Veteran educator Val Flores pulled off a stunning upset when she beat a well-funded candidate for a seat on the state board. No one thought it could happen.
Val spent $20,000. Her opponent spent $135,000. Val won by a margin of 59-41.
Jeanne Kaplan, a former member of the Denver school board, explains what happened.
This is a terrific article by Steve Nelson. I wish I could republish it in full but that is not allowed.
He actually says that what is called reform is “a national delusion.”
He writes:
“As I watch the education “debate” in America I wonder if we have simply lost our minds. In the cacophony of reform chatter — online programs, charter schools, vouchers, testing, more testing, accountability, Common Core, value-added assessments, blaming teachers, blaming tenure, blaming unions, blaming parents — one can barely hear the children crying out: “Pay attention to us!”
“None of the things on the partial list above will have the slightest effect on the so-called achievement gap or the supposed decline in America’s international education rankings. Every bit of education reform — every think tank remedy proposed by wet-behind-the-ears MBAs, every piece of legislation, every one of these things — is an excuse to continue the unconscionable neglect of our children.”
Read it!
His conclusion:
“Doing meaningful education with the most advantaged kids and ample resources is challenging enough with classes of 20. Doing meaningful work with children in communities we have decimated through greed and neglect might require classes of 10 or fewer. When will Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton Family, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan and other education reformers recommend that?
“No, that’s not forthcoming. Their solution is more iPads and trying to fatten up little Hansel and Gretel by weighing them more often. Pearson will make the scales.
“Only in contemporary America can a humanitarian crisis be just another way to make a buck.”
Valentina (Val) Flores, a career educator, won a surprising and decisive victory for a seat on the state board of education in Colorado.
Flores won by a margin of 59-41, beating a candidate who was supported by the hedge funders’ Democrats for Education Reform, Stand for Children, and Education Reform Now. Her opponent had two years experience in Teach for America.
Flores has more than 40 years experience in education.
In my post about this electoral contest, I asked “Will big money win again?” The answer in Colorado is a loud and decisive NO!
I am tempted to apologize for posting Peter Greene so often, but I won’t. He is consistently on the mark.
In this post he wonders about a glaring inconsistency in the corporate reform project. The reformers love competition. They want students to compete. They want teachers to compete. They want schools to compete.
But when it come to the Common Core, they want all states to have the same standards. No competition. No laboratories of democracy.
Peter Greene says that corporate reformers have discovered the secret to generating an endless supply of “ineffective” teachers: just keep proclaiming that teachers are ineffective if their students get low scores.
“In the wake of Vergara, we’ve repeatedly heard an old piece of reformster wisdom: Poor students are nearly twice as likely as their wealthier peers to have ineffective, or low-performing, teachers. This new interpretation of “ineffective” or “low-performing” guarantees that there will always be an endless supply of ineffective teachers.
“The new definition of “ineffective teacher” is “teacher whose students score poorly on test.”
“Add to that the assumption that a student only scores low on a test because of the student had an ineffective teacher.
“You have now created a perfect circular definition. And the beauty of this is that in order to generate the statistics tossed around in the poster above, you don’t even have to evaluate teachers!”
And he adds:
“You can have people trade places all day — you will always find roughly the same distribution of slow/fast, wet/dry. good/bad vision. Because what you are fixing is not the source of your problem. It’s like getting a bad meal in a restaurant and demanding that a different waiter bring it to you.”
Mother Crusader, written by New Jersey parent Darcie Cimarusti, determined to find out who was putting up the millions to beat teacher tenure and seniority in California. She examined the 990 tax forms for “Students Matter, the organization that led the battle against the California Teachers Union.
Students Matter spent more than $3 million from 2010-2012; the amount spent in 2013-14 has not yet been reported.
“The 990’s also reveal that the money behind the suit wasn’t Welch’s alone. The two largest contributions did indeed come from Welch; $550,000 from “The Welch Trust” and $568,357 from “LRFA, LLC” which is some sort of business entity that links directly back to Welch’s Infinera.
So that’s well over $1M from Welch.
The next biggest dollar amount came from none other than Eli Broad, who kicked in $200,000 to buy the Vergara ruling.”
“The next biggest dollar amount, $100,000, came from “Tammy and Bill Crown.” It took some digging around to figure out that William H. Crown, who seems to split his time between Chicago and Portola Valley, CA, is one of the heirs to Chicago billionaire Lester Crown’s fortune.
