Archives for the month of: June, 2015
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What Happened When a Student with Special Needs Took the Test

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2015 //
27

Dawn Neely Randall, a teacher in Ohio, is a passionate crusader for the rights of children. She posted this comment on the blog.

“Let me just tell you what stands out the most to me from a meeting I attended with legislators and educators about high stakes testing after school tonight. It wasn’t what the Senator said. It wasn’t what the State Rep. said. It wasn’t that the president of the college attended. It wasn’t that there were superintendents there (and I finally had the opportunity to mention how many were bullying parents for opting their children out of tests).

“What was it that stood out? It was the comment made by a teacher of special needs students who said that she had one student who pulled out every single eyelash the child had during all the hours of PARCC testing. Every. Single. Eyelash. Let that one settle on you for awhile.”

Categories Common Core, Special Education, Standardized Testing

TFA Teacher: “How I Would Fix Teach for America”

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2015 //
41

Andrew Gerst joined Teach for America and taught in Los Angeles schools, both public and charter. He has offered the following advice to TFA leadership:
How (I’d Like) to Fix Teach for America

For the last two-plus years, I’ve taught math in low-income Los Angeles public schools: first in the Los Angeles Unified School District through Teach for America, and later in a charter school. I have a prestigious degree, a master’s in education, and a minor in mathematics, and I’ve struggled more every single day of all two-plus years than at any other job I’ve ever had—an understatement. I feel I have had some successes, and some of our teachers have done very well. But I can say without doubt that Teach for America did not prepare the vast majority of my “corps members,” as our fellow teachers are called, and me to effectuate the long-term “transformational change” that the program strives for.

Rather than join the deafening cry of criticism over Teach for America—almost all of it, in my opinion, completely valid, and I hope it will continue—I’d like to try to offer some constructive comments on how I feel TFA desperately needs to change. I still believe in Teach for America. But if TFA doesn’t make these changes, or at least deign to publicly acknowledge its failures as school districts and universities around the country start questioning their relationship with TFA and stop hiring its teachers (Durham, N.C. stopped hiring TFA recruits in September; students and others have launched successful protests against TFA at Harvard, Vanderbilt, Michigan, Macalaster, and in the city of Chicago), I won’t be supporting TFA, or encouraging anyone to join it anymore.

1. Keep the two-year requirement. But make the first year a residency of mentorship and observation, not trial-and-error teaching.

Let me put this as simply as possible: Teach for America, you’re not teaching us how to teach.

Other programs do. It’s not 1990 anymore, and it’s time to catch up.

If I could go back in time, I would have in a heartbeat joined Aspire Teacher Residency or Match Teacher Residency—and not TFA. To me, it’s absolutely unquestionable that these programs—which both require a year of training and mentorship before releasing new recruits to the classroom—are better than TFA. In fact, I think the current Teach for America model may be considered literally illegal given its chronic inability to train effective teachers (see Vergara v. California, pending in court right now). That is to say: if we TFA corps members were held to the same standards as other teachers, we would not last very long.

Aspire, on the other hand, states that 95% of its graduates were rated effective or highly effective in their first year of teaching in low-income classrooms. That’s astounding. It’s hard to get solid numbers from TFA, but I can tell you that about 20% of my 200-plus fellow corps members in Los Angeles dropped out before even finishing their commitment. (A lot of people got fired. Others limped through. Countless alumni I encounter are bitter, though, yes, there are exceptions.) There’s no way 95% of us were effective or highly effective—if I had to estimate, I would guess the number was around 30% at best.

When I spoke with one senior TFA staff member about the residency model, the only objection the staff member seemed to raise was “cost.” As of 2013, TFA had a $350 million budget, according to CFO Miguel Rossy. If $350 million isn’t enough to train our teachers properly, maybe it’s time to change some priorities?

