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Jeff Bryant: Did the Big Teachers’ Protest Rally in 2011 Make a Difference?

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2026 //
6

Jeff Bryant, prolific education journalist, writes in The Progressive about the efforts by educators to fight back against the failed and punitive policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It’s a valuable summary of the past 15 years. Teachers rallied. Teachers sounded alarms about the bipartisan attack is on teachers, teaching and public schools.

Did it make a difference?

Now, 15 years later, there are thousands of charters, and they are no better than the public schools, contrary to their promises. Now, most states have vouchers, and the public is funding religious schools, which was unthinkable in 2011.

But we can’t give up! At last, there are candidates running to fight for public schools. Gina Hinojosa is the most prominent of them. If she defeats Greg Abbott in Texas, expect major changes.

Jeff writes:

It was a sunny July day in Washington, D.C., the temperature was forecasted to hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I arrived at the Ellipse on the National Mall for the Save Our Schools march I realized I would need a hat. Among the vendors that lined Constitution Avenue, the least expensive hat I could find was a gaudy, red-white-and-blue affair with an embossed rendering of fireworks going off over the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. “Some hat,” Anne Thompson, my videographer for the day, said when she arrived…

At the time, I was working on a project, partnered with the National Education Association, called “Starving America’s Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates Are Hurting Our Nation’s Students.” The project documented how state governments, following the Great Recession, cut funding for schools and rolled out efforts to privatize them with charter schools and voucher programs.

I had read  multiple analyses by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) that found at least thirty-seven states responded to the economic downturn that started in 2007 and extended into 2009 by slashing their education budgets back to pre-recession levels. My Starving America’s Schools project would examine how the cuts caused districts to fire teachers, cancel art and music programs, close libraries and science labs, and cut extracurriculars like athletic programs, field trips, and drama performances.

Teachers turned out to denounce high-stakes testing, NCLB, Race to the Top, budget cuts, privatization, and the attacks on their profession, funded by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other billionaires.

….The estimated crowd of 3,000 to 5,000 roared in approval at an array of speakers that included the actor Matt Damon (whose mother is a professor of education), Ravitch, best-selling author Jonathan Kozol, renowned educator Deborah Meier, and policy experts Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera. When the speeches were over and we marched to the White House, the line of people stretched for blocks and blocks…

The range of themes the speakers addressed included lack of pay and respect for teachers; the harms caused by poverty and privatization; the continuing racial discrimination and segregation in schools and glaring inequities in their funding; the unbearable class sizes teachers endure, and the injustices that result from using test scores to sanction schools and evaluate teachers.

What also animated the crowd, Anthony Cody tells The Progressive in a text message, was a sense of betrayal on education by the Democratic Party’s leadership. Cody, a fulltime classroom teacher at the time—he’s now retired—was one of the principal organizers of the march. “The great majority of teachers supported the election of Barack Obama in 2008,” he says. “[But] RTTT reinforced the worst elements of NCLB by encouraging states to link teacher pay and evaluations to standardized test scores.”

“A theme that ran through the rally was ‘how could a Democratic administration be so hostile to public schools?’ ” says Ravitch in an email to The Progressive.

“The speakers, me included, hated RTTT and saw it for what it was: encouragement for charters, high-stakes standardized testing, teacher evaluation based on student test scores, and other dreadful policies,” Ravitch continues. “We predicted [the policies] would fail, and they did.”

A particular target for invective at the rally was Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, Ravitch recalls. “He regularly assailed public schools as failing. He attacked public school teachers. He constantly praised charter schools, and whenever national test scores came out, he gleefully pointed to results and made them sound worse than they were.”

“Duncan could have fit in a Republican cabinet,” Ravitch adds.

Fifteen years later, did that outpouring in July 2011 matter?…

The sad truth is that the grievances that motivated people to board buses and gather on the Mall on a hot July day in 2011 continue to dominate the K-12 school landscape today.

For instance, one of NPE’s reports that Cody references, published in 2026, found that states that have been the most aggressive about redirecting public funds for schools to private education operators have been the most neglectful of funding and supporting their public schools.

Although No Child Left Behind was repealed in 2015, it was replaced that year by the Every Student Succeeds Act that still enforces standardized testing. And the legacy of the funding cuts enacted during the Great Recession continues to harm schools.

“In the decade following the Great Recession, students across the United States lost nearly $600 billion from the states’ disinvestment in their public schools,” an analysis by the Education Law Center reported in 2021. Calling the time, from 2008 to 2018, a “lost decade,” the organization noted that while states’ economic activity as measured by gross domestic product increased by 17 percent, state and local revenues for public schools lagged, increasing by only 6 percent.

