Peter Greene writes in Forbes about an insidious, nefarious, behind-closed-door plan to sabotage teachers’ pay and evaluations, while relying on the discredited value-added test-score-based system whose main corporation just happens to be in North Carolina. Greene relies on the relentless investigations by North Carolina teacher Justin Parmenter, a National Board Certified Teacher.

Just to be clear: the proposed plan to change teachers’ pay relies on test scores and merit pay. No merit pay plan has ever successfully identified the “better” or “best” teachers. Tying teacher pay to test score increases has been tried repeatedly and has failed repeatedly. The most extensive trial of “value-added” measurement was funded by the Gates Foundation and evaluated by RAND-AIR. Gates gave $575 million to Hillsborough County in Florida, Memphis, and Pittsburgh, and to four charter chains, to evaluate teachers by test scores. The goal was to get the most highly effective teachers into the classrooms with the neediest students. The RAND-AIR report concluded that the Gates money “did not improve student achievement, did not affect graduation rates or dropout rates, and did not change the quality of teachers.” Some of the districts experienced higher teacher turnover. The neediest students did not get the most effective teachers, because teachers were afraid that their VAM scores would fall if they moved to classrooms with the neediest students. Overall, the program was a very expensive disaster. I wrote about it in my book Slaying Goliath (pp. 244-245).

So, North Carolina appears to be determined to drive its best teachers away, to increase its teacher shortage, when the solutions to their problems are obvious: increase teachers’ pay, reduce class sizes, and respect teacher voices.

Greene writes in Forbes:

North Carolina is considering a radical revamp of its teacher pay system, a framework that ties teacher pay to measures of merit, instead of years of experience. It is a bad plan, for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is that no teacher merit pay plan has ever proven to be a definitive success. 

This plan lowers the bar for entering the profession, while creating a ladder to higher levels of certification and higher levels of pay tied to “educational outcomes,”. Meaning, a system in which a teacher’s livelihood is tied to student test scores and a teacher training is centered on preparing students for a single high stakes test. 

The current pay scale offers little relief; a teacher with a bachelor’s degree starts at $35,000 a year, and that goes up $1,000 per year until they’ve been in the classroom for sixteen. 

Then their pay does not move for a decade, at which point they get a $2,000 raise—the last raise they’ll ever see. 

A North Carolina teacher faces the certainty that if they make a lifelong career out of teaching, they will see their pay in real dollars steadily decline.

The North Carolina Association of Educators have come out strongly against the proposal, as did working teachers on the ground. So did the North Carolina Colleges of Teacher Educators. Yet the proposal is still headed for consideration. Where did it come from, and who is pushing it?

Justin Parmenter is a veteran North Carolina teacher who has been asking those same questions. They turned out to be disturbingly difficult to answer.

The pipeline dries up

The roots go back over a decade. North Carolina had been a leading state for public education, but in 2010 the GOP established a super-majority in the legislature. What followed was a steady dismantling of public education in the state, combined with steps backward for the teaching profession.

Funding levels of public schools dropped, and the legislature has dragged its feet on implementing a court-ordered funding equity plan. At the same time, they have provided great opportunities for charter school profiteers. 

The GOP legislature has used school funding for Democrat-voting districts as a political football. In recent culture battles, the state has seen everything from County Commissioners holding school funding hostage to Lt. Governor Mark Robinson leading a hunt (complete with tip line) to catch teachers misbehaving.

On top of these and other measures that might make educators feel a bit beleaguered, North Carolina has had trouble offering competitive salaries to its teachers (the state sets the pay scale for all NC teachers). For years, a career teacher in North Carolina would actually take an annual pay cut in real dollars. At one point the legislature offered teachers a raise—if they would give up the due process protections commonly known as tenure. 

Mid-decade, I sat at dinner with a former student and seven other young professionals in Charlotte, North Carolina. Six were former teachers; they had each decided there were far better ways to make a living in the Tar Heel State.

The rules implemented by the legislature, says Parmenter, “made it less and less attractive for people to become teachers.” Enrollment in teacher prep programs began dropping. Faced with the problem, Parmenter says the approach was, “Instead of addressing the reason that nobody wants to go to college to become a teacher anymore, what could we do to approach it in a different way.”

The result: in 2017 the state legislature formed the Professional Educator Standards and Preparation Commission (PEPSCPSC -0.5%) to make recommendations on how to expand teacher preparation programs, create an accountability system for those programs, and to “reorganize and clarify” the licensure process.

For a year or so, PEPSC tinkered with the small edges of policy recommendations. And then in 2018, a whole bunch of other folks got interested.

At this crucial point, I am going to ask you to go to the link and open the article. One of the major players in this fiasco is SAS, a student evaluation system based in North Carolina, which stands to make a whole lot of money if the proposed system is adopted. The Gates Foundation, despite having failed in all of its previous efforts to implement a successful merit pay plan or test-based teacher evaluation program, became a player.

As you read the story unfold, you will see the strenuous efforts by the corporate actors to keep the whole nasty business secret. They encouraged their partners to speak cheerfully and positively about the changes they had in store for the state’s teachers. Justin Parmenter got his information by filing Freedom of Information suits.

SOS Arizona tried its best and collected more signatures than necessary to get a referendum on the ballot to stop the state’s new universal voucher law, but “more than necessary” was not enough. The Koch machine managed to knock enough signatures out to block the referendum, which stopped vouchers in 2018 by a margin of 2-1. So Arizona heads into new territory, with public money supporting anything and everything that calls itself a school or a substitute for a school.

