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Rick Hess: The Pendulum Is Swinging Against the Bush-Obama “Reform” Era

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2018 //
45

 

Although I often disagree with Rick Hess, I think he is the most insightful of the reformers and the nicest as well. He has a code of civility, and he never descends into mud-slinging or name-calling, unlike others in the reform camp.

In his latest article, I was surprised and delighted to see his acknowledgement that the pendulum is swinging away from the Bush-Obama reforms. He tacitly admits, as few other reformers do, that the era of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top has failed, and (as John Merrow said in his latest post) “the air is humming,” and something great is coming. The current federal law (Every Student Succeeds Act) is a stripped-down version of NCLB, still insanely test-focused, in my view. Under ESSA, despite its grandiose name, there is no hope, none, that “every student will succeed.”

Rick looks at the wave of teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky (with more likely to happen) and draws five lessons.

First, “Teachers are immensely sympathetic actors. For all the gibes, harsh rhetoric of the accountability era, and tsk-tsk’ing occasioned by polls in which people say they don’t want their kids to be teachers, the reality is that people really like teachers. In surveys, no matter how much talk there is about “failing” schools and problems with tenure, teachers are trusted and popular.” Although he doesn’t say it, I will: People trust teachers more than hedge fund managers or billionaires.

Second, “The Trump era has made it tougher for GOP officials to plead “fiscal restraint.” For years, GOP governors and legislators have said there is no more money, but the national GOP has just added billions to the defense budget, over a trillion dollars to the national deficit, and cut taxes for corporations by more billions.

Third, the reform movement must shoulder a significant part of the blame for demonizing teachers, demoralizing them, and building a reservoir of rage. “Along the way, teachers came to look and feel like targets, rather than beneficiaries, of “school reform,” which may be why bread-and-butter demands from teachers are ascending as the guts of Bush-Obama school reform are sinking to the bottom of the “discarded school reform” sea.”

Fourth, teachers’ strikes and walkouts are succeeding because they have broad appeal.

Fifth, he sees the current moment as a good time to rethink compensation, pensions, and staffing. In the minds of reformers, this could be converted into their usual mindset: merit pay, performance pay, replacing pensions with savings plans, etc. As the Kentucky walkout showed, teachers will not sit still while their retirement benefits are whittled away. Part of the appeal of teaching is the expectation that one will not retire to a life of penury after a career of low-paid service.

This is one of the most hopeful articles I have recently read about the pendulum swing that almost everyone knows is coming.

 

 

Categories Corporate Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, Hope, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Resistance, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay, Teachers

John Thompson: The Oklahoma Teachers’ Walkout: What We Learned

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2018 //
6

John Thompson, teacher and historian in Oklahoma, reflects on the recent statewide walkout and the lessons learned.

 

The nine-day Oklahoma teacher walkout was the result of two risky, ideological experiments. As the National Education Association’s Jason Walta explains, the work stoppage also previews the dilemmas that are likely to become more frustrating if the U.S. Supreme Court does what is expected and issues an antiunion decision in Janus v. AFSCME .

https://acslaw.org/acsblog/teachers-walkout-without-bargaining-rights-%E2%80%93-why-it-matters-for-janus

The first theory which drove teachers out of their classrooms was “Supply Side economics.” Oklahoma replicated the extreme budget cutting that Thomas Frank documented in What’s the Matter with Kansas. Income tax cuts that were tilted in favor of the rich cost the state $1 billion per year. The 43rd richest person on the planet and Trump supporter, Harold Hamm, has further enriched himself by ramming though a reduction of oil Gross Production Taxes (GPT) from 7 percent to 2 percent. Consequently, by 2016, the state agencies that provide the most important social and medical services had been cut by one-quarter to one-third of their 2009 levels.

https://okpolicy.org/the-cost-of-tax-cuts-in-oklahoma/

https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2018/04/02/harold-hamm-the-enemy-of-oklahomas-public-educational-funding-fight/

Secondly, the resulting education cutbacks began as corporate school reform was imposed. In 2009, I was surprised to see how many legislators were bringing a New Yorker Magazine to an interim committee on education policy. It featured Steve Brill’s article on the New York City “Rubber Room,” which claimed that value-added teacher evaluations were a valid and reliable tool for firing “bad” teachers. The legislators believed Brill’s flawed reporting and they bought into the corporate school reformers’ self-proclaimed plan which included the replacement of Baby Boomer teachers with twenty-somethings.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-room