A 2025 Education Law Center report, “Making the Grade,” assessed states on how they fund public schools and found that not a single state earned an A grade on three crucial measures of funding: whether state and local revenues are adequate, whether funding is fairly distributed, and whether funding lags a state’s economic capacity.

In the meantime, the charter school industry continues to expand, with thirty-nine out of forty-three states experiencing growth in charters in 2025, according to charter industry data. And voucher programs also continue to grow, as fifteen states now operate twenty-three programs, and the Trump Administration is set to roll out a nationwide federal voucher program in 2027. As the right wing’s “long game” to end public education continues apace, prominent centrist Democrats call for a return to the education policies of the Bush and Obama years.

“Democrats [have] walked away from standards and accountability [for schools], and our kids are falling through the cracks,” former Chicago mayor and Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is telling anyone who will listen. And Arne Duncan is back in the media spotlight, encouraging Democratic governors to embrace the Trump Administration’s voucher program. That the politics of education in 2026 seem so similar to those of 2011 is evidence that a left-right binary over education policy doesn’t really exist.

As I observed all those years ago on the cusp of the march in D.C., there was no middle ground in education debates. Factions on the right wanted to get rid of public schools. Business interests represented by testing companies, charter schools, and tech firms wanted to make money off schools. And a “reform” community led by wealthy foundations and technocrats wanted to mold public schools to their ideological, and often political, agendas.

As I wrote at the time, “Faced with this array of antagonists toward public education, where does the ‘middle ground’ lie? When people openly admit they want to get rid of you, where should the bargaining start? When people have shown you they are more apt to use you for their own profit, and then walk away when the ‘market changes,’ why should you trust them? And when people say they are willing to align with your cause but only when you say and do things how they want you to do them—even when your ideals inform you to do otherwise—why should you simply bend to their will?”

Those questions are still relevant today. They will remain so until a progressive left faction adopts a robust message on education and articulates it repeatedly in advocacy documents and political stump speeches.

“Our battle for public schools is steeper now than it was when the Save Our Schools rally was held,” Ravitch says. “It will be a battle for many years to come.”

But in 2011, for at least a day, it seemed that public school advocates had the power to, as Ravitch put it in her email, “push back and give people a modicum of hope.”

The battle continues, and it’s not over. America needs a strong public school system, not a hodge-podge of pop-up schools.

We need well-prepared teachers who can knowledgeably teach history, science, mathematics, literature, and foreign languages. We need well-funded schools and respected, well-paid professionals. We need equality of opportunity for all children, and we need excellence.

We need the strong public schools that built the Aunited States into a great nation. We need education for democracy, where children are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

We need an education system that produces engineers, scientists, artists, musicians, athletes, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, social workers, idealists, scholars, young people eager to use their hands, their brains, and their hearts to make our society better for everyone.

We are now in a period of disruption and dissolution. That way lies disaster. It is the road to elitism, segregation, indoctrination, and decay.

We need to raise our sights and build better public schools that offer a goood education for all children.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Extremism, Failure, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Supporting public schools, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay, U.S. Department of Education, VAM (value-added modeling)

Michelle H. Davis: Texas GOP Insults Teachers, Unions, and Fellow Citizens

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2025 //
7

Michelle H. Davis follows the sinister machinations of the Texas Legislature, which always pretends to be helping ordinary folks when they are actually hurting them.

She writes on her blog “Lone Star Left”:

Yesterday, the Texas Legislature took another step toward reshaping public education, not necessarily for the better. SB26, a sweeping education bill championed by Conservative lawmakers, passed with promises of boosting teacher pay and improving student outcomes. But beneath the surface, the bill reads more like a Trojan horse for privatization, union busting, and a long-term erosion of public education as we know it.

SB26 shifts teacher compensation from across-the-board salary increases and implements a performance-based pay system. On paper, rewarding high-performing teachers sounds excellent. In reality, this model has been used to justify pay disparities, foster favoritism, and force teachers into a test-score rat race rather than focusing on student development.

Merit and meritocracy are words we hear Conservatives use all too much. They frame these ideas as the backbone of fairness, insisting that success comes purely from hard work and ability. But in practice, “meritocracy” is often just a smokescreen for maintaining existing racial hierarchies. It ignores the systemic barriers that keep marginalized communities from accessing the same opportunities as their wealthier, white counterparts. In education, employment, and economic mobility, so-called “merit-based” systems reward those who already have advantages through generational wealth, access to elite schools, or the benefit of implicit biases in hiring and promotions. 

