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Do Teachers’ Unions Have Any Friends in the Obama Administration?

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2014 //
92

We are living in an era when the very idea of public education is under attack, as are teachers’ unions and the teaching profession. Let’s be clear: these attacks and the power amassed behind them are unprecedented in American history. Sure, there have always been critics of public schools, of teachers, and of unions. But never before has there been a serious and sustained effort to defund public education, to turn public money over to unaccountable private hands, and to weaken and eliminate collective bargaining wherever it still exists. And this effort is not only well-coordinated but funded by billionaires who have grown wealthy in a free market and can’t see any need for regulation or unions or public schools.

In the past, Democratic administrations and Democratic members of Congress could be counted on to support public education and to fight privatization. In the past, Democrats supported unions, which they saw as a dependable and significant part of their base.

This is no longer the case. Congress is about to pass legislation to expand funding of charter schools, despite the fact that they get no better results than public schools and despite the scandalous misuse of public funds by charter operators in many states.

The Obama administration strongly supports privatization via charters; one condition of Race to the Top was that states had to increase the number of charters. The administration is no friend of teachers or of teacher unions. Secretary Duncan applauded the lamentable Vergara decision, as he has applauded privatization and evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. There are never too many tests for this administration. Although the President recently talked about the importance of unions, he has done nothing to support them when they are under attack. Former members of his administration are leading the war against teachers and their unions. Think Rahm Emanuel, who apparently wants to be known as the mayor who privatized Chicago and broke the teachers’ union. Or think Robert Gibbs, the former White House press secretary who is now leading the public relations campaign against teachers’ due process rights.

The National Education Association is meeting now in Denver at its annual conference. The American Federation of Teachers holds its annual convention in Los Angeles in another week or so. Both must take seriously the threat to the survival of public education: not only privatization but austerity and over-testing. These are not different threats. They are connected. Austerity and over-testing set public schools up to fail. They are precursors to privatization. They are intended to make public schools weak and to destroy public confidence in democratically controlled schools. What is needed at this hour is a strong, militant response to these attacks on teachers, public schools, and–where they exist–unions.

For sure, unions have their faults. But they are the only collective voice that teachers have. Now is the time to use that voice. The battle for the future of public education is not over. Supporters of public education must rally and stand together and elect a President in 2016 who supports public schools. This is a time to get informed, to organize, to strategize, and to mobilize. If you are not angry, you have not been paying attention.

Categories Obama, Privatization, Support for public schools, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

What Jesse Hagopian Told Bill Gates

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2014 //
13

Jesse Hagopian of Garfield High School in Seattle wrote this speech for the protest at the gates of the Gates Foundation a few days ago:

“Comments from Jesse Hagopian For the Gates Foundation Protest:”

Teaching in the shadow of the Gates Foundation is an ominous and treacherous endeavor. Everywhere you turn there is another so-called “expert”, funded by the Gates foundation–with very little, if any classroom experience—who believes that their dollars have given them sense.

Gates believes in the right of the rich to control the schools and even the very idea of what knowledge is. We believe that education and knowledge should be democratic pursuits and that only through collaboration—not market competition—can we fully become complete human beings.

Gates believes the intellectual and social-emotional processes can and should be reduced to a test score. We believe standardized testing can’t begin to quantify the things that matter most in education: imagination, collaboration, civic courage, empathy, and creativity.

The problem for us is that Gates has a few more dollars than we have.

The problem for Gates is that we have a few more friends, co-workers, and students than he has.

The power of solidarity to defeat the powerful was on full display when teachers at Garfield High School—and then teachers around Seattle—refused to administer the Measures of Academic Progress ( or MAP) test. That struggle defeated the MAP test for high schools in Seattle and helped to ignite a movement around the nation, not only against high-stakes testing, but also to redefine the purpose of education beyond the confines of “career and college ready” to talk about education in pursuit of social justice.

I am sorry I cannot be with you in person today as I am in Omaha sharing the lessons of this growing movement and meeting new people who want to join it. I am excited to say that we are currently in the midst of the biggest uprising against high-stakes testing in U.S. history.