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2011/08/grading_the_education_reformers.html

I emailed Brill and learned he didn’t really understand what value-added models could or could not do, and it became clear that he had not properly cross-examined the reformers’ claim that effective teaching, alone, could close the achievement gap. When completing his book, Brill had to make a dramatic change in the pro-reform narrative. Its hero, a 26-year-old with supposedly superhuman stamina and commitment named Jessica Reid, grew too exhausted to continue at her charter school. Today’s worn-down teaching profession is still enduring the effects of schools being “deputized”” as the agents for overcoming poverty.

https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/from-whence-come-ideas-for-reforming-teaching-practices/

Oklahoma joined almost all of the rest of the nation in passing legislation that allowed it to compete for federal Race to the Top funds. Oklahoma’s grant wasn’t funded, but as in more than forty other states, teachers’ due process rights were compromised. The state spent millions of dollars on standardized testing, computer systems for keeping track of test score increases, and for using an unreliable and invalid statistical model for firing teachers. Veteran teachers (and their higher salaries) were often pushed out so newbies could be socialized into bubble-in accountability.

http://newsok.com/article/3432650

Reformers didn’t bother to inventory the capacity that would be required to implement such a half-baked agenda. They simply imposed huge workloads on teachers and administrators trying to comply with dubious mandates. Unions were hard-pressed to merely minimize the damage done.

The experiment failed, and the law was repealed, but the money and energy squandered in the reckless experiment are gone forever.

And that brings us to the ways that the Oklahoma walkout and other teacher revolts in “Right to Work” states preview a new resistance for a post-Janus world. Harold Meyerson recently recalled his old wisecrack, “‘China has strikes but no unions; America has unions but no strikes.’” These teachers’ rebellions show that the United States is “becoming more like China every day.”

http://prospect.org/article/what-teacher-strikes-mean

The Oklahoma walkout epitomizes what could be great and what is worrisome about the new era of political activism which is likely to counter Janus. It was a grassroots uprising, organized on social media. As the National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen Garcia says, this is the “education spring.”

Teachers are challenging a system that had been created by the decades-long campaign to shrink government to the size where it can be strangled in the bathtub. Oklahoma unions and other traditional advocates for progressive causes are stymied by the 3/4ths legislative majority which is required to raise taxes. And term limits mean that the legislature lacks institutional memory. Most lawmakers weren’t in office in 2010 when the fateful decisions were made to gut the progressive tax system and to impose corporate school reform on educators.

In the long run, interactions between a youthful teaching profession and the newbies in the legislature are likely to produce better outcomes. Both groups are now frustrated, but they should recall the advice American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten offered on the first day of the walkout. Weingarten said that in every job action, there is “always a moment of truth.” She also said that it is “as important to find a way back in as it is to find a way out.”

At the end of the first week, it looked like a way back to work had been found. The legislature passed $40 million in additional taxes. When combined with the already agreed upon $6100 average pay raise, 95% of the teachers’ demands would have been met. But the fervor of the teachers at the Capitol meant that union leaders couldn’t call off the work stoppage. Besides, plans had already been made for the next week.

On Sunday, a prayer vigil at the Capitol drew hundreds of supporters. Monday’s crowd was far bigger than the 30,000 to 35,000 people who came to each of the first week’s events. Thousands of education supporters marched from Edmond, Del City, and Norman. The next day, marchers arrived from Tulsa. On Thursday, the Moore schools reopened but hundreds of teachers stayed out of class and marched to the Capitol. Had the walkout ended after one week, teachers could have proclaimed an unambiguous victory, but those and other consciousness-raising accomplishments would not have happened.