When conservatives push for “merit” in policies like education funding or hiring practices, they advocate for policies that protect privilege rather than create equity. In reality, meritocracy doesn’t level the playing field. It rigs the game in favor of those already winning. 

Brandon Creighton (R-SB04) used the words “merit” and “meritocracy” yesterday to describe SB26, which was a major red flag 🚩. This bill prohibits school districts from implementing general salary increases for instructional staff, except for inflation adjustments. Instead, funding is funneled into selective incentives that only some teachers will qualify for.

SB26’s move to contract a third party to provide legal assistance and liability insurance for teachers is particularly insidious. 

This might sound like a win, but here’s the catch: this state-controlled insurance provider would replace a key service teachers’ unions offer, weakening their role in advocating for educators’ rights. It’s union-busting in disguise. 

The bill also explicitly bans these contracted entities from engaging in political advocacy. Thus, teachers seeking to oppose harmful education policies will have one less resource. This is a classic conservative strategy: chip away at organized labor under the pretense of “helping” workers.

SB 26 isn’t about helping teachers. It’s about undermining unions, expanding state control over local schools, and pushing a corporate-style pay system that benefits wealthier districts while punishing the most vulnerable. Instead of investing in systemic reforms like universal Pre-K and across-the-board salary increases, the Texas Republicans have chosen to deepen inequities and destabilize an already struggling profession.

If the GOP were serious about education, they’d invest in all teachers, not just a select few. So, when Republicans announce that they’re pushing bills to raise teacher pay, just know that it’s total bullshit.

On top of this bill, which the Senate will claim is “teacher pay raises,” during yesterday’s hearing, Senator Bettencourt (R-SD07) continued his Trump impressions throughout. Weirdly, he does this in every hearing now. 

Please read my book Reign of Error, in which I review the research showing the consistent failure of merit pay.

Categories Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Lies, Teacher Pay, Texas, Unions

Washington Post: A Biased View of Tim Walz’s Record on Education

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2024 //
11

Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson wrote about Governor Tim Walz’s record on education in Minnesota. In making decisions, Walz relied on his own knowledge as a veteran public school teacher and very likely on research, but The Washington Post misleadingly attributed his views to “the teachers’ union,” the bugbear of the far-right.

The article is saturated with bias against teachers unions and presents the pro-education Walz as a tool of the union, not as a veteran educator who knows the importance of public schools. Walz grew up and taught in small towns. They don’t want or need “choice.” They love their public schools, which are often the central public institution in their community.

The 2019 state budget negotiations in Minnesota were tense, with a deadline looming, when the speaker of the House offered Gov. Tim Walz a suggestion for breaking the impasse.

They both knew that the Republicans’ top priority was to create a school voucher-type program that would direct tax dollars to help families pay for private schools. House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, floated an idea: What if they offered the Republicans a pared-down version of the voucher plan, some sort of “fig leaf,” that could help them claim a symbolic victory in trade for big wins on the Democratic side? In the past, on other issues, Walz had been open to that kind of compromise, Hortman said.

This time, it was a “hard no.”

He used his position’s formidable sway over education to push for more funding for schools and backed positions taken by Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union of which he was once a member. His record on education will probably excite Democrats but provide grist for Republicans who have in recent years gained political ground with complaints about how liberals have managed schools.

Teachers and their unions consistently supported Walz’s Minnesota campaigns with donations, records show. And in the first 24 hours after he was selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, teachers were the most common profession in the flood of donations to the Democratic ticket, according to the campaign.

During the chaotic 2020-21 pandemic-rattled school year, Walz took a cautious approach toward school reopening that was largely in line with teachers, who were resisting a return to in-person learning, fearful of contracting covid.

Critics say that as a result, Minnesota schools stayed closed far too long — longer than the typical state — inflicting lasting academic and social emotional damage on students.

As a former teacher, Walz knew that teachers were reluctant to return to the classroom until safety protocols were in place.

Walz also advanced his own robust and liberal education agenda. He fought to increase K-12 education spending in 2019, when he won increases in negotiations with Republicans, and more dramatically in 2023, when he worked with the Democratic majority in the state House and Senate. He won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students — including undocumented immigrants — whose families earn less than $80,000 per year. He also called out racial gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them…

And as culture war debates raged across the country in recent years, Walz pushed Minnesota to adopt policies in support of LGBTQ+ rights…

In the 2022 elections, Walz was reelected, and Minnesota Democrats took control of the Senate. Democrats now had a “trifecta” — governor, House and Senate — and a $17.6 billion budget surplus.