And when the last bubble test is thrown into the dumpster; when our libraries and computer labs are liberated from Pearson tests and can again be used again for research, inquiry, and incubators of imagination; When our schools cease to rank and sort our children and instead become centers of empowerment; you all here today will be remembered as having stared down the self appointed Testocracy Tsar, Bill Gates, and having said to him loud and clear: “our schools are not for sale!”
Jesse co

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Resistance, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

EduShyster: Barbara Madeloni, New President of MTA, Says It is Time to Fight Back

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2014 //
24

EduShyster interviews Barbara Madeloni, the recently elected president of the 110,000 member Massachusetts Teachers Association, and she warns that we either fight for public education or we will lose it.

A former high school teacher, Madeloni was teaching teachers at the University of Massachusetts-Amerst, and she and her students refused to participate in edTPA. As she puts it, “The students with whom I was working didn’t want to submit videos of themselves teaching to Pearson. They didn’t want their work as student teachers to be reduced to a number on a rubric by people who didn’t know them, and 67 of 68 students ultimately refused to send their work.” Madeloni told the story to Michael Winerip of the New York Times; ten days after his story appeared, she was fired. (Winerip, a superb education writer, was later reassigned to cover “Boomers,” and the Times eliminated its weekly education column. Winerip rattled cages every Monday.)

Edushyster asks Madeloni what we can do to fight back against the reformers attacking teachers and public education.

Madeloni responds:

“I think fighting is winning. In a union where members are truly engaged and active, we’re talking to one another about what’s happening, informing each other and making decisions about how we can fight back. The degree to which we’ve been told that our members are unwilling to be active is astonishing to me. If you alienate the membership by continually telling them that things are bad but they could be worse, so we’re going to get behind the bad thing, of course people aren’t going to be active. If we say to members—*We can be powerful. We can use our power. It’s going to be scary. It’s going to be hard. But history shows that we can do this,*—the reaction is completely different because you’re talking about things that really matter to them. And by the way, our members understand that the attacks on them and on public education are coming from both political parties.”

There’s lots more to enjoy. This is a scintillating interview. Keep your eye on Barbara Madeloni. Just think: Massachusetts is the most successful state in the nation by conventional measures like test scores, but even there, teachers, their unions, and public schools are under attack by the usual crowd.

Categories Massachusetts, Resistance, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

Reading Professor Responds to NCTQ Blast at Her Post

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2014 //
30

Katherine Crawford-Garrett, a literacy professor at the University of New Mexico,wrote on this blog about how the rating system used by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) affected her own ability to assign readings; her dean warned her that her syllabus might offend them. After her post appeared, it was criticized by Arthur McKee, who directed the NCTQ review of teacher preparation institutions. He ridiculed Crawford-Garrett for ignoring “the science of reading.”

This is Crawford-Garrett’s response to McKee.

Dear Dr. McKee,

I just read your response to the blog entry I posted on Diane Ravitch’s website earlier this week. I interpret your response to mean that you are, perhaps, paying attention to the onslaught of critique your organization is receiving.

I decided to reply in the interest of exposing yet another layer of inaccuracies put forth by NCTQ about the teaching of reading.

I wonder, Dr. McKee, what you are actually referring to when you mention “the science of reading”? I suspect it has something to do with the National Reading Panel (NRP) report, which was released over a decade ago, relied on an extremely limited number of studies to substantiate its claims, has been critiqued widely and led directly to the Reading First debacle during the George W. Bush administration. I have spent countless hours in kindergarten classrooms in urban Philadelphia that rely on the “scientific approach” to reading instruction recommended by the NRP. In most of these classrooms there were no children’s books but plenty of phonics workbooks featuring decodable texts. Are these children learning to decode? Maybe. They were certainly learning to sit still and be quiet and also learning that reading had no relevance to their lives. This is injustice, Mr. McKee. I have never seen a kindergarten class in a wealthy area employ this “scientific approach” to reading instruction. Not once.

I also wonder, Dr. McKee, whether you make it a point to read any of the top journals in the field of reading research including Reading Research Quarterly or the Journal of Literacy Research? Or whether you have read the policy statement issued by the Literacy Research Association that deems NCTQ’s textbook list “damaging to teachers and children”? There is a wealth of peer-reviewed research in my field, Dr. McKee. As an expert in that field, I am quite familiar with it. I suggest if you are going to continue to make pronouncements about the “best ways to teach reading” that you familiarize yourself with it as well.

