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Why NAEP Scores in History and Civics Are Meaningless in These Times

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2023 //
47

I served on the governing board of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for seven years. I was appointed by President Clinton. I learned quite a lot about standardized testing during that time. I enjoyed reading test questions and finding a few that had two right answers. Two subjects where I felt confident as a reviewer, in addition to reading, were history and civics.

I was momentarily dismayed, but not surprised, to learn that the NAEP scores in history and civics had declined, as they had in reading and math, after the disruptions and closings caused by the pandemic. This is not surprising, because fewer days of instruction translates into less learning.

So we know for sure that instructional time matters. You can’t learn what you weren’t taught.

But on second thought, I realized that in these days it is almost impossible to test history and civics and get a meaningful result.

Many states, all Republican-dominated, have censored history teaching. The legislatures don’t want students to learn “divisive concepts.” They don’t want anything taught that will make students “uncomfortable.” They don’t want “critical race theory” to be taught. These ideas have been spun out at length with other vague descriptions of what teachers are NOT allowed to teach.

The people who write test questions for NAEP history are not bound by these restrictions. They are most likely writing questions about “divisive concepts” and “uncomfortable” topics. They might even ask questions that legislators might think are tinged or saturated by critical race theory.

Given the number of states that ban the teaching of accurate, factual history, it’s seems to me impossible to expect students to be prepared to take an American history test.

Even more complicated is civics. A good civics exam might ask questions about the importance of the right to vote. It might ask questions written on the assumption that vote suppression and gerrymandering are undemocratic practices that were long ago banned by the courts. Yet courts are now allowing these baleful practices to stand. How can a student understand that a discredited practice is now openly endorsed in various state laws and have not been discredited by the courts?

Civics classes typically teach that one of the great strengths of American democracy is the peaceful transition of power from one President to another. How can they teach that idea when Trump partisans insist that he won the last election and was ousted in a coup? How can teachers explain the election process when Trump says it’s rigged (he said it before the 2016 election as well)? How can students answer questions about elections and the Electoral College when Trumpers believe they were corrupted in 2020?

How can teachers teach civics when almost every GOP leader asserts that the election was stolen?

How can civics be taught when public officials defy public opinion to allow any individual to buy guns without a background check or a permit. Having bought a gun, they may wear it openly in some states and carry it concealed in some other states. Students have been practicing in case an armed killer walks into their school during the day. They need only google to learn that a majority of the public favors gun control of varying kinds. Why, they might ask their teacher, doesn’t the legislature and Congress act to protect the lives of children?

Is it worse to teach lies or to teach the truth?

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Civics, Corruption, Curriculum, Elections, Extremism, History, Lies, NAEP, Racism, Religion, Segregation, Separation of church and state, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers and Teaching

Research: Children Need Stability to Do Well in School

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2023 //
15

A reader shared a link to an important study of the damaging effects of student mobility. The more students changed schools, the more negative effects on them.

Too bad Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan didn’t know about this research when they decided that the best way to help low-scoring students was to close their schools. Too bad Rahm Emanuel didn’t know about it when he closed 50 public schools in a single day.

School mobility has been shown to increase the risk of poor achievement, behavior problems, grade retention, and high school drop-out. Using data over 25 years from the Chicago Longitudinal Study, we investigated the unique risk of school moves on a variety of young adult outcomes including educational attainment, occupational prestige, depression symptoms, and criminal arrests. We also investigated how the timing of school mobility, whether earlier or later in the academic career, may differentially predict these outcomes over and above associated risks. Results indicate that students who experience more school changes between kindergarten and twelfth grade are less likely to complete high school on time, complete fewer years of school, attain lower levels of occupational prestige, are more likely to experience symptoms of depression, and are more likely to be arrested as adults. Furthermore, the number of school moves predicted above and beyond associated risks such as residential mobility and family poverty. When timing of school mobility was examined, results indicated more negative outcomes associated with moves later in the grade school career, particularly between fourth and eighth grade.