After taking his oath of office in January 2023, Walz said Minnesota had a historic opportunity to become the best state in the nation for children and families. His proposals included a huge increase in K-12 education spending.

“Now is the time to be bold,” he said.

The final budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years. Total formula funding for schools would climb from about $9.9 billion in 2023 to $11.4 billion in 2025, according to North Star Policy Action. The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K programs, mental health and community schools.

Walz also signed legislation providing free school meals for all students — a signature achievement — not just those in low-income families who are eligible under the federal program…

In his 2023 State of the State address, Walz drew a pointed contrast between the culture wars raging in states such as Florida and the situation in Minnesota.

“The forces of hatred and bigotry are on the march in states across this country and around the world,” Walz said. “But let me say this now and be very clear about this: That march stops at Minnesota’s borders.”

Through his tenure, he repeatedly took up the causes of LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice.

He signed a measure prohibiting public and school libraries from banning books due to their messages or opinions, and another granting legal protection to children who travel to Minnesota for gender-affirming care.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Minnesota, Teacher Pay, Teachers and Teaching, Unions, Vouchers, Walz, Tim

Newark: Teachers Union Wins Five-Year Contract

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2024 //
4

Remember when reformers were going to make Newark a model district transformed by charter schools and Teach for America? Mark Zuckerberg gave $100 million. Charter leaders arrived. Chris Cerf and Cami Anderson took charge. Senator Corey Booker advocated charters, even vouchers. The reformers gave up.

Newark Teachers Union Members Ratify New Five-Year Contract

NEWARK, N.J.—Newark Teachers Union members ratified a new five-year contract tonight that gives them a voice on classroom and district policies as well as a significant pay raise for each year of the five-year contract.

“NTU members voted to approve the transformational contract that makes them a true partner with the Board of Education on classroom and district policies. The negotiations and the contract itself are an example of labor-management collaboration at its best,” said NTU President John Abeigon. 

The contract provides all NTU members with a significant raise over the course of the five-year contract, depending on the person’s step level, longevity and degrees they have earned. The new starting salary will be $65,000 and in the fifth year of the contract, it will be $74,000. In addition, the contract includes salary increases for non-instructional staff, substitutes and hourly-pay employees.

Teachers will be able to select or even design curriculum, provide professional development that matches the standards-based curriculum, and receive support if their evaluations show they are underperforming. 

# # #

Categories Education Reform, New Jersey, Newark, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Unions

North Carolina Pays for Vouchers for the Rich

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2024 //
2

Public Schools First in North Carolina finds it strange that the legislature can’t find the money to raise teachers’ salaries but easily finds money to fund vouchers for the rich.

Its latest notice says:

This week House majority leader Tim Moore announced that a legislative short session priority would be to increase funding for vouchers for the coming year by around $300 million to ensure that the state could fund vouchers for all families who applied. More than half of the applications came from families with incomes too high to have been eligible last year. Our March 9 newsletterdescribed the applicant pool breakdown and pointed out that increased demand this year was likely due to the state spending $1,000,000 to market the program and droves of existing high-income private school families seeking a taxpayer-funded discount coupon for their tuition bill.

From 2018-19 through 2022-23, the percentage of new applicants who actually accepted vouchers ranged from 44% to 51%. If historical patterns hold, the current voucher budget would more than pay for Tier 1 and Tier 2 families, cover the cost for returning voucher recipients (typically 80%) and be left with $50 million extra. In other words, more voucher funding is only needed to pay for vouchers for the upper-income families.

To put Moore’s priorities in sharp relief, his announcement came one week after the State Board of Education heard from DPI staff that last year’s teacher attrition rate was higher than it had been in decades. It hit 11.5%, which represents a whopping increase of 42% over last year’s attrition numbers.

The attrition rates were driven by especially high attrition for teachers with fewer than five or more than 26 years of experience. The highest rate, 26%, was the same for first-year teachers and veteran teachers with 35+ years of experience.

When asked about teacher salaries, Moore did say he thinks there may be room in the budget for teacher raises, and that the short session would address the looming crisis in early childhood care funding.

But North Carolina has some serious catching up to do when it comes to bringing teacher salaries to a level where they will attract and retain teachers. North Carolina lags behind all surrounding states in state-funded salaries. Our beginning teachers start out lower and our veteran teachers remain at the bottom. (See our fact sheetfor links to salary schedules.)

In 2023-24, North Carolina’s state minimum beginning teacher salary was $39,000. While it is scheduled to increase to $41,000 in 2024-25, it will still lag behind the beginning salary in neighboring states. And young people looking at teaching as a possible profession will be put off by the relatively poor earnings trajectory.