Before becoming a literacy professor, I taught at an innovative, arts-focused charter school in Washington, DC. We consistently had some of the highest literacy scores in the city, and we did it all without relying on corporate, scripted programs to teach our students to read. Instead, we read real books and wrote real documents that were often sent to public officials or used in other authentic capacities. This is high-stakes accountability in the field of literacy- when reading and writing matters in the world.

Now, I know one of your primary concerns, Dr. McKee is whether I teach phonics in my reading methods class. I assure you that I do (it’s even featured quite prominently on my syllabus). Code-breaking is a fundamental aspect of learning to read. However, these skills mean very little outside a framework of meaning-making. If students don’t have a purpose for decoding a text, then why on earth would they do it?

Contrary to the claim you make on your blog, I do teach vocabulary and fluency in my classes- they just happen not to be listed as headings on my syllabus partly because it feels artificial to separate them out from other parts of the reading process.

This is the fundamental flaw in your organization, Dr. McKee. You make assumptions based on a piece of paper. You have not seen my classroom and you do not know about the opportunities and challenges we face in New Mexico or how literacy operates in a culturally and linguistically diverse community. The primary assignment in my reading class – the class NCTQ deemed “unacceptable” – requires students to study a child’s literacy practices through extensive observation, multifaceted assessments and consultation with their cooperating teachers. They then design an instructional plan to improve that child’s reading abilities. Students have reported to me time and again how helpful and generative this assignment is. But perhaps I should replace it with “quizzes” to increase the “rigor” of my class as your organization suggests.

I may not win this battle, Dr. McKee, but I’m not going to stop fighting it. I will continue to do everything I can to protest my institution’s involvement with your organization. In the meantime, please feel free to visit my classroom. I have a feeling you might learn something.

Sincerely,

Katherine Crawford-Garrett

Categories National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Teachers and Teaching

CCSS Writer Blasts CC Basic Reading Standards

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2014 //
118

Dr. Louisa Moats was part of the team that wrote the foundational reading standards for the Common Core. In “Psychology Today,” she strongly criticized the standards.

Among other things, she said:

“I never imagined when we were drafting standards in 2010 that major financial support would be funneled immediately into the development of standards-related tests. How naïve I was. The CCSS represent lofty aspirational goals for students aiming for four year, highly selective colleges. Realistically, at least half, if not the majority, of students are not going to meet those standards as written, although the students deserve to be well prepared for career and work through meaningful and rigorous education.

“Our lofty standards are appropriate for the most academically able, but what are we going to do for the huge numbers of kids that are going to “fail” the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test? We need to create a wide range of educational choices and pathways to high school graduation, employment, and citizenship. The Europeans got this right a long time ago.

“If I could take all the money going to the testing companies and reinvest it, I’d focus on the teaching profession – recruitment, pay, work conditions, rigorous and on-going training. Many of our teachers are not qualified or prepared to teach the standards we have written. It doesn’t make sense to ask kids to achieve standards that their teachers have not achieved! “

Categories Common Core, Teachers and Teaching

Peter Greene: What Is “Whole Brain Teaching?”

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2014 //
53

Yesterday I posted a clip of students at Nashville Prep chanting the answers to questions. I should have mentioned that chanting the answers to questions was a common practice in mid-nineteenth century schools. Students would chant their geography lessons, for example, singing out the names of continents or mountains or oceans. They did not necessarily knew where to find them on a map, but they knew the words to the chant.

Peter Greene reports that this chanting is today called “whole brain teaching,” and is associated with someone named Chris Biffle.

Greene says that WBT has a website, and its goal is to put “organized fun” into the classroom.

But he takes a dim view of this chanting:

“Some of the groupiness aspects are recognizable to anyone who was ever in band, choir, or the armed forces. And I have to tell you– given the youtube and on-line testimonials, and WBT’s persistence over fifteen years, there are people out there who love this. I can see the appeal if you are in a school mired in endless chaos, or if you’ve always struggled with classroom management, or if you’re Dolores Umbridge.

“All that aside, it is creepy as hell. Set your individuality aside, become part of the group, do as you’re told, sit up, lie down, roll over , speak (but only as directed). Just imagine what this would look like with someone more stern, more authoritarian, more Hitlerish, in front of the classroom. If you can handle it, you can find sample lessons all the way down to Kindergartners.

