In this post on EduShyster’s always enlightening blog, goest blogger Sarah Lahm in Minneapolis examines one of the central claims of the Status Quo Reform crowd: They say that teachers should have no job protections so that it is easier to get rid of veterans (who are presumably burned out and lazy) and replace them with fresh-faced, inexperienced teachers whose expectations are supposed to produce higher test scores and close the achievement gap.
But what if it turns out that the highest-performing sections of the district have veteran teachers, while the sections where poor kids are concentrated get the newbies?
What if the poor kids actually need experienced teachers, not bright young amateurs who don’t know how to teach?
What if the “solution” is a big part of the problem?
What will the Status Quo do then?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I just started this at Petition2Congress. It is very easy to sign, copies are automatically sent to President Obama, and your own senators and your representatives. Please take the time to read and the petition entitled: STOP COMMON CORE TESTING. Thank you.
http://www.petition2congress.com/15080/stop-common-core-testing/?m=5265435
Done 😀
NY teacher: Great idea. I’ve already signed on. This is the type of pressure we need to be applying on a consistent basis. Thanks.
Done, and thank you for posting.
Signed and delivered. Shared link on Facebook.
Spread the word. Make this petition go viral. Political pressure will work. When the powers that be have their power threatened, they will act.
Go back to the petition and read the comments from Princeton NJ.
If these heartfelt pleas don’t resonate with the politicians its time to revolt.
Couldn’t they have figured this out with a lot less anguish and waste of time and money by looking at principals and superintendents? Are the “best” (whatever the measure) principals and superintendents going to work in high-need public schools that are poorly funded and abandoned by lawmakers? Or do they go to public schools that are stronger and supported?
That’s a market, right? Does the magic of markets work there? If not, why would it work for teachers?
Now that Philadelphia’s principals have taken a 15% pay cut and been cut back to 10-month positions, will the best stay on or are they spending this weekend tuning up their resumes? And if Hite, our Broad school alum gets his way in Philadelphia, and seniority and tenure are abolished, will the best and veteran teachers remain to pick up the pieces of a demolished public school system? It isn’t that difficult, Arne, to figure out where this is all heading. And the students in these urban districts will suffer the most.
President Obama, are you listening?
“Now that Philadelphia’s principals have taken a 15% pay cut and been cut back to 10-month positions, will the best stay on or are they spending this weekend tuning up their resumes? ”
It’s a great question. I don’t know if this is accurate or representative, but I live in a rural district where we have to fight for every penny of funding and we have a lot of low income families, and people here thought we got really young inexperienced principals who worked here to sort of “intern” and polish up the resume and then head for better-funded and larger suburban districts.
It happened again and again, so they finally started hiring local people who have ties to this place and promoting from within and we got some consistency and local experience and commitment.
Which is the opposite of the ed reform “parachute in and disrupt and create chaos!” strategy 🙂
Oh that’s ok. They can just start up a bunch of charter schools where the CEO makes $500,000 a year and there is 50% staff turnover a year. The new teachers fresh out of college will constantly be looking for new jobs. Some years a student may see as many as six different teachers in a classroom. Forget experienced teachers, there is money to be made.
Chiara, the opposite of what you describe in your community is happening in Philadelphia. The principals had been working without a contract and finally caved in to the Corbett-backed state-run commission which administers the school district and took the pay and time cuts I described. Last year the district laid off 4000 staff and in my wife’s K-8 school (750 students), as an example, the assistant principal lost her position and the principal, with 2.5 years in the building, now tries to manage alone, with fewer aides, secretaries, counselors and nurses, not to mention teachers. This is typical in the district where the average principal’s tenure in his or her building is 2 years. Yet, the superintendent claims now, in a petition recently filed with the Pa. Supreme Court, that he needs the authority to strip the teachers of their rights to seniority and tenure because the principals need the power to match the best teachers with the most needy students. Not only do the principals in Philly not have the experience to make such calls, they don’t have the time and probably, considering all the blows to morale, the inclination.
Superintendent Hite and his ilk think they can fool us with the reform lingo, but we know it’s all about only one thing: money.