2. Acknowledge that classroom management is absolutely everything.

I refuse to read any education critiques by anyone who hasn’t ever taught full-time—because you have no idea about classroom management, or even what it really means. It means this: Your master’s degree is worthless if you can’t get defiant students to sit down. And a lot of the time, I couldn’t. It’s great that TFA emphasizes real talk on race, class, gender, and privilege. I say this un-ironically—these things are important. But those conversations need to take a backseat to the “teacher moves,” as Mike Goldstein of Match puts it, that make effectuating change based upon these very principles possible. It may not be very sexy, but I would much rather learn by spending a year watching a master teacher get 45 middle school students in a room to work silently on math than go to yet another lecture about diversity. It’s horribly naïve to think that 6 weeks of Institute does anything more than to provide a false sense of security in teaching ability. (A lot of us taught in Institute classrooms of 6 or fewer students, for 45 minutes a day—not the nearly 200 students we work with during the school year.) And it’s not enough to have only brief exposure to classroom management principles. The only way to use classroom management effectively, as Goldstein says, is by practicing teacher moves “to the point of automaticity.” We do have some rock stars who seem to teach perfectly right away—but I would venture to say that almost everyone else needs at least a year to get ready. I volunteered as a staff facilitator at a recent Teach for America corps member retreat. I was disappointed that we spent almost all of the day and a half oriented toward a “north star” that had nothing to do with actual teaching—just endless Youtube animations, music videos, TED Talks, and quotes from Jeff Duncan-Andrade and other education professors. We wouldn’t have gotten into TFA in the first place if we weren’t culturally literate. It’s time to recognize we came here to teach in tough schools, not study sociology.

3. End the culture of low expectations for first-year teachers.

I’m horribly frustrated by the double standard TFA has on results. When a student who can barely read has trouble with a grade-level text we assign, we’re told we as teachers must be holding low expectations. When we ourselves fail as teachers, we’re given a pat on the back. To have a bad first (and/or second) year of teaching, that is, is considered part of the experience. My school director at Institute, who’s now an assistant principal in a well-recognized charter school district, bragged to us about his years in the corps, saying, “Those students did not do well.” One of my teacher coaches in TFA—i.e., the person who was supposed to be helping me—told me she was “such a bad teacher.” TFA seems to treat the whole experience of teaching in low-income classrooms as a nice little business school case study. It’s something you laugh over while having beers with your banker friends. A “growth experience” shouldn’t come at the expense of hundreds of students and families, especially not in communities of color.

4. Listen to your alumni, disgruntled, content, or otherwise.

Perhaps the most maddening thing of all is how little TFA seems to really care about making change. TFA was revolutionary back in the early 1990s, before the charter school movement took off, before extensive research on low-income teaching had been done, before Common Core. But the game has changed. Aspire, Match, and other alternative programs (though conspicuously, still not most traditional university education programs) seem to have caught up—but I fear that TFA hasn’t. I’ve had many conversations with our local staff in LA about changing things. But I’m not sure TFA as a whole seems to care. I see a huge drop in both applicant numbers and the size of the corps, but I don’t see the model of Institute changing significantly. I don’t think that adding a few months’ part-time support for newly admitted college students, which is TFA’s latest move, will make much of a difference. And I don’t hear anyone listening. I completed a long alumni survey last year and never got a response. People seem to go to a lot of conferences on leadership and do one-off coaching, rather than forming a real relationship with corps members and alumni. One of TFA’s new co-CEOs has never even taught—just like its founder, Wendy Kopp. It would be nice to know that someone is listening.

Categories Education Reform

BREAKING NEWS! NC Court of Appeals Overturns Law Repealing Tenure!

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2015 //
11

The North Carolina Court of Appeals overturned a law passed in 2013 that was intended to eliminate tenure. The court said the law was unconstitutional.

Sharon McCloskey of the Progressive Pulse in North Carolina writes:

The General Assembly’s 2013 repeal of the teacher tenure law amounted to an unconstitutional taking of contract and property rights as to those teachers who’d already attained that status, according to a Court of Appeals opinion released this morning.

Writing for the court, Judge Linda Stephens said:

[W]e cannot escape the conclusion that for the last four decades, the career status protections provided by section 115C- 325, the very title of which—“Principal and Teacher Employment Contracts”— purports to govern teachers’ employment contracts, have been a fundamental part of the bargain that Plaintiffs and thousands of other teachers across this State accepted when they decided to defer the pursuit of potentially more lucrative professions, as well as the opportunity to work in states that offer better financial compensation to members of their own profession, in order to accept employment in our public schools.
The ruling by the three-judge panel affirms Superior Court Judge Robert H. Hobgood’s decision handed down a little over a year ago.