Strong support for bolstering salaries also came from North Carolina’s Fiscal Research Division’s recent analysis of state-funded salaries that found only deputy clerks of court had lower starting salaries than teachers. After the 7th year, deputy clerks made more. Only state highway patrol officers had lower maximum salaries than teachers. 

Many local communities are working to make up for state neglect by offering teacher salary supplements, but this remedy simply exacerbates existing inequities. In 2023-24 teacher salary supplements ranged from $10,650 in Chapel Hill/Carrboro School District to $0 in Caswell County, Graham County, and Weldon City Schools.

Teacher salary increases barely scratch the surface of what the NCGA could do to improve conditions for public school educators, students, families, and communities. Funding for instructional assistants, school psychologists, counselors, nurses, and social workers is desperately needed. The looming child care crisiswill require fast action to prevent child care centers across the state from closing.

According to Moore, North Carolina has ample funds in reserve to pay the private school tuition vouchers for wealthy families. Perhaps those tax dollars should be redirected toward programs that serve the taxpaying public at large. 

Categories Cruelty, Education Industry, North Carolina, Teacher Pay, Vouchers

Florida: Republicans Scheme to Destroy Teachers’ Unions

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2023 //
20

Republicans don’t like teachers’ unions. They don’t like them for many reasons. The unions get a seat at the table when it’s time to bargain over wages, health care, pensions, and working conditions. They are the collective voice of working people. Republicans don’t want working people to have power.

Unions also are skewed toward Democrats, so killing unions hurts the Democrats.

The Florida legislature passed a law declaring that unions would be decertified if their membership was below 60% of the relevant workforce. The law is aimed at the teachers’ unions. The 60% cutoff is intended to block unions; in a normal democratic election, the winner needs to get 50% plus one, not 60%.

The Miami Herald reported:

Florida’s largest teachers union, United Teachers of Dade, will head down the path toward decertification if it cannot prove that hundreds more teachers began paying dues over the last week — an unprecedented situation that threatens to leave about 30,000 Miami-Dade public school teachers and personnel vulnerable to possible labor contract changes.

On Friday, to meet the requirements of a new state law that requires at least 60% of union members pay dues, Miami-Dade Public Schools was gauging how many eligible employees were union-paying members within UTD. The last tally — conducted on Nov. 10 — put that number at just 58.4%.

It was unclear Friday whether the 60% threshold would be met, and union leaders and district administrators were uncertain exactly what the future would hold if they fell short.

During a news conference Thursday night, Karla Herndandez-Mats was unable to detail what the potential ramifications could be as a result of submitting the audit. “We don’t know what it means, because we don’t know what the numbers will be tomorrow,” she said.

The potential collapse of the state’s largest teachers union could minimize the collective voice of educators in a state that has increasingly been hostile to teachers unions, and undercut them locally when they find themselves in need of collective representation.

Teachers unions have often been at the forefront of criticism toward the governor and Republicans over education policies. If the unions are decertified, it would mark the first wave of change from a law that went into effect July 1 and was criticized by union leaders and Democrats as a “union-busting” effort to silence critics.

Decertification would leave the union unable to bargain for things such as pay and protections in the classroom. Without that ability, Hernandez-Mats said, there would be “detrimental” effects and a “mass exodus of teachers” who are tired of political attacks. (The union successfully bargained for its members to receive pay raises ranging from 7% to 10% this school year.)

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article281987848.html#storylink=cpy

Categories DeSantis, Florida, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Unions

Jan Resseger: Teachers Should Be Paid as Professionals

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2023 //
5

Jan Resseger lives in Ohio. She has spent her career as an advocate for social justice and educational equity. Her blog is a must-read. This column probes the growing gap in pay between teachers and other college graduates. It is ironic and pathetic that self-styled “reformers” like Bill Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are silent on the issue of teacher pay, but expend their resources to promote teacher evaluation, merit pay, innovation, and other dead ends. They know they have to pay for talent in their own organizations. Why not in schools?

She writes:

In our society, teaching is not a high status position. It used to be considered women’s work, probably still is by many people. How wonderful it would be if we had fully transcended the cruelty of the old joke: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach, teach gym.” But we haven’t. I regularly hear legislators in my state explaining that if someone who knew what he was doing were put in charge, teachers would be forced to improve test scores immediately. The implication, of course, is that teaching is simply a matter of the production of test scores, and teachers don’t produce.