“Lester Crown, 80, chairman of Henry Crown & Co., the privately held company that is the vehicle for much of the family’s investments
……
“William H. Crown, 41, general partner in Henry Crown & Co.; president and CEO of another family-run investment company, CC Industries Inc. (son) Bucks: Regulars on Forbes’ billionaires list, Lester Crown and clan ranked 52nd this year with an estimated net worth of $4 billion.”
And then there is this: “A $30,000 donation from the Emerson Education Fund may be one of the most interesting, however. The Managing Director of the Emerson Education Fund is Russlynn Ali, who also just happens to be on the Students Matter Advisory Board.” Ali was at Education Trust before she became Arne Duncan’s Assistant Secretary of Education for civil rights. Recall that school segregation has been soaring in the past decade. Could it be because the U.S. Department of Education believes that tenure is a greater threat to civil rights than segregation?
Darcie likens Vergara to the Parent Trigger, which brings disruption to communities, not much else, and she concludes:
“It’s my greatest hope the Vergara decision does not spread to other states, and is overturned in California on appeal due to pressure from the actual parents, teachers and students who would be affected but this reckless ruling. I don’t know about you, but personally I’m pretty sick and tired of monied interests buying legislation, and now a court decision, that could potentially impact my (and your) kids and their teachers.”
Spokespersons for the corporate reform movement hope to launch legal attacks on tenure and seniority in Connecticut, following the example of the Vergara case in California.
Even though the laws in the two states are quite different, the corporate reformers object to any job security at all for teachers, and they assume that low scores anywhere must be caused by teachers who should be fired.
Here is one of Connecticut’s leading corporate reform voices: “”The Vergara case exposed the fact that children have unequal access to quality teachers in California. This problem exists in Connecticut as well,” said Jennifer Alexander, chief executive officer of ConnCAN, an organization that supports school reform.”
The head of the corporate reform Connecticut Parents Union said she wants a judge to rule that teachers in low-performing schools should have neither tenure or seniority.
But Connecticut has a much longer waiting period for tenure than California. In the latter state, teachers may win tenure in 18 months, but in Conne it cut, tenure is awarded after four years of teaching. In California, dismissing a teacher is a long and costly process, but in Connecticut, according to Cindy Mirochine, president of the Danbury Teachers Union, the time allotted to the termination process is limited: “”We reduced the time for due process,” Mirochine said, adding that the maximum time from notice of termination until termination was reduced from 125 days to 85 days.
Given the differences between the two states, it becomes clear that the goal of a lawsuit in Connecticut would be to remove any and all job protections for teachers so that they could be fired promptly, for any reason. There is no reason to believe that such changes would increase the number of “great teachers” or have any beneficial impact on students with low test scores.
In an article at politico.com, Stephanie Simon presents a gloomy portrait of the future of teacher unions.
At the outset, she acknowledges that the unions have been the target of “a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign portraying them as greedy and selfish.”
This campaign is funded by billionaires, millionaires, ALEC, powerful corporations (Koch brothers?), rightwing think tanks, and wealthy foundations, all of whom we must assume are noble and selfless, not “greedy and selfish” like those no-good, lazy, worthless teachers. And then there are the academics who receive lavish funding from the noble and selfless billionaires and millionaires to produce studies and reports about the greedy and selfish teachers and unions.
But, as Simon reports, the campaign seems to be effective, as union membership falls and revenues decline. As evidence, she offers poll numbers reported by Paul Peterson’s group at Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and “Education Next,” both of which support vouchers and charters and oppose teachers unions and are funded by the afore-named groups of billionaires and millionaires. The numbers may or may not be correct, but the source is not reliable since both PEPG and “Education Next” are part of the campaign to rid the nation of teachers unions. But Simon does not mention that PEPG is an integral part of the anti-union campaign.
Simon ends the article by concluding that unions only make matters worse if they fight back against the wealthy coalition that now seeks to destroy workers’ rights:
“And some analysts, even those sympathetic to organized labor, say the teachers unions risk alienating the public with their constant complaints about the conspiracy of wealthy forces arrayed against them and their defense of job protections like those found unconstitutional this week in California.
“It’s entirely possible,” Kerchner said, “that unions can turn public education into a bad brand.”
In other words, resistance is futile.
But many teachers would not agree at all. They don’t believe that the 1%–and those who are on their payroll–are fighting for civil rights and social justice. they believe that it is imperative to stand up for hard-working teachers and the children they teach every day. Teachers are not greedy and selfish. their unions are not wrong to stand up for the rights of teachers, which are under attack in many states. Accepting the claims and the rhetoric of the privatization movement is a recipe for losing public education and the teaching profession, not just losing the unions.