“But in a funny twist, per Ravitch’s post this morning, it turns out that Biffle was a man ahead of his time, because what Nashville Prep and others have discovered is that WBT is great for test prep. It turns out that subsuming your individuality, spitting out dictated exact answers on demand, and generally being a good little all-fit-one-size widget is excellent training for taking standardized tests.

“So if you find this little mini-re-enactment of the Cultural Revolution unappealing, the bad news is that this is exactly what high stakes standardized testing call for.”

Categories Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Alan Singer Responds to Supporters of edTPA

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2014 //
3

Alan Singer of Hostra University in New York wrote a critique of edTPA, a new assessment of student teachers, which was posted here. He called it “The Big Lie Behind High Stakes Testing of Student Teachers.”

A group of faculty at the City University of New York wrote to explain why they support edTPA, and it was posted here.

In a new article, Alan Singer writes that “edTPA is currently being implemented in a number of states through a partnership of SCALE (the Stanford University Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity), the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), and the publishing and testing mega-giant Pearson Education. About the same time, SCALE released “edTPA MYTHS and FACTS,” which responded to critics of edTPA and purports to set the “record straight.”

In his comments here, Singer points out that the supporters of edTPA are a small fraction of the CUNY faculty, and he challenges their defense of edTPA.

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

Shaun Johnson: What’s Behind the Attack on Tenure?

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2014 //
54

Shaun Johnson, an elementary school teacher, explains the attack on tenure and details what reformers would do of they really cared about teachers or children or the quality of education.

He writes:

“Obsessions with teacher tenure, or tenure in any academic profession, is all about union busting, and flipping the teaching profession into an unprofessional, short-term, part-time, scab workforce. It’s also about taking control of a largely “feminized” profession, one that few in the education policy community actually understand. That frightens them.

“Eliminating teacher tenure is education reform on the cheap. It’s a low-cost, no frills, low-brow maneuver. It rearranges the deck chairs without doing anything to the ship. Eliminating tenure shuffles control over who gets to teach, and nothing else. No prior or future investment necessary.”

He lists what teachers and children really need. Read it. It is focused and clear.

“Until then, don’t get cheap on me/us.

“Don’t be cheap with students.

“Until these glaring deficiencies are mitigated, not one single teacher is going to take VAM, testing, merit pay, or any other such nonsense seriously. There will be no buy-in, and all you’ll meet is either outright resistance or malaise. Every time you enter a school or classroom, or invite teachers for professional developments, all you’ll meet dear reformer are folks who check their email when you’re talking, who roll their eyes with every sentence you speak. You’ll meet those who smile and accept your free totes, and then talk viciously behind your back.”

Categories Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

EduShyster on “Knowledge Ventriloquism”

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2014 //
5

EduShyster here interviews Ken Zeichner of the University of Washington about teacher education.

They talk about the NCTQ report, whose findings were predetermined by its political agenda (I.e., university-based teacher preparation bad, alternative preparation good).

Zeichner says that no other country–certainly no high-performing country–has gone full-throttle for alternative teacher preparation.

He describes a phenomenon that he calls “knowledge ventriloquism:”

“Basically what you have is an echo chamber effect where think tanks and other advocacy groups just keep repeating each other’s claims until they become true. There’s a research component too, except that the research isn’t independent. In fact, you can usually predict what the findings are going to be be based on who is doing the research. Cherry picking is another essential component of *knowledge ventriloquism.* Advocates a particular position or program will selectively choose certain findings and ignore others. The problem is that by the time any of this reaches the mainstream media and the headlines, any nuance or complexity is lost.”

In another era, this was known as the Big Lie, repeated again and again in authoritative circles until the public assumed it must be true despite the lack of evidence.

Zeichner and colleagues recently published a study of the movement to privatize teacher education. The NCTQ ratings are a part of that movement.

Categories Privatization, Teachers and Teaching

David Sudmeier: USA Today Permits Hate Speech

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2014 //
63

David Sudmeier accurately portrays the vile advertisement in USA Today as hate speech directed against teachers. He posted this commentary on the blog.