Doesn’t this seem like common sense? Your child is in a school where he or she makes friends and has a good relationship with teachers. You take the child out, and he or she has some trouble readjusting. Maybe the family moved, and it was necessary. But why would the government inflict it on children, call it “reform,” and celebrate the harm to the children?

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Closing schools, Cruelty, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Emanuel, Rahm, Failure, Ignorance, Inequity, Innovation, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Students, Stupid

Chicago Will End Reliance on Standardized Test Scores to Rate School Quality

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2023 //
20

Here’s a sign of hopeful change. The federal government has used standardized tests as valid measures of school quality for the past decade. The Chicago Board of Education has decided to discontinue the practice. Accountability experts have cautioned against rating schools by test scores for years. The test scores are highly correlated with family income. Schools in affluent districts getvhigh ratings, while schools enrolling the poorest kids get low ratings and are likely to be punished instead of helped.

Sarah Macaraeg of the Chicago Tribune wrote:


The Chicago Board of Education has voted to adopt a more “effective and fair” approach to assessing the performance of schools, replacing the district’s School Quality Rating Policy with a framework shaped by input from more than 20,000 members of school communities.

The previous method, relying largely on standardized test results to judge schools’ performance, penalized schools serving predominantly disadvantaged students, district officials and research partners said.

“Part of what started this was our communities being very clear about the harm that they felt from a ranking and ratings system that didn’t just make them feel like it was something about their schools, but something deficient with them as people, as communities, as parents,” board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland said of schools issued low ratings under the prior system, which was in effect from 2013-20.

Shifting toward a model of shared responsibility, district CEO Pedro Martinez said the new policy will be more responsive to the needs of school communities.

Doing away with summative ratings, the “Continuous Improvement and Data Transparency” policy will instead measure a range of “indicators of success.” Those include not only academic progress but also student well-being, quality of daily learning experiences, school inclusivity and the capacity of staff to collaborate in teacher learning.

“We are really focusing on what matters most: what’s happening in our schools and filling out the gaps to ensure that our educators have the resources and the support that they need, so that we can get the student outcomes that we all want for our babies in Chicago,” Chief Portfolio Officer and CPS parent Alfonso Carmona said at Wednesday’s school board meeting, where the vote to do away with the SQRP system was taken.

How the policy was developed also matters, in fulfilling the district’s stated commitment to equity, said Natalie Neris, chief of community engagement for the nonprofit Kids First Chicago, which partnered with CPS in engaging parents, students, experts, the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, the Chicago Teachers Union and others in the school accountability redesign.

“We can’t continue to say that we want to create systems that are fair and then not include the people who are part of those systems in co-creating and co-producing the policy that they’re impacted by,” she said.

Categories Chicago, Education Reform, Hope, Standardized Testing, Students

TIME: How Voucher Programs Hurt Students

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2023 //
8

Joshua Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, wrote the following article for TIME magazine:

In recent months, state legislatures across the country have broadened efforts to subsidize private school tuition with taxpayer dollars. New proposals for these programs—collectively called school vouchers—have appeared in more than a dozen states and passed as major priorities for Republican governors like Kim Reynolds in Iowa and Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas. Since 2021, Arizona, Florida, Utah and West Virginia have also created or expanded voucher plans. Meanwhile, a handful states like Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Wisconsin have run voucher programs for years. But do school vouchers actually work? We need to focus on what research shows, and what that means for kids moving forward.

As an analyst who has studied these and other forms of school choice for nearly two decades, I’m in a good position to give an answer. And based on data from existing voucher programs, the answer is almost unambiguously negative.

Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements. Florida just passed its version of such a universal voucher program, following Arizona’s passage in the fall of 2022. In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school—either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocatesmarket these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.

And what about the students who do leave public schools? Some plans, like the currently proposed bill in Texas, restrict eligibility to students in public school for at least one year. But for the children who do transfer using a voucher, the academic results in the recent scaled-up statewide programs are catastrophic. Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C.,Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.