The tragedy of this kind of thinking is that the same teachers whom people attack and insult are the human beings to whom we trust the formation of our children. The opinion polls tell us that we handle this contradiction by learning to know, respect, and appreciate our own child’s teacher even as we fail to protest the barrage of attacks on teachers in general.

We forget to consider that teaching is a relentlessly hard job. Teachers work with masses of children and adolescents all day without much of a break. The pressure is relentless. Regents’ Professor of Education, Emeritus, at Arizona State University and the past president of both the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Division of Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association, David Berliner describes just some of the complexity of a teacher’s day:

“A physician usually works with one patient at a time, while a teacher serves 25, 30 or in places like Los Angeles and other large cities, they may be serving 35 or more youngsters simultaneously… (T)eachers have been found to make about .7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching… (A) researcher estimated that teachers’ decisions numbered about 1,500 per day. Decision fatigue is among the many reasons teachers are tired after what some critics call a short work day, forgetting or ignoring the enormous amount of time needed for preparation, for grading papers and homework, and for filling out bureaucratic forms and attending school meetings.”

Teachers know how to build trusting relationships with their students and to help students respect each other while they all engage with their academic work. One of the best writers about teaching , the late Mike Rose published my favorite definition of excellent teaching based on years of observing teachers in their classrooms: “Some of the teachers I visited were new, and some had taught for decades. Some organized their classrooms with desks in rows, and others turned their rooms into hives of activity. Some were real performers, and some were serious and proper. For all the variation, however, the classrooms shared certain qualities… The classrooms were safe. They provided physical safety…. but there was also safety from insult and diminishment…. Intimately related to safety is respect…. Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority…. A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed…. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility…. Overall the students I talked to, from primary-grade children to graduating seniors, had the sense that their teachers had their best interests at heart and their classrooms were good places to be.”

In the introduction to her annual report on the teacher pay penalty, published last week by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Sylvia Allegretto acknowledges the challenges teachers face: “Teachers have one of the most consequential jobs in the country—they have the future of the U.S. in front of them every day. But teaching is becoming a less appealing career choice for new college graduates. Not only are levels of compensation low, but teaching is becoming increasingly stressful as teachers are forced to navigate battles over curriculum and COVID-19 related mandates as well as rising incidence of violence in schools. Low pay makes recruiting and retaining highly qualified teachers difficult.

Here are Allegretto’s conclusions about the trend in teachers’ wages and compensation through 2022:

  • “The pay penalty for teachers—the gap between the weekly wages of teachers and college graduates working in other professions—grew to a record 26.4% in 2022, a significant increase from 6.1% in 1996.
  • “Although teachers tend to receive better benefits packages than other professionals do, this advantage is not large enough to offset the growing wage penalty for teachers.
  • “On average, teachers earned 73.6 cents for every dollar that other professionals made in 2022. This is much less than the 93.9 cents on the dollar they made in 1996.”

Allegretto explains: “Because public school teachers must attain at least a bachelor’s degree to teach in the U.S., this research compares teachers with college graduates working in other professions… Over the past two decades, the weekly wages and total compensation of public school teachers have fallen further and further behind… Recent high inflation has significantly reduced the average weekly wages of teachers but has had less of an effect on other college graduates… The erosion of relative weekly wages for teachers continued apace in 2022.” “Teachers generally receive a higher share of their total compensation as benefits than other professionals do, partially offsetting the weekly wage penalty.” But, “the benefits advantage for teachers has not been enough to offset the growing wage penalty.”

Inflation has been a significant factor recently: “From 2021 to 2022, real wages for teachers fell by a bit more than inflation (8.8% vs 8.1%), meaning that the lion’s share of the decline was due to inflation, not a large drop in nominal wages. Regardless, the buying power of teachers took a big hit…. This dynamic is likely explained (at least in part) because teachers’ wages are often set by long-term union contracts and dependent on government budgets. In contrast, the private sector can often respond more quickly to improving or deteriorating economic conditions by adjusting wages. Other college graduates were able to garner an increase in nominal wages to keep pace with inflation….”

In 31 states, in 2022 the relative teacher wage penalty was greater than 20 percent. The five states with the greatest relative teacher wage penalty in 2022 were Colorado at 37.4 percent, Arizona at 33.2 percent, Virginia at 32.1 percent, Oklahoma at 31.8 percent, and Alabama at 30.9 percent. You can check your state’s relative teacher wage penalty on page 8 of Allegretto’s report.

Allegretto concludes: “One of our nation’s highest ideals is the promise to educate every child without regard to means. In many respects, we have always fallen short on that promise. And there are many issues to be addressed around public education and its funding… But one thing is for sure. A world-class public educational system cannot be accomplished without the best and the brightest heading our classrooms. And it cannot be done on the cheap.”