The Crucible

Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible survives to this day as a metaphor for accusations without merit that damage reputations and lives. The advertisement that appeared in USA Today after the Vergara decision contained such an accusation, which might as well have been of witchcraft and evil spells cast upon students by malevolent kindergarten teachers. The same organization that created that ad had another rejected by the Chicago Tribune, because it conflated teacher unionism with racist segregationist attitudes a la George Wallace. Teachers can likely expect a continued barrage of similar ads in the media, funded by privatization interests.

Maintaining a sense of dignity depends on the deference and support shown to you by society in light of your contributions. When major media publications accept ads portraying student feet protruding from a garbage can, and accuse teachers of placing students in that demeaning position, they accept hate speech as a legitimate source of income. Teacher sensitivity to outright lies is less a product of being targeted for criticism—that’s part of life in the public sector— than it is due to the duplicity of the bad actors that create those lies. They demonize teachers on the one hand and extend the other for profits to be earned by displacing unionized teachers with ill-trained, easily controlled dupes working in charter schools, among their many crimes. The “Center for Union Lies” does not criticize teachers; it intentionally distorts and mischaracterizes their achievements to enable corporate gain.

When you deprive teachers of dignity and meaning in their work, you strike a blow against public education. Of course, that is exactly the point for some. For others, it is “collateral damage” that must be accepted to improve instruction and raise test scores. If test scores rise, then education must be improved. If living and breathing teachers who will demand immediate compensation can be replaced with technology that raises test scores on tests written by testing companies whose shareholders seek short-term profits…well, all the better.

What is lost if public education is lost? Just as terrorism is a front in the war for the soul of Islam, attacks on public education—one of the sources of our common good— constitute one front in the war for the soul of democracy. Democracy can withstand challenges from without which are obvious and overt; whether democracy can withstand challenges from within is unknown. Dismantling public institutions encourages individualism and loss of community. That loss of community opens a democracy to manipulation and exploitation by powerful corporations.

Still, we teachers as a group fail to see the forest for the trees. We imagine that what we experience in the form of attacks by individuals and organizations on teachers and education is somehow unique and unrelated to other events. We feel our institution being assailed, and we forget that there are others in the public service enduring similar mistreatment.

How have we ended up in this situation? Corporatists have built a myth of excellence and efficiency in the private sector, and a specter of malfeasance and incompetence in public institutions. Their tactics include attacks on public institutions, accompanied by demands for firings and accountability measures. They then demand new “standards” for performance that are clearly impossible to reach, and place blame on those same institutions when they fail to attain them and attempt to cover it up. Finally, they seek to withdraw financial support from those institutions, citing the failures they themselves engineered. This has happened in education with NCLB and RttT, and will occur with CCSS, if it is not more widely abandoned. It has happened as well with the Veterans Administration. The VA (underfunded and overwhelmed by demands resulting from the Iraq/Afghanistan debacle) was accused of not providing timely care for those who deserved better. The solution? A standard was set that could not be met, a 14-day window for care, and accountability measures for not achieving success. When that couldn’t be accomplished, managers found ways of lying to make it appear that things were fine. Uncovered, the VA was again blamed for incompetence. Calls were made to privatize an institution that attempts to fulfill a public obligation to those who have stood in the line of fire for us all.

We teachers can easily comprehend what VA employees face. Our experiences are not unique; they are part and parcel of a wider attack on democracy. The sooner we accept that and coordinate our actions with other institutions that are also suffering, the sooner we will begin to turn the corner. We become powerful when we recognize our community, and weak when we abandon it. Badass Teachers know what it means to acquire community; we need to remind our colleagues of the role their unions need to play in preserving, protecting, and extending that community of public service employees. NEA and AFT have accomplished much in the past, but are only lately stepping up to the plate on this issue. They can do much more, and will need grass roots support to do so.

We are not just educators. We are warriors for democracy, and we fight a dangerous opponent. We fight for free, fair, and appropriate public education, just as our brothers and sisters fight battles for better public health care, better public transportation, and improved public security. Part of our fight is to act with dignity and demand dignified treatment from society. We need to build a new myth of the public employee, one that recognizes our commitment to service and champions our achievements in creating community.

Arthur Miller is calling to us now.

Categories Teachers and Teaching
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