And these harmful voucher impacts from existing statewide vouchers lasted for years, with little else on balance to show for it.

What explains these extraordinarily large voucher-induced declines? Aren’t private schools supposed to be elite educational opportunities? When it comes to private schools accepting voucher payments, the answer is clearly no. That’s because elite private schools with strong academics and large endowments often decline to participate in voucher plans. Instead the typical voucher school is a financially distressed, sub-prime private provider often jumping at the chance for a tax bailout to stay open a few extra years.

In Wisconsin, 41% of voucher schools have closed since the program’s inception in 1990. And that includes the large number of pop-up schools opening just to cash in on the new voucher pay-out. For those pop-up schools, average survival time is just 4 years before their doors close for good.

Here’s another problem: for most students, using a voucher is a temporary choice to begin with. In states that have reported data on the question–Indiana, Louisiana, and Wisconsin—roughly 20% of students leave voucher programs each year, either because they give up the payment or because schools push them out. In Florida, where vouchers just expanded, that number is even higher: around 30% per year in pre-expansion data.

That kind of turnover is bad for kids, even when they’re leaving under-performing voucher schools. Not least because kids who leave voucher programs tend to be students of color, lower income children, and kids struggling academically in the first place.

And it’s not just the academic results that call into question any rhetoric around opportunities created by vouchers. Private schools can decline to admit children for any reason. One example of that is tied to the latest culture wars around LGBTQ youth, and strengthened in current voucher legislation. In Florida, a voucher-funded school made national news last summer when it banned LGBTQ children. In Indiana, pre-pandemic estimates showed that more than $16 million in taxpayer funding had already gone to voucher schools with explicit anti-LGBTQ admissions rules.

Voucher schools also rarely enroll children with special academic needs. Special education children tend to need more resources than vouchers provide, which can be a problem in public schools too. But public schools are at least obliged under federal law to enroll and assist special needs children—something private schools can and do avoid.

When we look at all the challenges to accessing education with these programs it’s clear that actually winning admission to a particular private school is not about parental school choice. It’s the school’s choice.

That is what research on school vouchers tells us. Vouchers are largely tax subsidies for existing private school families, and a tax bailout for struggling private schools. They have harmful test score impacts that persist for years, and they’re a revolving door of school enrollment. They’re public funds that support a financially desperate group of private schools, including some with active discriminatory admissions in place.

And public support for these programs is tenuous at best, highly dependent on state contexts. Recent media reports indicate that the latest voucher push is at least partly the result of well-funded campaigns led by Betsy DeVos, the conservative billionaire and U.S. Education Secretary under Donald Trump. DeVos has championed vouchers for decades as an alternative to traditional public education in what she, Trump, and other supporters call “government schools.”

But DeVos has acknowledged the poor track record for vouchers—at least when it comes to academic impacts. Asked about the dismal results of the Louisiana voucher plan while she was a public official, DeVos avoided detailed comment, but her answer back then was as good a summary as any that a voucher expert like me could provide. That program, she said, was “not very well-conceived.”

That goes for school voucher plans today, currently spreading across the country.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Hoax, Inequity, Privatization, School Choice, Students, Vouchers

Sara Stevenson: Texas GOP Would Criminalize Librarians

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2023 //
14

There is a popular stereotype of librarians: Mild-mannered, quiet, unassuming, and of course, bookish. But the Republicans in the Texas legislature seem to think that behind that compliant demeanor lies a sinister purveyor of dangerous ideas and books. What other explanation can there be for proposed legislation that would place book selection in the hands of a parent committee? And why strip away the legal protections accorded to librarians doing their job?

Sara Stevenson, a retired middle school librarian in Austin, wrote the following article, which was published in the Dallas Morning News.

As a former school librarian and mother, I have always believed parents have total control over what their children select to read from the school library.