Yohuru Wiliams and Marla Kilfoyle explain here why reformers today are not entitled to claim the legacy of the civil rights movement. Their essay was written to mark the 50th anniversary of what was known as Freedom Summer, when advocates for civil rights risked their lives to advance the cause of freedom and equality.
They begin their essay:
“One of the more disturbing narratives employed by corporate education reformers, who support both Teach for America and the Common Core, is the claim that they are cast in the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement—specifically in the use of education as a tool to challenge economic and political inequality. The larger claim of the Common Core defenders is that it will close the achievement gap. Their rhetoric is that CCSS will increase “rigor” and make children “college and career ready.” The idea that a set of standards can erase child poverty, systemic racism that continues to exist in our educational system, and squash the rise of classist privilege is beyond absurd. To do this in the name of Civil Rights is insulting. Have the CCSS really leveled the playing field? Are they really doing what the corporate reformers say they will do.”
Williams and Kilfoyle go on to describe significant differences between then and now. One that matters is that none of the contemporary “reformers” are risking their lives. They are making monetary contributions in hopes of raising test scores. They are advancing the privatization of public schools. They are seeking to strip teachers of their rights. It is impossible to confuse the current movement–funded by the richest people in the nation–with a movement for freedom and equality.
The Chicago Teachers Union reacts to the Vergara decision in California. Here is the key quote:
“If we really want to improve public education, let’s provide all children the financial and social resources that children in David Welch’s home of Atherton, CA, the most expensive zip code in the US, have. Then we need to let teachers, the real experts in curriculum and instruction, do their work without fear that they could lose their jobs at any time for any reason.”
CTU Statement on California Tenure Decision
It must be nice to be a wealthy tech mogul like David Welch. When you want to “prove” a theory, you just go get someone else’s kids to be the guinea pigs. When you want to “prove” a theory, you conveniently omit the most relevant and direct causes of harm. Such was the case in this week’s California lawsuit decision against tenure for teachers. Fortunately, our Constitution and legal system have clear protections for speech and structured processes for appeal so that we non-billionaires have an opportunity to air the facts.
Teacher laws vary from state to state, and so the ruling in California is not automatically a blueprint for changes in states like Illinois. Despite a recent law that makes tenure much more difficult to acquire in Illinois, the myth that tenure equals a permanent job persists. In fact, teacher tenure is not a guarantee of lifetime employment. Tenure provides protection from capricious dismissal and a process for improving unsatisfactory practice, but as in any job, teachers can be dismissed for serious misconduct. Further, as we have seen in California and Illinois, persistent budget “crises” stemming from insufficient revenue generation have decimated the teaching profession.
Contrary to popular belief, the school boards routinely dismiss teachers. Deep budget cuts have savaged the teaching corps, either through probationary teacher non-renewals or tenured teacher lay-offs. Fully half of all teachers leave the profession within their first five years, either because of the difficulty of the work or job insecurity. And for those who do stay, lay-offs are a constant threat, even to the most highly decorated, talented, and dedicated teachers. One Chicago Public School teacher was laid-off three times in a little more than a year. A holder of National Board Certification, the highest certification a teacher can have, he left the profession because of the tumult, and his students at multiple South Side high schools lost out on the opportunity to work with a highly qualified and dedicated public servant. Far from “obtaining and retaining permanent employment”, in the words of Judge Rolf Treu, tenure provided my colleague with no long-term job protection.
Judge Treu also misinterpreted the real causes of discrimination against low-income students of color. Teacher tenure does not cause low student achievement. Rather, the root causes of differences in student performance have to do with structural differences in schools. Omitted from his decision are the impacts of concentrated poverty, intense segregation, skeletal budgets, and so-called “disruptive innovation” that have been at the heart of urban school districts for decades. Scripted curricula, overuse and misuse of standardized testing, school closures and school turnarounds, and the calculated deprivation of resources are the real reasons low-income students of color face discrimination. So-called reformers like David Welch and Arne Duncan push those policies. In other words, the new “reform” status quo has made worse the problem it purports to fix.
If we really want to improve public education, let’s provide all children the financial and social resources that children in David Welch’s home of Atherton, CA, the most expensive zip code in the US, have. Then we need to let teachers, the real experts in curriculum and instruction, do their work without fear that they could lose their jobs at any time for any reason.
Diane Ravitch's blog 