/current Daily Beast contributor James Warren to the list.
Friedman has been wrong about almost everything he has every written about – from the wonders of global free trade to the wonders of the Iraq war.
Matt Taibbi has done the best take downs of Friedman. Here’s the most famous of those:
http://nypress.com/flat-n-all-that/
Glenn Greenwald points out how Friedman is emblematic of our imperial press corps – shilling for the corporate state, but wrong about everything:
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/25/the_value_of_tom_friedman/
Somehow Friedman, despite being wrong about pretty much everything, gets to continue to pontificate about the horrors of teachers unions and the wonders of standardized test scores in China (not realizing, of course, that only a small segment of children in China take those tests and thus are counted in the scores.)
If there were a value-added score for Tom Friedman, it would be in the negative.
Read something he’s written and you lose brain cells.
As for Warren, he attacked teachers for whining about air conditioning in the Daily Beast earlier this week.
Warren doesn’t seem to care that some Chicago schools are actually in session in July and August and some teachers have to work in classrooms with 40+ students when it’s a 100 degrees.
Warren also called Karen Lewis a “bumbler,” though it seems Warren’s old newspaper thinks Emanuel was the one who bumbled into – and then through – this strike by being tin-eared and sticking to his “Demonize the Unions” strategy he’s been using since NAFTA:
As the son of stockbroker, I guess I can see why Warren would side with Emanuel and the Hyatt heiress over the students and teachers of Chicago.
In this article, five “liberal” pundits are cited who never side with teachers.
If the article had looked beyond the “liberal” side, it would have added Jonathan Alter and David Brooks, who are firmly on the side of the “reformers” who blame teachers and their unions for all the ills of American education. Alter appeared in “Waiting for Superman,” where he lauded testing and accountability, and Brooks claimed that the charter schools of the Harlem Children’s Zone had closed the achievement gap and never posted a correction to acknowledge that it had not. Anyway, he is a self-proclaimed conservative so there is no reason to expect him to support teachers and public education.
This investment service says the trend is downward, and it’s a good time to go short on K12. High student churn, poor results, increasing government scrutiny do not augur well for the future of for-profit virtual schooling.
I read recently that the average teacher salary in Boston is $81,000.
In Chicago, the average salary is $71,000.
Nationally, the average salary for teachers is about $51,000.
The cost of living in different regions and cities affects teachers’ salaries.
Many in the media think that it is an outrage that teachers are paid “so much.” I think that anyone who says this on radio or television should disclose their own salary. I have no doubt that it is a multiple of what teachers in the same region are paid.
Why aren’t they shocked that the head of K12, the online company, is paid $5 million to deliver a shoddy product? Why aren’t they furious about the charter school leaders who take home $400,000? Why aren’t they in perpetual outrage that Rush Limbaugh is paid $50 million or so to talk on the radio? Why aren’t they ranting about CEO salaries?
Why the objection to teachers having what is really a decent middle-class income? Teachers have a college degree and many have a master’s degree; some have a doctorate. They are doing one of the hardest and most important jobs in society. Recent surveys by the Gates Foundation and Scholastic and by Metlife estimate that a teacher typically works 11 hours a day.
I say that teachers deserve every penny they are paid, and more.
What other profession would be satisfied to be paid so little?
One of our readers got his score from the state education department. He is in a state of shock and rage:
Today I’m angry, disgusted, demoralized,and frustrated. I am also firmly resolved to fight back against the tsunami of junk ideology that all good educators face these days.
I received my ‘growth score’ today from the New York State Education Department.
I know, I really shouldn’t care what my score is. I know 100% of my students tested at or above grade level in Math and English Language Arts. I know my class’ scores were near or at the very top of my district’s scores. I know my district is also at or nearly at the top of the region’s and states’ scores. I know I work my heart out and push my students to excel. My students always, ALWAYS succeed.
Yet according to the NYSED my growth score is so so. I’m rated effective with a growth score of 14 out of 20. Keep in mind, my student’s mean scale in math is 708.4 and ELA it is 678. I’m confident both scores are well above that state mean.
So why did I get a mediocre growth score?
The state’s explanation of it’s calculation should be a eye opener for all of us. Check out this junk math.
Click to access Teachers_Guide_to_Interpreting_Your_Growth_Score.pdf
Here it is in a nutshell..
They compare your students with similar students and measure how your students do to these similar students. You are then graded based on how much better your students did or how much ‘poorer’ your students did than these other students. They look for the gap between your students and the representative group of similar students.
Here the flaw…
If the representative sample of student all do well, your ratings will be negatively affected, because your growth is based on only how much better your students did than the group. In other words they look for a gap between your students and the group.
We all know that this year scores went up for everyone.. so as they rise, individual teachers get lower ratings, because the gap doesn’t increase. Sounds nuts doesn’t it? Goes against all the jargon about closing the gap.
It gets worse if you happen to have some high performing students in your class as well. Not much room for growth if you’re near the top, and your group is near the top. It’s a teacher’s advantage then to not take those high performing kids, It will hurt their growth scores.
My students did great, it’s a shame that NYS thinks they did so, so. Perhaps, if my students understood pineapples and hare races a little better, they could have correctly answered just 1 more question in that 6 hour marathon of testing correct, and all would be well.
We have a choice, we could start practicing saying, “welcome to Walmart”, for our next career or fight back. What say you?
http://rlratto.wordpress.com/2012/09/05/growth-scores-a-formula-for-failure/
A fascinating article in The Notebook in Philadelphia describes a charter school that has found a unique way to limit the kind of students who apply. Applications are available only one day in the year.
They are not available online.
They are not available at the school.
They are available only at a private golf club.
Parents who don’t know how to apply or how to get to the golf club never apply.
Despite “significant barriers” to access, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission just granted the schools another five years of operation. Seventeen other charters with other barriers to access were also renewed.
The school, of course, is open to all. To all who know when and where to apply.
A friend in Wisconsin sent this just now.
“Colas ruled that the law violated workers’ constitutional rights to free speech, free association and equal representation under the law by capping union workers’ raises but not those of their nonunion counterparts. The judge also ruled that the law violated the “home rule” clause of the state constitution by setting the contribution for City of Milwaukee employees to the city pension system rather than leaving it to the city and workers.
The decision could still be overturned on appeal – the Supreme Court has already restored the law once in June 2011 after it was blocked by a different Dane County judge in a different case earlier that year.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 