Under North Carolina’s “Career Status Law,” teachers in their first four years were deemed “probationary” and employed year-to-year under annual contracts. At the end of the four-year period, they became eligible for career status, giving them rights to continuing contracts and due process protections from arbitrary or unjustified dismissals.

In summer 2013, lawmakers enacted a repeal of that law in an effort to rid the state of tenure by 2018, saying that it enabled bad teachers to stay in the system.

– See more at: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2015/06/02/just-in-court-of-appeals-says-repeal-of-nc-tenure-law-is-unconstitutional/#sthash.nkB65Sc2.sKSMHTmS.dpuf

Categories North Carolina, Teacher Tenure

Randal Hendee: The Goal of Reform is Not to Improve Education but to Cut Costs

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2015 //
30

The question frequently arises: Why do so many billionaires support the privatization of public education? Surely, they don’t care about making a profit as they are already billionaires. Here is one possible answer, as reader Randal Hendee posted this comment on the blog about the motives of the billionaires who support “reform”:

 

 

There’s a lot of evidence that reducing the cost of public education is one of the main goals of people like Gates, Broad, and the Waltons. They’re playing a long game that they hope will result in lower taxes for big property owners and for the wealthy in general. At the same time, they see profit in “reform” because even with relatively lower tax revenues, a new cohort of children enrolls every year. Once the opportunists tap into that public revenue stream (through privately operated charters, educational technology, data mining, real estate deals, and so on), the cash cow will keep on giving. Or so they hope.

 

The Walton family fortune is based mainly on cost reduction (that and inventory control via technology and breakneck expansion). The Walton billionaires are billionaires because Walmart learned how to squeeze both suppliers and employees. In the process they put thousands of local merchants out of business. The Waltons are trying to undermine American institutions such as public schools and labor unions. To imagine that these efforts have nothing to do with cost reduction doesn’t square with company history. (If you want to know more about how the family stays so rich, google “Walton tax avoidance.”)

 

While Eli Broad is said to favor higher taxes for the rich, cost reduction is a big part of the Broad efforts. Broad wants fewer schools, larger class sizes, more charters. Charter expansion is one of his big goals, and of course many charter teachers work in sweatshop conditions for relatively low pay. Some of this cost saving is diverted to marketing and high administrative salaries. But the long term idea is to spend less on schools, not more. Presumably, free market incentives will spur “higher achievement.”*

 

Here’s what Bill Gates said about education and technology (and cost reduction) at the 2013 Davos Conference:

 

“Well, we’re taking the Internet revolution and we’re applying it in more areas. So, for example, in education the idea that not only are the best lectures online, but you can interact with people, talk to other students, that we ought to be able to deliver education that’s higher quality but dramatically lower cost. There’s a lot of excitement about that.

 

“MOOC means Massively Online Open Courseware and a lot of good pioneers that are learning and making that stuff better and better. The [Gates] Foundation is the biggest funder of that activity ’cause we see so much promise and the increasing price of education just doesn’t work. You know, a lot of our unemployment is because kids aren’t well educated enough. If you’re a college graduate, unemployment is very low. We’ve got to increase access to education, but letting the price go up won’t allow that.”

 

Anytime you hear someone say, “You can’t solve the problem by throwing money at it,” that person wants to reduce the cost of (that is, underfund) public schools, particularly the ones in poor urban neighborhoods and areas of rural poverty. Gates often used to preface his education remarks by stating that we spend way more than we used to but have little to show for it. He never took inflation into account, nor did he mention special education mandates.

 

Sure, the “reformers” want to “transform” public education by destroying it, but cost reduction is built into their overall scheme.

 

 

*Note: Eli Broad publicly supported Governor Jerry Brown’s proposal to raise taxes for education, but he simultaneously funded a “dark money” effort to fight the same proposition.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Privatization

Colorado Charter School Removes Class Speaker Who Planned to Reveal He Was Gay

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2015 //
8

Evan Young is the valedictorian of his graduating class at Twin Peaks Charter School in Boulder, Colorado. The school reviewed his planned speech and discovered that Evan intended to reveal that he is gay. He was not allowed to be the graduation speaker. His principal explained to other students that Evan has “bad character.” Evan had planned to talk about respect and tolerance for others.