However, Senate Bill 13 goes too far. Between July 2021 and June 2022, only 22 of 1,650 Texas school districts experienced formal book challenges in the past school year, less than 2%. All school districts already have formal challenge and reconsideration policies in place.

SB 13 transfers the decisions for acquiring library materials into the hands of a council of parents, the majority of whom do not work for the district but only have children attending. What possible experience or credentials or rights does this committee have to make decisions on what children can and can’t read in an entire school district? After a long, convoluted process spelled out in the bill, the school board must then approve the list of library books before they may be purchased.

First of all, it is clear the authors of this bill have a poor understanding of school library programs. In Austin ISD, there are 116 schools. This Local School Library Advisory Council, appointed by the school board, is required to meet only twice a year to decide on the library collections for all 116 schools. A single campus librarian purchases materials throughout the year. It’s not a one and done process.

This bill will greatly delay the timeline between ordering books and getting them into the hands of children. The additional 30-day waiting period further impedes the process. As a librarian, I had the freedom to pre-order the next book in a popular series so that I could add it to our collection the very day it was published. Kids clamoring for the next book in a beloved series will now have to wait for months if not all year.

The bill also invites parents to opt in to a program in which the librarian emails them each time their child checks out a book, including the book’s title and author. One elementary school in south Austin averages 196 checkouts per day. How is it possible for the librarian to send these emails while also running her library program? Instead, why not integrate the library catalog information into the parent portal, the website which parents already access to see their child’s grades? Parents can then look up their students’ library records. It would even help librarians with the bane of our existence: long overdue books.

The portion of the bill that enables anyone to prosecute individual librarians for distributing “harmful material” under the Texas penal code (Sec. 43.24) is the most shocking and destructive piece in this bill. It removes affirmative defenses for educational purposes. Does this also remove legal protections from members of the advisory council if a “bad” book slips through the cracks?

I can’t believe the state of Texas wants to allow frivolous lawsuits against librarians, school boards, principals, and teachers. We are already experiencing a teacher shortage, with at least 59 districts switching to four-day weeks.

If passed, this bill will bring a culture of fear and intimidation to our schools.

The men and women who choose to serve as school librarians are among the most intelligent and ethical people I know. They are not just serving the children of the five parents on the Local School Advisory Committee; they are representing the interests of all children and the parental rights of all families at their schools, upholding their First Amendment Rights to read.

If the Senate Public Education Committee had only consulted in good faith with the vast majority of school librarians whose patrons are extremely satisfied with the library collections they curate, this bill would have been able to find a balance between respecting parental rights and ensuring better oversight in purchasing materials without adding unwieldy, impractical layers of bureaucracy and red tape that will prevent children from having ready access to the books they want and need to read.

Sara Stevenson is a former school librarian in Austin ISD. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Lies, Literacy, Literature, Students, Stupid, Texas

Idaho: Bill Would Allow Parents to Sue Libraries and School Districts

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2023 //
17

Republicans have gone stark raving mad. They are terrified that their children might read a book that will turn them gay or transgender or might make them feel bad about racism. of course, their children have access to the internet, where they can see stuff far more sensational than anything in a book.

Somebody has to be punished for the racy books in the libraries.

In Idaho, parents will be able to sue libraries and school districts if they find an inappropriate book on their shelves. The fine would be $10,000 for each time a dangerous book is accessed.

A bill that would allow parents to sue libraries and school districts for allowing books containing material considered “obscene” on their shelves is one step closer to becoming law.

The “Children’s School and Library Protection Act” passed the Idaho House on a 40-30 vote Monday afternoon.

The bill lays out a proposed definition for what it calls material that is “harmful to minors,” including material that contains description or representation of nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement or “sado-masochistic abuse.”

The bill also specifically mentions representations of “intimate sexual acts, normal or perverted” along with descriptions of “masturbation, excretory functions, or lewd exhibition of the genitals or genital area.”…

One legislator made a good point:

A representative from Latah County says libraries are not the main place where kids are being exposed to mature content.