GST, just think, what if Arne and friends could have given Philadelphia about 50 mil like they gave TFA? Geesh, couldn’t Philadelphia have used it, or what if Obama lobbied hard to save the schools. I guess the children in the public schools don’t matter to the USDOE.
The metaphor, ‘invisible hand of the free market’, is a lie!! It would be better described as ‘the hidden hand of a corrupt market’. Adam Smith’s economic theory has long been dead on the vine. Only those with obscene wealth and political power strive to keep his ideas alive. Their motivation… greedy self-interest!
Done. Thanks for creating the petition.
Thanks.
There is another context to this idea that veteran teachers are burned out. Because there is not a shred of accountability for the administrative behaviors that push out the veteran teachers, the was against American who happen to be teachers has reached a point where anything goes in order to harass teachers. Case in Point is LAUSD. The most recent post by Lenny Isenberg whose site Perdaily.com chronicles the corruption in LAUSD illustrates the anything goes strategy. “If you are a current or retired employee of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) there is yet another assault you might find yourself being subjected to- the clearly false allegation that you were overpaid by LAUSD, when the reality is that there is a greater likelihood and in many cases clear and convincing evidence that you were significantly underpaid. In the last few years, LAUSD has been in the process of going after thousands of teachers for these alleged overpayments without any evidence to substantiate that this ever took place and for the sole motive of lessening its bottom line at any cost.”
Read more, but sit down, because it is mind-boggling, but only a tiny part of the harassment of teachers when the there is no accountability in place: LAUSD’S LATEST SCAM- CLEARLY FALSE ASSERTIONS OF TEACHER OVERPAYMENT
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/04/lausds-collection-thugs-valer-enterprisesif.html
unreal. Did the mob take over LAUSD?
I wish one of you edu-experts would elaborate on Cincinnati. I’ve been reading about it and they’ve been working on this “community schools” idea for a decade (so they went in another direction from the Bush-Obama template) and they are “Ohio’s highest-performing urban district”
So, leaving out the “miracle district!” narrative which we’re all sick and tired of, is this a solid, workable alternative to “free market” corporate-type reforms?
Is this different than the template they’re using in New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark and all the ed reformer-run school systems?
They had a forum last week and there were very few corporate sponsors and they invited Reverend Barber from NC, and he’s a public school supporter, so they must be different than the Duncan-Kasich- Rhee-Billionaires set 🙂
http://www.communityschools.org/save_the_date__2014_national_forum_.aspx
Cincinnati is highly involved with wrao-arpund services for students in the urban communities. A lot is happening here with community involvement and support.
I just wish Ohio would drop out of the insane testing. It is going to slam even Cincinnati once the CCSS/Pearson testing begins. The outlying districts are doing great, for now, but the hammer is awaiting everyone. I believe our district has very few teachers with more than 20 years experience who have remained. No matter how well your kids do, the pressure gets worse and tighter. Never stops.
“Dee Dee
April 12, 2014 at 10:37 am
Oh that’s ok. They can just start up a bunch of charter schools where the CEO makes $500,000 a year and there is 50% staff turnover a year. The new teachers fresh out of college will constantly be looking for new jobs. Some years a student may see as many as six different teachers in a classroom. Forget experienced teachers, there is money to be made.”
The devaluing of experience in ed reform is bizarre, from a “business” standpoint let alone from a “schools as centers of communities for kids” standpoint.
It is bizarre to insist that experience doesn’t matter.
It also directly conflicts with what they’re telling kids, which is “persistence and mastery and grit”.
The near-fetish for “new!” makes me distrust them. It makes me think they’re people who follow gimmicks and fads and fashion.
I think I’m temperamentally unsuited to having people who think like this run my public schools. It’s not personal. I just think that’s incredibly misguided and might be due to them not having any work experience. It’s a vicious cycle. They don’t have any experience so they devalue experience because they don’t know any better 🙂
It is merely a business model. It keeps wages down and unions out. I really believe that is the goal. I have worked in two charters and know how they work. It is all about the money. A family or group keeps the power and money at the top and short-change the staff, students, and the community. It is the biggest con job ever. That is why it makes me sick to see a Dem Gov. ran over a Dem mayor and handed money over to shysters in NYC. It is so disgusting it makes me sick. The worst part of all is the USDOE helping this con spread in America all in the name of helping poor urban children.