Many rank-in-file teachers are frustrated with the decisions to return to school, but several key points must be emphasized. First, it took both the threat of a walkout and an initiative petition to raise the Gross Production Tax to persuade the legislature to increase the GPT to 5%. Now, energies must be devoted to initiatives that would raise it all the way back to 7%, as well as defeating an initiative that would defund the pay increase. Both efforts have great potential for building unity among education allies and dividing their opponents. (The same applies to the need for citizen actions to end the constitutional requirement for a 75% majority to raise taxes, and to curtail extreme gerrymandering.)

http://oklahomawatch.org/2018/04/13/ballot-questions-could-boost-teacher-pay-or-put-raises-at-risk/

Moreover, none of these victories would have been possible without the support of local school boards and district administrations, not to mention students and parents. As it became clear that no new money would be appropriated, teachers needed to support their allies in keeping the rest of the school year from degenerating into chaos.

http://www.oklahoman.com/article/5590781?access=17a8dbf82012571d5b94781d849851c5

Just as important, teachers should remember the needs of state employees who pulled out of the walkout just before the OEA announced its end. The Oklahoma Public Employees said, “Recent discussions focus solely on education funding and exclude public safety, veterans’ services, mental health, protective services or any other state agency services.” Given the legal and political complexities of the job actions, that mistake probably was inevitable. But, educators must refocus on the overall needs of their students and families.

http://newsok.com/article/5590683?utm_source=NewsOK.com&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=ShareBar-Twitter

http://newsok.com/state-agencies-say-they-have-funding-needs-too/article/5589886

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/02/07/harmful-tax-cuts-helped-fuel-oklahomas-budget-woes

Finally, while understanding that this new, evolving activism won’t always be pretty, we should listen to former teacher, Sen. J.J. Dossett (D-Owasso) who says that teachers had been apathetic but tens of thousands of them became activists. Led by teacher-candidates, hundreds of additional candidates filed for office last week, leaving almost no Republicans unchallenged. So, teachers should avoid recriminations, celebrate a victory, and focus on November.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Failure, Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay, Unions

New Mexico: What I Said in Santa Fe

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2018 //
21

 

I was invited to speak in Santa Fe about the state of education by the Lannan Foundation. Jesse Hagopian, the great teacher activist and test critic from Garfield High School in Seattle, was the interlocutor, who arranged the invitation, introduced me, and led a discussion afterwards.

Here is a summary of the talk.

New Mexico is a purple state with a Republican Governor. The governor brought in Hanna Skandera, an associate of Jeb Bush, to lead the state education department. Skandera introduced every element of the corporate reform program. None of it worked. New Mexico vies with Mississippi and Louisiana for the lowest NAEP scores in the nation. It also has the highest child poverty rate in the nation, at 36%, worse than child poverty in Mississippi. But nothing was done to reduce poverty over the past decade. Instead of doing anything about poverty, medical care, or hunger,  Skandera and Governor Martinez pushed test-based teacher evaluation, charter schools, and school grades. The ultimate endorsement of the vaunted Florida model that Betsy DeVos applauds. The result? Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Mexico, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations

What Cuomo Said about Public Schools and Teachers in His Last Campaign

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2018 //
44

Lest we forget. This is the real Andrew Cuomo. 

I said when he ran for his second term in 2014 that he sounded like Scott Walker.

Vowing to break “one of the only remaining public monopolies,” Gov. Cuomo on Monday said he’ll push for a new round of teacher evaluation standards if re-elected.

Cuomo, during a meeting with the Daily News Editorial Board, said better teachers and competition from charter schools are the best ways to revamp an underachieving and entrenched public education system.

“I believe these kinds of changes are probably the single best thing that I can do as governor that’s going to matter long-term,” he said, “to break what is in essence one of the only remaining public monopolies — and that’s what this is, it’s a public monopoly.”

He said the key is to put “real performance measures with some competition, which is why I like charter schools.”

Cuomo said he will push a plan that includes more incentives — and sanctions — that “make it a more rigorous evaluation system.”

Cuomo expects fierce opposition from the state’s teachers, who are already upset with him and have refused to endorse his re-election bid.

“The teachers don’t want to do the evaluations and they don’t want to do rigorous evaluations — I get it,” Cuomo said. “I feel exactly opposite.”

He backed off because of the success of the Opt Out movement, after 200,000 students chose not to take the state tests.

He formed a commission and tempered his language. But he continues to privilege charter schools, because that’s where the big campaign contributions come from, the ones that have built a war chest for him of $30 million.

Will the unions that he blasted in 2014 support Andrew Cuomo in 2018?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Cuomo, Andrew, New York, Teacher Evaluations

Good News: Pittsburgh Will Drop Teacher Performance Pay and Raise Salaries

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2018 //
9

Pittsburgh was once one of Bill Gates’ favorite cities. He showered it with millions to try out his ideas about how to improve teaching and test scores. But it didn’t work.