 

Bruce Baker has written on several occasions (see here, for example) that students abandon their civil rights when they enroll in a charter school. If their actions are challenged over their disciplinary policies, they assert that they are not “state actors,” but private corporations that make their own rules.

 

Thus, they can act in ways that public schools could not, writing their own rules about admission, discipline, suspension, and due process rights (or the lack thereof) for students.

 

I was thinking of Frank Bruni of the Néw York Times when I read this story. Bruni is openly gay and has written several columns in the New York Times on gay-related issues. He apparently is also a supporter of charter schools, which are free of unions and state regulations. I hope he reads this story.

Categories Charter Schools

Peter Greene Disagrees with Checker Finn on the Hard Truths about American Students

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2015 //
43

Peter Greene read a post that Checker Finn wrote for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s blog, in which Checker warned parents to be ready for the unpleasant news they would learn about their children’s failure when the Common Core tests results are reported. Peter did not agree with Checker because he thinks the tests are dumb, not the kids. Peter can’t understand why a “conservative” would want the federal government to take control of what all students in the nation ought to learn. He writes: Aren’t Fordham guys like Finn supposed to be conservatives? When did conservatives start saying, “The government should decide what a person is supposed to be like, telling people when they aren’t measuring up to government standards, and using government pressure to try to make them be the way the government says they should be.”

 

I am sort of in a tough spot here because Checker was my closest friend for many years. We worked together at the Educational Excellence Network, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (now Institute), the Koret Foundation at the Hoover Institution, and we shared many family events. However, when I turned against testing, choice, accountability, charters, and vouchers, our friendship did not survive. I am still fond of Checker, his wife Renu, and his children, but we don’t agree anymore about things we both care about, and we both understand that. I lost a very close friend when I changed my world views, and I am sad about that. But, I had no choice. Knowing Checker, he would do the same. But he didn’t.

 

I know that Checker has a low opinion of American students and teachers. He went to Exeter and Harvard, and very few meet his high expectations. When he was chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which oversees NAEP, he led the creation of the achievement levels so the American public would see just how ill-educated their children were. The established NAEP scale was a proficiency scale from 0-500. Checker thought that the public did not derive a sufficient sense of urgency because they did not understand what it meant to be 350 or 425 on a scale of 500. What they would understand, he thought (correctly), was proficiency levels: basic, proficient, advanced (and, of course, the worst, below basic). He wanted the public to be duly alarmed at the sad state of education. Congress recognized that there is an arbitrary quality to proficiency levels; they still considered them to be “trials.” Experts disagree about how to set them and what they mean. Ultimately, the NAEP levels are set by panels of people from different walks of life who make judgment calls about what they think students in fourth grade and eighth grade ought to know. This is not science, this is human judgment.

 

Unfortunately, the public didn’t listen to the periodic alarums from NAEP and NAGB. The reports came out, and they didn’t get much attention. But after the passage of No Child Left Behind, the nation went into full-blown crisis mode about the state of education, and a hungry industry grew up to tutor, remediate, and school the students who didn’t pass their state tests. Then the charter industry emerged, and the henny-penny-sky-is-falling movement saw that the way to create a demand for charters and vouchers was to generate a steady narrative of “our schools in crisis.” Suddenly the regular NAEP reports were headline news. Suddenly the public became aware of the number of students who were “not proficient,” even though proficient was a very high bar indeed.

 

Now we have Common Core, more rigorous than any of the other standards, and Common Core tests, designed to find 70% of American kids falling short of the standards.

 

This is where Checker comes in again, to warn parents that their children will surely fail. Imagine this: the most powerful nation in the world, with the most advanced technology, the most influential culture, the biggest economy, yet somehow the schools that educated 90% of Americans are terrible. How can this be?

 

Peter Greene steps in now to take Checker on.