“This telephone and this computer has more damage than any library is ever going to have to our children,” Lori McCann (R), representative of Legislative District Six, said.

How many of those voting went home to watch porn on their phone or computer?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Idaho, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy, Literature, Students, Stupid

Katherine Marsh: Why Children Don’t Fall in Love with Reading

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2023 //
37

Katherine Marsh is an award-winning novelist who writes for children in grades fifth-through-eighth. At that age in the 1980s, she remembers falling in love with books. But she knows that children today are not reading for fun as much as they used to. NAEP data say so; parents as well. She knows that the ubiquity of cell phones, the Internet, abd television explain some of that decline in reading.

But she believes there is a problem with the way children are taught reading. No, she’s not talking about phonics and how children learn to read. She refers to the pedagogical approach that is required by the Common Core. children in school are taught to analyze what they read. This technical mindset, she believes, kills the joy of reading.

She writes in The Atlantic:

What I remember most about reading in childhood was falling in love with characters and stories; I adored Judy Blume’s Margaret and Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse. In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.

This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.” There is a fun, easy way to introduce this concept: reading Peggy Parish’s classic, Amelia Bedelia, in which the eponymous maid follows commands such as “Draw the drapes when the sun comes in” by drawing a picture of the curtains. But here’s how one educatorexperienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.

For anyone who knows children, this is the opposite of engaging: The best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on a story. “Nonliteral language” becomes a whole lot more interesting and comprehensible, especially to an 8-year-old, when they’ve gotten to laugh at Amelia’s antics first. The process of meeting a character and following them through a series of conflicts is the fun part of reading. Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.

But as several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices. Jennifer LaGarde, who has more than 20 years of experience as a public-school teacher and librarian, described how one such practice—the class read-aloud—invariably resulted in kids asking her for comparable titles. But read-alouds are now imperiled by the need to make sure that kids have mastered all the standards that await them in evaluation, an even more daunting task since the start of the pandemic. “There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,” LaGarde said.

Under the duress of Commin Core, students are analyzing passages without reading the whole book. They are getting read to do the same on the tests. This is a sure fire way to make reading a chore, not a pleasure.

The architect of the Common Core standards, David Coleman, used to claim all sorts of miraculous things that would happen, if everyone taught the way he wanted. Test scores would rise, achievement gaps would close, etc. in the decade after Commin Core was introduced in 2010, none of those miracles came to pass.

Coleman believed that children needed to interpret what was put in front of them, without context. Understand the four corners of the text in front of them. This may make sense for a test, where the only thing in front of the student is a short passage, but it’s no way to read for pleasure.

Worse, this approach is a sure fire way to turn reading into a dull exegesis of language, not into a source of joy.

Categories Childhood, Common Core, Creativity, Curriculum, Education Reform, Failure, Literacy, Literature, Real Education, Students

Omaha: High School Students Walk Out to Protest Hate Laws

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2023 //
32

Yesterday, hundreds of Omaha high school students walked out to protest the anti-trans legislation moving through the Nebraska legislature. The youth are our hope for a better future, one where hate is stigmatized.

As many as several hundred students at Omaha’s Central High School braved dropping temperatures Friday and walked out of class to protest two pending bills in the Nebraska Legislature.

Armed with bright, colorful signs and a microphone, students used speeches and poetry to protest Legislative Bills 574 and 575, which focus on transgender youths. Both bills were introduced by State Sen. Kathleen Kauth of Omaha.

The Central students were joined by others, including parents, young children and community members, to hear a number of student activists talk about the potential impact of the bills.

Several students said the legislation would prevent transgender youths from accessing lifesaving medical care and limit how they participate in sports or the bathrooms they can use.

“I am a human being. I am not defined by my gender,” said Harley Lawton, a junior at Central High. “They are trying to take away our rights. They are trying to define us as what they first saw us as, not what we became, not what we decide to be.”