Now Superintendent Anthony Hamlet is scrapping the last vestiges of the Gates plan.

Pittsburgh Public Schools is scrapping a performance-based pay system, giving all its teachers at least a 2 percent raise and paying its least experienced teachers as much as 15 percent more per year.

The tentative changes are included in three-year contracts overwhelmingly approved Wednesday by the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, said Nina Esposito-Visgitis, the union’s president. The union represents about 3,000 teachers and support staff.

A little more than 2,000 members voted on the contracts, which were approved by 90 percent of teachers, 90 percent of paraprofessionals and 77 percent of technical and clerical employees.

“We really focused on the new teachers. We were falling behind other districts in terms of our starting salary,” Esposito-Visgitis said. “A lot of money was put at the bottom of the salary schedule because we want to attract the best and the brightest in Pittsburgh.”

Superintendent Anthony Hamlet issued a statement Wednesday night thanking “parents, stakeholders and the larger city for their patience” through stalled negotiations that nearly culminated in districtwide school closures.

Hamlet said he expects the new contracts to help reduce teacher turnover and improve school stability.

“It’s a testament to our members and to both negotiating teams that we were able to resolve things,” Esposito-Visgitis said. “We’re glad this chapter is over.”

 

 

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Merit pay, Pittsburgh, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay

Peter Greene: Was All That Time and Money Spent on Test-Based Evaluation Worth It?

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2018 //
28

 

Matthew Kraft, an assistant professor of education and economics at Brown University, asks the question in the title of this post. He weighs the pros and cons. The cons are overwhelming. The pros are dubious. Peter Greene assesses Kraft’s balancing act. He finds the pro side of the balance curiously vacuous. Yet Kraft steps back and concludes that the nation is better off for the millions or hundreds of millions or billions spent to evaluate teachers by dubious measures.

Greene is not buying it.

The rush to evaluate demoralized teachers, created perverse incentives, and created a teacher shortage, with no evidence of success. Not much of a positive scorecard. (By the way, whatever happened to Raj Chetty and his Nobel-worthy research demonstrating that your fourth grade teacher determines your lifetime income and whether you [if female] get pregnant before marriage?)

He writes:

“Previous sucky evaluation systems may not have provided useful information about teachers (or depended on being used by good principals to generate good data). But at least those previous systems did not incentivize bad behavior. Modern reform evaluation systems add powerful motivation for schools to center themselves not on teachers or students or even standards, but on test results. And test-centered schools run upside down– instead of meeting the students’ needs, the test-centered school sees the students as adversaries who must be cajoled, coached, trained and even forced to cough up the scores that the school needs. The Madeline Hunter checklist may have been bunk, but at least it didn’t encourage me to conduct regular malpractice in my classroom.

“So yes– everyone would be better off if the last round of evaluation “reforms” had never happened.

“Kraft also asks if “the rushed and contentious rollout of teacher evaluation reforms poison the well for getting evaluation right.”

“Hmmm. First, I’ll challenge his assumption that rushed rollout is the problem. This is the old “Program X would have been great if it had been implemented properly,” but it’s almost never the implementation, stupid. There’s no good way to implement a bad program. Bad is bad, whether it’s rushed or not.

“Second, that particular well has never been a source of sparkling pure water, but yes, the current system made things worse. The problems could be reversed. The solution here is the same as the solution to many reform-created education problems– scrap test-centered schooling. Scrap the BS Test. Scrap the use of a BS Test to evaluate schools or teachers or students. Strip the BS Test of all significant consequences; make it a no-stakes test. That would remove a huge source of poison from the education well.”

Categories Teacher Evaluations

Ohio: State Senate Wants to Drop VAM from Teacher Evaluations

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2018 //
11

The Ohio State Senate wants to drop changes in test scores from teacher evaluations. However, the Cleveland district objects because the superintendent clings stubbornly to standardized tests of students as a reasonable measure of teacher quality. The fact that value-added measurement has flopped nationally doesn’t matter to him.