 

Read the whole thing, but here is the windup:

 

Finn’s basic complaint is that parents aren’t being forced to understand the Hard Truth that BS Tests prove that their children are dopes, and that said parents should be alarmed and upset. The Hard Truth that Finn doesn’t face is that the PARCC and SBA provide little-to-no useful information, and that parents are far more likely to turn to trusted teachers and their own intimate knowledge of their own children than to what seems to be an unfair, irrational, untested, unvalidated system.

 

Yes, some parents have trouble facing some truths about their own children. There can’t be a classroom teacher in the country that hasn’t seen that in action, and it can be sad. I’m not so sure that it’s sadder, however, than a parent who believes that his child is a stupid, useless loser. Finn seems really invested in making that parents hear bad news about their kids; I’m genuinely curious about what he envisions happening next. A parent pulls the small child up into a warm embrace to say, “You know, you’re not that great.” A parent makes use of a rare peaceful evening at home with a teenager to say, “I wish your test results didn’t suck so badly. Would you please suck less?” What exactly is the end game of this enforced parental eye opening?

 

Okay, I can guess, given the proclivities of the market-based reformster crowd. What happens next is that the parents express shock that Pat is so far off the college and career ready trail and quickly pulls Pat out of that sucky public school to attend a great charter school with super-duper test scores. The market-driven reform crowd wants to see an open education market driven by pure data– not the fuzzy warm love-addled parental data that come from a lifetime of knowing and loving their flesh and blood intimately, and not even the kind of chirpy happy-talk data that come from teachers who have invested a year in working with that child, but in the cold, hard deeply true data that can come from an efficient, number-generating standardized test. That’s what should drive the market.

 

Alas, no such data exists. No test can measure everything, or even anything, that matters in a child and in the child’s education. No test can measure the deep and wide constellation of capabilities that we barely cover under headings like “character” or “critical thinking.”

 

Folks like Finn try hard to believe that such magical data-finding tests can exist. They are reluctant to face the Hard Truth that they are looking for centaur-operated unicorn farms. The unfortunate truth is that they have dragged the rest of the country on this fruitless hunt with them.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, NAEP, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Parents, Standardized Testing, Students

A Great Friend of 5.2 Million Public School Children in Texas Retires from the Legislature

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2015 //
3

Jimmie Don Aycock, a Repubilcan legislator from Killeen, Texas, has decided to retire from the House of Representatives in the state legislature. This is a great loss for the state’s children, because Aycock has been a great friend and defender of public schools. As chair of the House Education Committee, he tried to get a new funding formula that would fairly distribute state monies, without waiting for a court to declare the state’s formula to be unconstitutional. He has delayed, diverted, and stopped many efforts by ideologues to harm public education, whether by vouchers, parent trigger, or other devious means that would siphon money away from the public schools.

Before entering the legislature, Jimmie Don Aycock was a veterinarian and a rancher. He was also a graduate of his local public school in Bell County, and he served on the local school board. He will be fondly remembered by parents, educators, and perhaps even students, as the author of SB5, the bill that reduced the number of end-of-course exams required for high school graduation from 15 to 5.

Even if the children never heard his name, they have benefited from his wisdom and care for them. He is admired by both parties as a statesman, a man who really does put children first. One of his Democratic colleagues said that “he’s the kind of guy you’d buy a used car from, and wouldn’t look under the hood.” Certainly the children of Texas and public schools benefited from the fact that a member of the dominant party in red state Texas was their champion.

Will anyone else in the Texas legislature take on Jimmie Don Aycock’s role as a defender of the precious democratic institution of public education? Will anyone else take the lead to stop the evisceration and privatization of public education? The Lt. Governor, former radio host Dan Patrick, is an outspoken proponent of vouchers. Until now, a bipartisan coalition of big-city Democrats and rural Republicans have defended their community’s public schools. Will another Jimmie Don Aycock rise from the ranks?

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Aycock when I spoke in Austin to a combined meeting of the Texas Association of School Administrators and the Texas School Boards Association. He is a respected and beloved figure in Texas. With all the honors being heaped on him, this may not mean much, but I place him on the blog honor roll as a hero of public education in the nation.