Blogger Dillon Rosenblatt writes an Arizona blog called Fourth Estate 48. In this post, he explains the glaring inequity of vouchers. Most vouchers will underwrite students who are already enrolled in private schools. Vouchers will increase economic segregation. Open the link for zip code data.

He writes:

With the ballot measure failing to collect enough signatures to put the new universal expansion¹ on hold through the 2024 election, Arizona K-12 students can now get their Empowerment Scholarship Accounts and attend any private or parochial school they’d like at a cost to the taxpayers of roughly $7,000.²

We already saw an influx of applications come in for the first few weeks of eligibility with most of those going to families already enrolled in a private school rather than those who would be switching from public to private. 

Of course, now that the application period is a full go (and the deadline extended from September 30 to October 15 in order to receive Q1 funding) those numbers will likely look different. How different remains to be seen, but I’m sure the Department of Education will provide those updates as they have been. 

Many of the arguments in this always heated debate about school vouchers comes down to who can afford to attend private school and who cannot. Put simply, wealthy families can foot the bill and those in lower income areas struggle, as do the public schools they attend. The 75% figure from ADE in August shows that families who can already afford to attend these private schools were the first ones to hop on the opportunity to cash in on the taxpayer money to help them pay for the tuition (most private schools cost more than the $7,000)….

This expansion effort failed in 2021, but was able to succeed this session with the support of the three Republican no votes last year: Michelle Udall, Joanne Osborn and Joel John. All three voted no in 2021 because they wanted some type of accountability measures in place. That didn’t happen and all three lost their respective races in the August primary to candidates further to the right of them.

2

Something to keep an eye on is how many schools will lower their tuition to $7,000 or new schools that will open up around this amount for the purpose of siphoning students from the competition.

3

The Urban Assembly is a group of nearly two dozen schools in New York City that are specialized but whose admissions are not competitive. They are not charter schools. They are affiliated with the New York City Board of Education. The organization released the following statement:

Prioritize Equity, Not Screens  We are disappointed by the news that the current administration has prioritized a return to screens in the middle and high school admissions process. This pushes against the Urban Assembly’s value of providing all students with access to high-quality education and supporting schools and educators to meet students where they are. UA Schools remain committed to both unscreened admissions practices and excellence in student education and opportunity. High-quality schools do not result from screening out young people, but from educating them. The Urban Assembly honors the teachers and administrators who tirelessly devote themselves to elevating all students, leading to innovations that solve challenges in education rather than exacerbate them. At UA, we are proud to have been at the vanguard of innovation in public education for 25 years. Just as UA values around postsecondary outcomes and SEL are now educational values, I look forward to the day that all schools value high-quality unscreened public education that is accessible to all students. We will continue the work to bring about that day.  In the coming weeks, I look forward to sharing examples of UA innovations in supporting all students with the current administration and district leaders in the pivotal moment, to promote equity in education in New York City.  David AdamsCEO, Urban Assembly

A couple of days ago, I posted an essay by the multi-talented Bob Shepherd about teaching reading comprehension. Many readers pointed out to me that I forgot to include the link, and they were eager to read the entire essay. This is not the first time I have omitted a link, which is absolutely vital, and I apologize sincerely.

I didn’t remember where I saw the essay but assumed it was on his blog. I began searching and eventually found it. It was first published five years ago. But as with any worthy writing, it is as informative now as it was then.

Here is the link:

https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/on-the-pseudoscience-of-strategies-based-reading-comprehension-instruction-or-what-current-comprehension-instruction-has-in-common-with-astrology/

While searching for the link, I found many other wonderful essays. The one that meant the most to me was Bob’s dissection of the brutal attack on my last book, Slaying Goliath, in the New York Times Book Review by a science journalist named Annie Murphy Paul.

From my perspective, Ms. Paul’s review was mean-spirited, misleading, and completely missed the point of the book, which was to celebrate the parents, students, teachers, and citizens who stood up to the powerful “Disrupters” and saved their schools.

She thought I was boasting about myself, which I was not. She thought I was wrong to name the billionaires and financiers and corporations that were trying to privatize the nation’s public schools. Why not name them? I thought I was writing a muckraking book like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, but she berated me for not telling “both sides” of the story. Should I have complimented Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and Betsy DeVos on their good intentions? That was not the purpose of the book. I wanted to give aid and comfort to those who stood up to the wealth and power of the oligarchs who hate public schools and compliment them for their courage and persistence.

Bob (whom I have never met) wrote his review a week after Ms. Paul’s review was published. I wish I had seen it. I was down in the dumps at the time. I would have been thrilled, as I am now, to know that someone saw through her vitriol.

I was shocked when I heard that Josh Shapiro endorsed a voucher bill for Pennsylvania. His opponent is an insurrectionist who was in D.C. and a QAnon nut. Why did Josh pander to Republicans?

I wrote him this letter at contact@joshshapiro.org

Dear Josh,

I was so excited when you won the Democratic primary for Governor.

But when I learned you support vouchers, I was shocked and disappointed.

Research shows that kids who use vouchers fall behind their peers in public schools.

Vouchers will send public money to religious schools that discriminate against children with disabilities, children who are LGBT, children who don’t share the same religious faith, children with low test scores. SPrivate schools choose, not families. Public schools belong to everyone and are not allowed to exclude children.

Democrats support fair and adequate funding for public schools.

Why do you support vouchers?

Diane Ravitch, Ph.D.