”District CEO Eric Gordon isn’t happy about the change and still wants to use test scores as a major part of teacher ratings. He looks at student scores — particular the “value added” measure of how much students learn in a year — as an important part of gauging whether teachers are doing well or not.”

Maybe no one told him that VAM is a sham.

Categories Ohio, Teacher Evaluations, VAM

Adam Kuranishi: I Failed the edTPA

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2017 //
66

The following article was written by a graduate student and Celia Oyler, his professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.

In this article, co-written by a teacher and a professor, the authors examine possible explanations for why Adam (first author), a New York City public school special educator, failed the edTPA, a teacher performance assessment required by all candidates for state certification. Adam completed a yearlong teaching residency where he was the special educator intern of a co-teaching team. He received glowing reviews on all program assessments, including 12 clinical observations and firsthand evaluations by his principal and one student. In this article, the authors analyze Adam’s edTPA submission showing evidence of how he met his teacher education program’s expectations for teaching inclusively in a heterogeneous Integrated Co-Teaching classroom using frameworks from Universal Design for Learning and culturally sustaining pedagogy. They speculate that this pedagogical approach was in conflict with the Pearson/SCALE (Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity) edTPA expectations or scorer training. They conclude by discussing the paradigmatic conflicts between the Pearson/SCALE special edTPA handbook and the aims and practices of inclusive education

Numerous people have complained about Pearson’s edTPA. Not because its standards are too high but because it does not accurately identify good teachers. At a time of teacher shortages across the nation, what is the point of using a test that weeds out good teachers along with some who are not so good. Shouldn’t human judgement count for more than a standardized test?

Categories Pearson, Standardized Testing, Teacher Education, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Shortage

Gary Rubinstein: Will Reformer Michael Johnston Please Stop Boasting About His “Miracle ” School?

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2017 //
22

Gary Rubinstein knows Michael Johnston from his days in Teach for America. He wishes Mike would stop telling tall tales about the school he briefly ran.

Mike said that the school he ran had a 100% graduation rate and college acceptance rate. Gary points out that 44 seniors graduated and got accepted to college, but there were 73 students in tenth grade two years earlier. That’s a 60% graduation rate, not 100%.

Now Mike Johnston is running for Governor of Colorado. He has built a reputation in the state as an education “reformer.” After graduating from Yale, he taught in Mississippi as a member of Teach for America, earned a degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, then a law degree, then was principal of a small school in Colorado where he claimed the school had a graduation rate of 100% and all were accepted into college. Based on this record, he ran for and was elected to the State Senate at the age of 35.

I met Mike Johnston in 2010, when I visited Denver to talk about my then-new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” I was scheduled to debate Johnston at a luncheon before about 100 of Denver’s civic leaders. At the very moment I was in Denver, the Legislature was debating Johnston’s legislation to evaluate teachers and principals by the test scores of their students. Johnston called his law, SB 10-191, the “Great Teachers, Great Principals Act.” It required that test scores would count for 50% of every teacher and principal’s evaluation.

On the day we were to debate, Johnston was late. I spoke. Minutes later, Johnston arrived, not having heard anything I said about choice and testing. He spoke with great excitement about how his new legislation would weed out all the bad and ineffective teachers in the state and would lead to a new era of great teachers, great principals, and great schools.

Johnston, as Gary Rubinstein points out, is very much an Obama Democrat. Arne Duncan, whose Race to the Top squandered $5 Billion, has endorsed Johnston’s candidacy for governor.

Seven years later, even Colorado reformers acknowledge that Mike Johnston’s grandiose promises fell flat. In an article in Education Week, Colorado reformer Van Schoales admitted that the punitive SB 10-191 didn’t have much, if any effect.

He wrote:

“Implementation did not live up to the promises.

“Colorado Department of Education data released in February show that the distribution of teacher effectiveness in the state looks much as it did before passage of the bill. Eighty-eight percent of Colorado teachers were rated effective or highly effective, 4 percent were partially effective, 7.8 percent of teachers were not rated, and less than 1 percent were deemed ineffective. In other words, we leveraged everything we could and not only didn’t advance teacher effectiveness, we created a massive bureaucracy and alienated many in the field.

“What happened?

“It was wrong to force everyone in a state to have one ‘best’ evaluation system.”