Categories Funding, Honor Roll, Standardized Testing, Texas

Good News! Legal Challenge to New York Teacher Evaluations Will Proceed in Court

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2015 //
40

Bruce Lederman, an attorney acting on behalf of his wife, experienced elementary school teacher Sheri Lederman, filed suit to challenge the state’s teacher evaluation system. The New York State Education Department sought to have the case thrown out. Today, the New York Supreme Court ruled that the lawsuit can go forward. Good for the Ledermans!

From Bruce Lederman:

The NY Supreme Court has denied a motion by the NY Education Department to dismiss the Lederman v. King lawsuit, in which an 18 year veteran Great Neck teacher has challenged a rating of “ineffective” based upon a growth score of 1 out of 20 points, even though her students performed exceptionally well on standardized tests.

This means that the NY Education Department must now answer to a Judge and explain why a rating which is irrational by any reasonable standard should be permitted to remain. The NY Education Department argued that Sheri Lederman lacked standing to challenge an “ineffective” rating on her growth score since her overall rating was still effective and she was not fired. A judge disagreed and determined that an ineffective rating on a growth score is an injury which she is entitled to challenge in Court.

Now, Sheri will have her day in Court. A hearing will likely be scheduled in August.

Categories New York, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

Heavens to Betsy: Arizona Charters Face Possible Budget Cuts!

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2015 //
12

Arizona loves its charters. It is generally known as “the Wild West of charters,” a state where charters may engage in nepotism and conflicts of interest without sanction because they are not covered by those laws (remember, they are deregulated from such mundane regulations as self-dealing).

But what have we here? The Arizona legislature actually cut millions of dollars from small schools, a bonus many charters were accustomed to receiving. The charters with fewer than 600 students could lose a total of $15 million by some estimate. Some charters kept their enrollment below 600 to get the bonus. The Arizona State Attorney General has been asked to issue a ruling on the legislation and its impact on charters.

The Arizona Charter Schools Association believes the department did not calculate the formula as the Legislature intended.
“The association is exploring every option to lessen these devastating cuts. The total impact is more than double what legislators had been told when they voted for the state budget,” association CEO and President Eileen Sigmund said in a statement.
“The impacts will be real and immediate, as some of our smallest schools stand to lose nearly $1,000 per pupil on July 1. We are engaged with the governor’s office, lawmakers and ADE to resolve this crisis.”
The change in the formula also would affect the amount that the charters receive under the Proposition 301 program, which provides money for teachers through a sales tax. Douglas’ letter asks Brnovich to rule on that as well.
According to a spreadsheet used by the Department of Education to calculate the cuts, 207 schools will face cuts affecting about 85,000 students. About 15 percent of Arizona’s public-school students attend charters.
Many charters cap their enrollment to take advantage of the extra funding for small schools — a model that is now threatened.
Peter Bezanson, CEO of the Basis Schools charters, said that the total cut to his network could be almost $4 million.
“I can say without qualification that Basis will not grow any more in Arizona with this new funding reality,” he said. “We won’t add any more schools.
“We had wanted to give fairly significant increases in teacher salaries this year and those increases are not possible,” he said. Basis has 15 schools in Arizona.

In a state where charters have gotten more or less whatever they wanted, and public schools are underfunded, this comes as a shocker.

Categories Arizona, Charter Schools

Bob Braun to Star-Ledger: Stop Defaming Teachers!

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2015 //
32

This is one of the most powerful articles I have ever read about the pernicious lies of those who call themselves “reformers.” It should be a cover story in TIME or Newsweek or the front page of the Néw York Times. Someone should send it to Frank Bruni, Nicholas Kristof, David Brooks, the PBS Newshour, and everyone else who opines about education.

Bob Braun slams the editorial board of the Star-Ledger for their consistent, unrelenting defamation of teachers. The editorial board apparently believes that the only good teachers are inexperienced young teachers (think TFA), while any experienced teacher is a slacker who should be fired, “sooner rather than later” (using the phrase quoted in the NY Times by one of the co-authors of the infamous Chetty-Rockoff-Friedman study).