Duncan is shallow. He repeats the most scripted nonsense as if he’s saying something new.
He constantly references pundits in his speeches. Amanda Ripley! Tom Friedman! He lavishes praise on the states and districts who adopt his preferred reforms and ignores any evidence of strong public schools in other places. I can read one of his speeches and wait for “DC” and “Tennessee” and those two places are ALWAYS there.
Seriously? Parents are supposed to listen to these stern lectures from him? I can read editorials myself, and I know the Obama Administration promotes the privatization strategy they’re using in DC and Tennessee. Duly noted, Mr. Secretary. Got it! I don’t need it repeated 5000 times.
I don’t need the Secretary of Education promoting these people, because you know who he’s really promoting? Himself. They adopted HIS script, which is why he talks about them constantly.
The Final Solution to the Teacher Question:
– Proclaim austerity for the public schools, while continuing to expand charters.
– Create incentives for non-educators to be in positions of power, from Assistant Principal on up.
– Maintain a climate of scapegoating and witch hunting for “bad teachers,” who are posited as the cause of poverty and student failure, doing everything possible to keep debate from addressing systemic inequities.
– Neutralize and eventually eliminate teacher unions (the first part largely accomplished in the case of the AFT). As part of that process, eliminate tenure, seniority and defined benefit pensions.
– Create and maintain a climate of constant disruption and destabilization, with cascading mandates that are impossible to keep up or comply with.
– Create teacher evaluations based on Common Core-related high stakes tests for which no curriculum has been developed. Arbitrarily impose cut scores on those exams that cast students, teachers and schools as failing, as was done by NYS Education Commissioner John King and Regent Meryl Tisch.
– Get teachers and administrators, whether through extortion (see RttT funding) threats or non-stop propaganda, to accept the premises of “data-driven” everything, even when that data is irrelevant, opaque, contradictory, or just plain wrong.
– Get everyone to internalize the premises and language of so-called education reform:
– Parents are not citizens with rights, but “customers” who are provided “choices”
that are in fact restricted to the decisions of those in charge, based on policies
developed by an educational industrial complex made up of foundations,
McKinsey-type consultants and captive academics.
– Students are “valuable assets” and “products,” whose value is to be enhanced
(see the definition of VAM) before being offered to employers.
– Teachers are fungible units of “human capital,” to be deployed as policy-makers
and management see fit. Since human capital depreciates over time, it
needs to be replaced by fresh capital, branded as “the Best and Brightest.”
– Schools are part of an investment “portfolio,” explicitly including the real estate
they inhabit, and are subject to the “demands” of the market and the preferences
of policy-makers and management.
– Create an intimidating, punitive environment, where the questions and qualms are either disregarded or responded to with threats.
– Get the university education programs on board under threat of continuing attack. Once they are on board, go after them anyway, and deregulate the teacher licensing process so that it’s easier to hire temps.
– Eliminate instruction that is deemed irrelevant to the most narrowly-cast labor market needs of employers, getting rid of art, music, dance, electives, etc., thereby reducing the focus of education to preparation for passive acceptance of low-wage employment.
– Embed software and electronic gadgets in every facet of the classroom and school, from reading to test-taking, with the intention of automating as much classroom input and output as possible.
– Use the automation of the classroom to enlarge class size – something explicitly promoted by Bill Gates – and transform teachers into overseers of student digital production that is connected to massive databases, so that every keystroke is data to be potentially monetized.
– Cash your bonus checks, exercise your stock options, and declare Excellence and Civil Rights achieved.
Wow.
Quite possibly the best post I have ever read here.
( and that is saying something as we have many excellent, brilliant, super informed, and funny contributors.)
You hit it all, my friend.
Michael, the sad part is that there is truth in everything you wrote. Very sad.
Brilliant Mr. Fiorillo!
With regards from Depreciated Human Capital!
Michael Fiorillo: what you said.
😎
I am seeing this already. As an online teacher, I am responsible for serving hundreds and hundreds of “clients.” I knew the day I first heard them called that — clients, not students — that I wasn’t a teacher anymore; I was a sweatshop grader, little-respected and easily replaced.