Categories Education Reform, Teacher Pay, Teacher Shortage, Teachers and Teaching

Steven Singer: Why Teach for America Failed

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2023 //
30

Steven Singer considers the trajectory of Teach for America and concludes that it failed. Enrollment in the program is down. No one believes any more that TFA newcomers are “better” than experienced teachers. What’s the point of hiring a newby instead of someone who wants to make teaching their career?

Steven Singer writes:

Teach for America (TFA) was a solution to a problem it helped create.

Educators have been leaving the profession for decades due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.

So Wendy Kopp, when in Princeton, created a program to fast track non-education majors into the classroom where they would teach for a few years and then enter the private sector as “experts” to drive public policy.

These college graduates would take a five week crash course in education and commit to at least two years in the classroom thereby filling any vacant teaching positions.

Surprise! It didn’t work.

In fact, it made things worse. Apparently deprofessionalizing education isn’t an incentive to dive into the field.

That isn’t to say everyone who went through the program became a bad teacher. But the few good and committed educators that did come through the program could have done so even more successfully by graduating with a degree in education.

Now the organization created in 1990 is expecting its lowest enrollment in 15 years. TFA anticipates placing slightly less than 2,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall. That’s two-thirds of the number of first-year teachers TFA placed in schools in fall 2019, and just one-third of the number it sent into the field at its height in 2013.

Apparently fewer people than ever don’t want to train for four to five years to become lifelong teachers – and neither do they want to be lightly trained for a few years as TFA recruits, either – even if that means they can pass themselves off as education experts afterwards and get high paying policy positions at think tanks and government.

On the one hand, this is good news.

Watering down what it means to be a teacher is even less popular than actually being an educator.

On the other hand, we have a major crisis that few people are prepared to handle.

The US is losing teachers at an alarming rate.

After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers.

Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And that’s on top of already losing 250,000 school employees during the recession of 2008-09 most of whom were never replaced. All while enrollment increased by 800,000 students.

Meanwhile, finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.

Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

It’s no wonder then that few college students want to enter the profession.

Over the past decade, there’s been a major decline in enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs in education.

Beginning in 2011, enrollment in such programs and new education certifications in Pennsylvania — my home state— started to decline. Today, only about a third as many students are enrolled in teacher prep programs in the Commonwealth as there were 10 years ago. And state records show new certifications are down by two-thirds over that period.

To put that more concretely, a decade ago roughly 20,000 new teachers entered the workforce each year in the Commonwealth, while last year only 6,000 did so, according to the state Department of Education (PDE).

But don’t look to most of the so-called experts to solve the problem. A great deal of them are former TFA recruits!

Through programs like TFA’s Capitol Hill Fellows Program, alumni are placed in full-time, paid staff positions with legislators so they can “gain insights into the legislative process by working in a Congressional office” and work “on projects that impact education and opportunities for youth.”



Why do so many lawmakers hire them? Because they don’t cost anything.

Their salaries are paid in full by TFA through a fund established by Arthur Rock, a California tech billionaire who hands the organization bags of cash to pay these educational aides’ salaries. From 2006 to 2008, alone, Rock – who also sits on TFA’s board – contributed $16.5 million for this purpose.



This isn’t about helping lawmakers understand the issues. It’s about framing the issues to meet the policy initiatives of the elite and wealthy donors.



It’s about selling school privatization, high stakes testing and ed-tech solutions.

Please open the link and keep reading.

Categories Education Industry, Teach for America, Teacher Pay, Teacher Shortage, Teachers and Teaching

National Education Policy Center: School Choice for Teachers

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2023 //
45

The National Education Policy Center recently posted a study of how teachers choose their workplace. The study was conducted in San Antonio, where about one quarter of students attend charter schools. Why do some teachers choose to teach in public schools while others prefer charter schools?

School choice involves different choosers—students, their parents, and of course the schools themselves. But teachers choose too when they decide where to work. Increasingly, this process involves deciding whether to work or not to work in the charter sector.

A recently published study by Andrene J. Castro of Virginia Commonwealth University, NEPC Fellow Huriya Jabbar of the University of Southern California, and Sebastián Núñez Miranda of the University of Texas at Austin takes a closer look at this process via interviews with 23 prospective or new-to-the-profession teachers and 22 current educators about their job searches in San Antonio, Texas, where about a quarter of the students attend charters. The semi-structured interviews were conducted pre-pandemic, during the 2016-17 school year. The study was published last summer in Education Policy Analysis Archives, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal.