“First, the data. We built a policy on growth data that only partially existed. The majority of teachers teach in states’ untested subject areas. This meant processes for measuring student growth outside of literacy or math were often thoughtlessly slapped together to meet the new evaluation law. For example, some elementary school art-teacher evaluations were linked to student performance on multiple-choice district art tests, while Spanish-teacher evaluations were tied to how the school did on the state’s math and literacy tests. Even for those who teach the grades and subjects with state tests, some debate remains on how much growth should be weighted for high-stakes decisions on teacher ratings. And we knew that few teachers accepted having their evaluations heavily weighted on student growth.

“Second, there has been little embrace of the state’s new teacher-evaluation system even from administrators frustrated with the former system. There were exceptions, namely the districts of Denver and Harrison, which had far fewer highly effective teachers than elsewhere in the state. Both districts invested time and resources in the development of a system that more accurately reflects a teacher’s impact on student learning. Yet most Colorado districts were forced to create new evaluation systems in alignment with the new law or adopt the state system, and most did the latter. This meant that these districts focused on compliance (and checking off evaluation boxes), rather than using the law to support teacher improvement.

“Third, we continue to have a leadership problem. Research shows that teacher evaluators are still not likely to give direct and honest feedback to teachers. A Brown University study on teacher evaluators in these new systems shows that the evaluators are three times more likely to rate teachers higher than they should be rated. This is a problem of school and district culture, not a fault with the evaluation rubric.

“Fourth, all of Colorado’s 238 charter schools waived out of the system.

“We wanted a new system to help professionalize teaching and address the real disparities in teacher quality. Instead, we got an 18-page state rubric and 345-page user guide for teacher evaluation.

“We didn’t understand how most school systems would respond to these teacher-evaluation laws. We failed to track implementation and didn’t check our assumptions along the way.”

Unfortunately, when the time came to change the law, Sen. Mike Johnston joined with five Republicans on the State Senate Education Committee to defeat a proposal to fix his failed law.

The rejected proposal, “originally introduced with bipartisan sponsorship, would have allowed school districts to drop the use of student academic growth data in teacher evaluations. It also would have eliminated the annual evaluation requirement for effective and highly effective teachers.”

But Johnston preferred to keep his law in place, despite its failure. It remains today as the most regressive teacher evaluation law in the nation. And it has had seven years to demonstrate its ineffectiveness.

Gary Rubinstein calls on Mike Johnston to stop making the false claim in his campaign literature that his high school’s graduation rate was 100%.

I call on him to renounce and denounce SB 10-191.

Make a clean break of it, Mike. Set things right. Show you are man enough to admit you were wrong.

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Corporate Reformers, High School Graduation, Teach for America, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM

Laura Chapman on “Educators for Excellence”

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2017 //
26

Laura Chapman writes:

“E4E requires teachers to sign a “pledge” that endorses VAM as a component of their evaluation. I do not understand why anyone would sign a pledge to any organization that billionaires fund. This is a variant of the infamous Gates Compact that called for school districts run by elected officials and with public accountability to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that would allow charter schools, privately run and often by out of state franchises, to use resources they did not pay for, occupy public school buildings, avoid the full costs of a district services such as those providing food and transportation. The charters were supposed to share their “best practices” with the district. The E4E pledge and the Gates compact are duping teachers and leaders of district in the same way…with contract-like arrangements totally out of bounds of professional work ing education.

“Imagine a hospital or medical practice that signed a ledge or a “compact” to prescribe only the drugs/treatments that a billionaire donor wanted, and under conditions where those drugs/treatments were known to be toxic for parents and the medical personnel.

“I am reminded of the pledge that I had to sign to be employed in Florida, mid-century last. The document asked if I had every been a member of the Communist Party or a member of one of the groups labelled “communist sympathizers”–with the list on legal paper, both sides, two pages two columns.

“I think the E4E pledge is intended to function much like a loyalty oath, but now it is one aspect of market-based thinking. It also draws on the actual and implied threats in a non-compete clause in some employment contracts.

“There is probably nothing that E4E can do to legally enforce compliance with the terms of the pledge–a pledge of loyalty to an agenda set by the billionaires. The whole point is to use teachers as marketers for the bad ideas of E4E and make them accomplices in their own demise.

“If you sign the pledge, you confirm that you are easy prey. Do not be duped or used.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Hoax, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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