Categories Courage, Cruelty, Disruption, Gender, Nebraska, Students

Glenn Sacks: Why the L.A. Strike Is Good for Workers and Students

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2023 //
8

Glenn Sacks teaches social studies at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He is one of the UTLA (United Teachers of Los Angeles) representatives for his school and also a strike captain in both 2019 and 2023. I was pleased to join the 2019 strike and walk the picket line with UTLA. Wish I could have been in L.A. for this one too.

The public schools of Los Angeles were closed this past week by a three-day strike, led by the low-wage staff represented by SEIU 99—about 30,000 workers, including bus drivers, teacher aides, custodians, cafeteria workers, gardeners, and special education assistants. The UTLA struck in support of the SEIU; UTLA’s 35,000 members include teachers, counselors, therapists, nurses and librarians.

A tentative settlement was reached after Mayor Karen Bass intervened to mediate. The SEIU was seeking a 30% wage increase, and they won it. The agreement must be approved by the membership.

Glenn Sacks reported the unions’ victory directly to me:

Friday afternoon SEIU and LAUSD reached an agreement which addresses SEIU’s central demands. The agreement includes:

• a 30% wage increase

• Retroactive pay of $4000-$8000, depending on job classification, including a $1000 bonus for all
• Increase to average annual salary from $25,000 to $33,000
• 7 hours of work guaranteed for Special Education Assistants
• Fully paid health care benefits, including family coverage, for Teacher Assistants, Community Representatives, After School Program Workers and others)

The average pay for SEIU workers went from $15.00 an hour to $22.52 an hour.

As the UTLA often says: “When we fight, we win.”

Sacks wrote this article for FOX News. Good for him for getting published in a place usually dominated by anti-union views!

I don’t blame our bosses for being surprised.

For decades Los Angeles Unified School District’s workforce has been divided into eight different unions. Our contracts expire at different times and labor law often ties our hands, so LAUSD plays us off against each other, to the detriment of all employees.

Service Employees International Union Local 99 represents 30,000 LAUSD bus drivers, teaching assistants, maintenance workers and cafeteria staff. Recently SEIU announced a three-day “Unfair Practice Charge” strike based on its well-founded accusations that LAUSD’s mistreatment of SEIU workers violates California labor law.

LAUSD probably expected that with teachers coming in to work, along with personnel brought in from LAUSD headquarters on an emergency basis, they could roll right over SEIU, as school districts often do to campus workers in similar situations.

Except this week, Los Angeles teachers said “No.”

Over half of LAUSD’s SEIU workers have children in LAUSD. Many of our students have aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and older siblings who work at LAUSD.

There is only one way UTLA educators could keep faith with our students, their families and the workers whose labor enables us to educate our students — by honoring SEIU’s picket lines.

Our sympathy strike (aka “solidarity strike”) is very much in line with the traditions of American labor. American labor unions were built through labor solidarity, and in recent decades, unions have been undermined because union leaders have abjured sympathy strikes.

On this issue, recently one publication often critical of teachers unions unwittingly paid UTLA a complement:

“State law allows one bargaining unit to go on a sympathy strike with another union, but
Bradley Marianno, an assistant education professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said it’s ‘highly unusual,’ for a teachers union to join a walkout with non-teaching employees.

“‘They may issue statements of support, but to join in strike is a different, and relatively rare, matter.’”

SEIU has historically been a much weaker union than UTLA. Their membership is divided into many different job classifications, they are often on campus at different times, and their heavily minority, immigrant and female membership is at a much lower socioeconomic level.

Despite this, SEIU’s performance this week was remarkably strong, reflecting the raw anger of its members over low wages and LAUSD abuses, which were well-documented by the national media this week.

UTLA has its own contract battle with LAUSD, but its robust showing this week also reflects our sympathy for our SEIU colleagues and the fact that UTLA has become a strong, disciplined labor union.

LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has found himself increasingly isolated, as many key players in Los Angeles education, including Austin Beutner, LAUSD superintendent from 2018 to 2021, school board Member Kelly Gonez, who served as president of the LAUSD Board of Education from 2020 until earlier this year, and LAUSD school board President Jackie Goldberg have all made statements undermining Carvalho in his battle against SEIU.

Earlier this week dozens of CA Legislators signed a letter backing SEIU, telling Carvalho to “resolve this.”

As in 2019, many of LAUSD’s own school administrators made it clear their hearts aren’t in this battle either, with some walking early morning picket lines with us or bringing us coffee and donuts.

Carvalho, humbled by the firestorm he foolishly ignited, has pivoted, shifting from stonewalling and even mocking SEIU workers towards a humble, “I feel your pain” posture.

Some of our critics claim our strike hurts our students, yet meeting SEIU demands will improve our schools.

To pick one example among many, each day special education students are deprived of two hours of their special education assistants’ time. Why?

LAUSD keeps these paraprofessionals at only six hours a day, so they won’t be considered full-time employees. This petty chiseling at the expense of our students typifies the way LAUSD mistreats its SEIU employees.

Other critics assert that parents have turned against teachers unions. These people are kidding themselves.

Polls show LAUSD parents support educators. A Loyola Marymount University poll taken earlier this year asked “LAUSD teachers requested an increase in salary. If labor negotiations cannot reach an agreement, would you support or oppose LAUSD teachers going on strike to meet their demands?”

Among those living within LAUSD’s boundaries, 76% supported teachers. Among those aged 18-29 — people who most likely attended LAUSD schools not long ago — 88% supported teachers.

Moreover, throughout this week of picket lines and massive rallies, the public showed they were behind us with continual honking horns, raised fists and shouts of approval.

As we walk to and from rallies in our union colors, we’ve had truck drivers and firefighters walk up to us, pat us on the back, and tell us, “Good luck.”

Leaving one rally a construction worker walked up to me, shook my hand, and said, “Give ’em hell!”

We did.

Categories California, Inequity, Injustice, Los Angeles, Students, Teachers, Unions

Speak Out in Support of #AbbottElementary

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2023 //
3

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, asks you to show your support for #AbbottElementary, the delightful weekly show that favorably portrays the real life of teachers, students, and public schools. The show was written, produced by, and stars the amazingly talented @QuintaBrunson.

Carol writes:

ABC’s award-winning sitcom Abbott Elementary is the story of a wonderful group of teachers who stick with a challenging Philadelphia public school because they love teaching and kids. In recent episodes, it has been critical of the effects of charter schools.

It seems hard to believe it, but “Ed Reformers” are attacking its creator, Quinta Brunson, on Twitter.

Please stand up for Abbott Elementary & Ms Brunson by copying and tweeting the Tweets below. The show and its producers need to know you stand for truth-telling and for public schools.

Thank you @AbbottElemABC & @quintabrunson for yr amazing show that dares to tell truth abt how charters hurt public schools. Love the show. Keep up the great work! I love #AbbottElementary https://abc.com/shows/abbott-elementary

How small @JeanneAllen & @edreform look trying to suppress @AbbottElemABC from criticizing the charter system by lying about @quintabrunson. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/quinta-brunson-shuts-down-critic-151809283.html I love #AbbottElementary

When @AbbottElemABC critiques Pa billionaire trying to undermine public schools w/charters, @edreform goes on the attack. Pathetic to go after a beloved show & its beloved creator/star @quintabrunson. Gotta say it. I love #AbbottElementary. https://abc.com/shows/abbott-elementary

You can read about the show’s critique of charters here and the Jeanne Allen controversy here including the Tweets in which Brunson pushes back.

Thanks for all you do,Image

Carol Burris

Network for Public Education

Executive Director

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Humor, Media, Students, Supporting public schools, Teachers
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