Here are excerpts from Bob Braun’s fiery and brilliant :editorial:

“A recent editorial in The Star-Ledger stated the state administration of the Newark school system “may soon be forced” to fire its “highest performing teachers” because of seniority rules. That is utter nonsense and it’s impossible to believe whoever wrote it doesn’t understand it is utter nonsense. So that makes the statement a lie, and a defamatory one at that. Why is it ok to defame teachers?

“The writer could not possibly know who, among those who might be laid off by the hermit-like superintendent Cami Anderson, belongs to some sort of category of “highest performing teachers” because there is no such category. It scurrilously presumes, however, that, if teachers are experienced, they must perform less well than inexperienced teachers.

“In what other profession—or vocation or job, if The Star-Ledger won’t admit teachers are professionals—are less experienced practitioners automatically considered less capable than amateurs? Airline pilots? Surgeons? Lawyers? Plumbers? Editorial writers? I’ve written about teachers for more than 50 years and I know teachers themselves believe they need years of experience to be effective.

“The editorial is built, without evidence, around the canard that all teachers with experience either are, or soon will become, “dead wood” that ought to be cleared from the forest of public schools by—in the case of Newark—administrators with virtually no (and, in some cases, just plain no) teaching experience. As if experience teaching was itself the cause of poor teaching–what naïve drivel.

“How convenient it is for these non-experts to decide that the problems of urban schools are caused by a phantom band of dead wood teachers who, because they are experienced, are thereby at fault for the dismal performance of urban public schools.

“By reaching such a wildly unsupported conclusion, the editorial writers—really writing as flacks for their corporate owners and managers—make these corollary, if implied, arguments: Protections for school employees also contribute to poor schools; money doesn’t make a difference; because inexperienced teachers are cheaper teachers, the schools can cut budgets without impunity if veterans are fired; unions serve only to preserve failure and, therefore, should be eliminated; and this is the most risible—politicians like the anti-public employee union Steve Sweeney are owned by public employee unions and should be shamed into voting against due process for teachers.

“This editorial is simply a rewrite of dozens of editorials in The Star-Ledger and other media outlets that endlessly blame school employees who are set up to fail—when they do fail, and they don’t always—by a system steeped in the isolation of the poor and black and brown in woefully underfunded and overwhelmed urban school systems….”

“If The Star-Ledger had a heart or a soul or even just a brain, it would look honestly at what is happening in cities like Newark. With the full endorsement of the newspaper’s editorial board, outsiders are destroying neighborhood schools their children would never attend anyway–destroying, too, real communities the employees of the newspaper couldn’t possibly understand. Or live in.

“These hypocritical missionaries from the middle class–funded by hedge fund managers and others–have fashioned what they call “reform” out of a toxic mix of libertarian ideology, personal arrogance, anti-union animus, racism, and anti-spending politics. “Reform” means creating a privatized system for a few students believed to be educationally remediable while casting the rest into warehouses of despair. In Cami-land there isn’t the money to buy enough lifeboats, so some children will be saved and some will drown.

“That has nothing at all to do with teachers–high-performing or low-performing. That is Social Darwinism made public policy by a buffoon of a governor, his sycophantic followers and media outlets in search of the ever elusive clicks. Hate for public employees always generates more readers than support.

“Hey, editorial writers–instead of repeating the same lies and canards that never stop, just look at Newark. Look at its children. Look at its history. Look at its streets. Look at its needs for health care, safe streets, welcoming parks and playgrounds, a workable justice system, and housing.”

A reader once asked me what single post or article she could show to her friends who are liberal, affluent Democrats but don’t pay much attention to what is happening to public schools. How could she convince them that President Obama and Arne Duncan are promoting harmful, failed education policies? I would say, “Start here. Start with Bob Braun’s letter to the editorial board of the Star-Ledger, where he worked for many years.

Let me add that despite my outrage at this administration for its terrible education privies, I don’t regret voting for him on 2012. He made great choices for the Supreme Court. On education, however, his administration is hardly different from that of any Republican, including Romney. No wonder K-12 education never came up during their debates, other than to elicit bipartisan support for the disastrous Race to the Top. Their only difference was vouchers, yet even here both Obama and Duncan have done nothing and said nothing to stop the proliferation of vouchers.

Categories Newark, Teachers
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