The goal of the research was to examine “how choice policy contexts alter teachers’ professional identities as they search for jobs,” a topic that had received only limited attention from researchers. The researchers describe how:

[T]he job search is not separate or isolated from teachers’ professional identity, rather it is a critical juncture where teachers evaluate their professional identity as they make choices about the sector—charter or TPSs [traditional public schools]—and/or school organizations that best align with their professional beliefs and values.

Teachers, the researchers write, “largely construct professional identities to match positions in the primary sector, that is, jobs in TPSs, which typically offer greater stability, higher salaries, and predictable career paths.” These qualities of TPSs appealed to most of the interviewees.

As one interviewee noted,

Even though they [charter schools] tell you that you’re going to get paid more, in all reality once you sign the contract, the pay is not what you’re told at the beginning of signing the contract. It’s a little more frustrating because I feel like you have to fight more . . . I think it’s more of a challenge now than working at the regular big public schools.

Some interviewees also indicated that charter schools were not in line with their professional identities or values. “I’m not really interested in charter schools,” one job seeker said. “I feel like the public schools, there’s a lot of areas that we need to improve. That’s where I feel like I can do the most good.”

For these and other reasons, the interviewees in this study typically turned to charters as a last resort, explaining that charters tended to pay less, offer temporary contracts, and lack transparency. But some interviewees embraced a charter school career, responding to a different professional identity.

Teach for America participants emerged as a group favoring charters over TPSs. They perceived that the values of TFA aligned with the missions of specific charter management organizations. Also, a few younger teachers who were interviewed felt more comfortable at charters because they tended to have younger staffs, with many teachers who were new to the profession.

Teachers also applied to charters because they believed that those charters provided higher levels of autonomy, better opportunities to learn a lot in a short period of time, and the chance to receive pay raises and promotions more rapidly than might be possible in the traditional public school system. One interviewee noted:

You can be stuck in the same teaching position for seven years [at a TPS] as opposed to [charter school] where if you’re really just doing a rock-solid job at what you’re doing now you can be within mid-management principal-ship within five, 10 years.

One additional finding from the study has clear policy implications for those hoping for cross-fertilization and sharing of ideas and experiences between the sectors: Prospective teachers were more open to switching sectors than were current teachers seeking to change jobs.

“To some extent, we found these segmented identities led to sector entrapment, constraining teachers’ notions, both individually and collectively, regarding what it means to be a teacher in either sector, rather than the profession at large,” the researchers conclude.

NEPC Resources on Charter Schools ->

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, School Choice, Teach for America, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Texas

Jim Hightower: Chicken Little Attacks America’s Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2023 //
18

Jim Hightower is a Texas populist who has observed the state’s hard rightward swing with dismay. In this post, he flays the profiteers who are attacking teachers and public schools. You should consider subscribing to his blog.

He writes here in honor of teachers:

I’m a child of privilege. Not the privilege of money (I come from a family of small-town working people). But it was my privilege to grow up in the public schools of Denison, Texas.

There I received the rich blessings of dedicated classroom teachers, a diverse student body, playground socialization, librarians, coaches, cafeteria and custodial workers, student politics, vocational training… and a deep appreciation for the unifying value of community and the Common Good.

That’s why I’m flabbergasted by today’s clique of corporate profiteers, theocratic zealots, and laissez-faire knuckleheads who’re lobbying furiously across the country to demonize, defund, and dismantle this invaluable social benefit. If ignorance is bliss, they must be ecstatic!

Public schools do have some real problems: Politicians constantly slashing education budgets, professional burnout created by understaffing and low pay, the devastating strain of a killer pandemic, and a new-normal of assault-rifle murders. But the profiteers, theocrats, and knuckleheads aren’t interested in those, instead focusing on what they say is the fatal flaw in public education: Teachers.

Yes, the claim is that diabolical educators are perverting innocent minds by teaching America’s actual history, showing students that the full diversity of humankind enriches our society, and presenting our Earth as something to be protected, not plundered. And worse – OMIGOSH – many classroom teachers are union members! So, teachers suddenly find themselves political pawns in the GOP’s culture war. “Our schools are a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination,” squawked Sen. Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump squealed that schools are run by “radical left maniacs” and “pink-haired communists.”

These right-wing Chicken Littles are demonizing America’s invaluable educators because they need someone for people to hate, providing cover for their unpopular plot to privatize education. But hate can easily backfire on hatemongers – and local teachers are a whole lot more popular than conniving politicos and profiteers.

Categories Censorship, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Supporting public schools, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Teachers and Teaching, Texas
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