This is one of the most positive and optimistic posts I have read in a long time.
David Cohen, an NBCT teacher in Palo Alto, California, describes models where teacher leadership has worked and is creating new paradigms for teacher improvement and compensation, not tied to test scores.
Do yourself a favor and read about the places where teachers are remaking the profession. As David predicts, “A change is gonna come,”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes. Yes. Yes. This is where I have hoped this mess will end–teachers take control. It will be better for the kids, better for the tax-payers, and better for we teachers.
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Hello Diane, I am a regular ed teacher in CA, responding to your post regarding information for the following questions: 1. In your state, are special education students required to take the same grade-level tests as regular students? Special Education students initially take the same CST test as regular student, but there is a modified assessment that Special Ed students can take called the CAPA.? It is the alternative test for Special Ed students. It’s a modified CST. Are there exceptions based on IEP’s? (Yes), accommodations are allowed ( i.e. extra time). 2. Are charters in your state required to administer the state tests? Charter schools, are required to teach the CA standards and administer that same CSTs for their students. 3.In your state, which state regulations are charters exempt from? Charters are exempt from most of the Ed. Code. They are not exempt from any other state and federal regulations. There is a state website: http://www.ca.gov. I hope this helps. Thank you for all that you do for education.
Diane Brown diamel@aol.com
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True, a change will come as the policies of Broad/Klein/Rhee/Obama/ALEC/Rotherham/Hanushek/Kopp collapse under their own conceit.
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“… as the policies… collapse under their own conceit.”
And under the weight of the corruption they inevitably spawn, as well.
In my more optimistic moments, I still see that happening. Yet we shouldn’t expect that some deus ex machina will swoop in to save us. With the largest financial swindle in human history (the mortgage securitization/ AIG-Bank Bailouts complex of 2006- present) continuing to go unpunished, the US Department of Justice is hopeless. If no one has been indicted in finance, there’s little reason to expect them to delve into the relative backwaters of education.
Hopefully, an ambitious state AG or US Attorney will make a calculation that the career benefits of working the inexhaustible gold mine/cesspool of ed reform corruption exceed the potential costs of embarrassing some very powerful people. So far, though, that’s been a losing bet.
If we have to rely on them, we’re probably lost: the billionaire malanthropists and the accompanying lampreys that attach themselves to schools and suck the blood out of them are a persistent bunch, and they’re gorging on public schools everywhere.
It will take broad resistance and mobilization by parents, kids and teachers, on many fronts, soon, to dislodge them.
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Thanks for reading and sharing, Diane! Looking back on what I wrote, I wish I’d elaborated a bit on the timeline. I have a long term optimism because I believe that eventually, we’ll favor what works, and I have no doubt that most elements of the current education “reform” model will fail – unambiguously fail. Will it take a decade, or two, or four? In the short term, I’m less optimistic, for reasons we all recognize. Still, I’m trying to discipline myself to spend more of my energy on the positive. For more details on some examples of teacher leadership models in California, I direct interested readers to my blog:
http://accomplishedcaliforniateachers.wordpress.com/category/ca-teacher-leader-profiles/
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Thanks, David, for your wisdom and optimism. The “reforms” are already failing. We won’t have to wait decades. There is not a single district they can point to–even those they totally control–where their destructive policies work. Their main result is massive demoralization.
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Given the endgame, these words are nearly as true and applicable as the day they were spoken:
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. ~Frederick Douglass
Question Authority | Start a Movement
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One of the primary, critical ways teachers can take back their profession and even improve their careers is to REMAKE their unions with fresh, pulsing, fearless, uncompromising, and uncorrupted leadership. The Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) is one such example, and the UFT should have quite a bit to be nervous about if MORE delegates get elected to the exectuive board. We teachers would be very fortunate if this were the trajectory.
While unions must win the support of the lay public, they must first and foremost listen to and advocate as a contstituent petition-based organization. RIght now, they don’t, and have not been for at least 8 years.
Unions must not flip floppingly politick issues to death, and they should be willing and able to put up their dukes with the devil rather than dance with him. Futhermore,the kind of institutionalized lack of democracy that drives the union’s bureacracy is exemplified by such leaders as Dick Ianuzzi and Randi Weingarten, to name a few. Presently in the UFT, employees high up are given an additional salary and pension, which motivates and sways their willingess to listen to their constituents and act accordingly versus going along with the overly politicized agenda of the presidents. It was Weingarten, for example, who was indispensable, in part, in getting her “union” to secure mayoral control for Michael Bloomberg. And she defended her position on it. It was also Weingarten who featured Bill Gates as a key note speaker at an AFT convention.
Does it get any more perverse than that?
Karen Lewis proved to be a strong, noticeable, but certainly not perfect example in contrast to other major union leaders. Still, she is an outlier, and all the more power to her.
But this “taking back” will be up to the teachers and the extent to which they are willing to inform themselves by alternative sources and relatively off-the-grid advocacy groups, such as MORE, the Grassroots Education Movement, and the New York Principals.
Personally, I am more hopeful about this than I used to be, but I am not “lowering my dukes” anytime soon at all. . . .probably not for five to ten years.
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I hope teachers wake up and start questioning union management!
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Trust me when I say that most of the unions are, to objectionable extents, in on this reform . . .
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David, I thank you for the “Move up and don’t move out” approach to sustaining teachers in the system, and teachers as leaders is a critical paradigm to develop and advocate for! If you have not already, send the article to Jim Thorpe at NBPTS.
As as NCBT, I your article inspiring. Now it gives me some ideas to present to my principal.
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It is time for teacher control, at the building level. Let a hundred thousand flowers bloom.
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