August 10, 2014 · 10:28 pm

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a News Show Tenure Lawsuit Discussion…

…intelligent and informed debate!

Melissa Harris-Perry, professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University, has a Sunday morning show on MSNBC, and on August 10th, she had a panel on to discuss the recent attempts to bring California’s Vergara v. California lawsuit against teacher tenure protections to New York State.  Her panelists were Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, Dana Goldstein, author and reporter for The Marshall Project and Derrell Bradford of the NY Campaign for Achievement Now and formerly of Governor Christie’s Educator Effectiveness Task Force.

From the opening minute of the first segment, it is obvious that Ms. Harris-Perry was not going to let Mr. Bradford get away with Campbell Brown like talking points unchallenged, and the rest of the panel was certainly not inclined to back off either.  Ms. Harris-Perry quotes directly from the language of the challenged New York statutes in response to the standard claim that teachers with tenure have permanent lifetime employment.  Mr. Bradford tried to sneak in another favored talking point of the anti-tenure campaign by claiming a time frame of nearly 3 years to remove a teacher under the law, but Ms. Weingarten immediately pushed back with the changes that have already been made to the law and the current, more accurate figure nearly 1/6th the time of Mr. Bradford’s assertion.

For once, a media discussion on these lawsuits was not a monologue, and the moderator of the discussion, while not claiming the “neutral” ground so cherished by many figures, did something, in my opinion, more important.  She did not set up conditions of “false equivalency” where someone like Mr. Bradford, whose own history in education reform and willingness to try to frame his advocacy of privatization of schools in civil rights terminology is neither upfront nor honest, is treated as having equivalent facts on his side even if he is prevaricating on most of them.  While this is not “balanced” it is absolutely fair, and it is the result of the host having actually studied the issues before moderating her panel and clearly noting that Mr. Bradford’s side of the debate is routinely distorting the truth.  Would that we could have that more frequently.

The entire segment runs close to 30 minutes, but is worth it:

Melissa Harris-Perry August 10th, 2014 Part 1

Melissa Harris-Perry August 10th, 2014 Part 2

Melissa Harris-Perry August 10th, 2014 Part 3

Melissa Harris-Perry August 10th, 2014 Part 4
One notable exchange happens at 5 minutes, 44 seconds in the second segment, where Randi Weingarten says:

RW: How do we attract and retain well-prepared great teachers for our most needy kids? Because what’s happening is just a few miles down the road in Westchester we’re not talking about this issue but in Rochester we are and we are in the places where there’s intense, real social-economic issues.  So why are we not having that conversation? That is the conversation we need to have. (Turns to Derrell Bradford) And what I would argue is that you need to give people better working conditions. We need to make sure that they don’t feel that they are going to be fired if they try something new or if they stand up for their special needs kids.  That’s what we’d like to do.

Pay special attention to Mr. Bradford’s body and facial language during this.  Twice, near the end, he purses his lips and looks down very briefly.  I am possibly reading too much in this, but to my eyes he is distinctly uncomfortable at not being able to simply say what he wants without challenge.  Understandable, as Ms. Weingarten just cornered him repeating a talking point based on out of date data.

It happens again in segment 4, when Mr. Bradford lengthily admits that there is no “one thing” that is driving the achievement gaps and states that inequality is “hardwired” into the system.  He does not explain how eliminating tenure assists that in any way, and he even makes an ironic statement to my ears that we attract the least experienced teachers to the most needy kids — when his stance on tenure would do absolutely nothing to improve that situation and could actually make it worse.  Ms. Goldstein then notes that we have reduced the achievement gap in the past when we “aggressively” integrated schools, and Ms. Weingarten again pushes on the need for resources and support instead of attack.  I’d invite any reader to look at the body language of Mr. Bradford here as well.  When Ms. Weingarten talks about the outcomes of the NYC Chancellor’s District and the proven value of attracting and retaining great teachers and giving them and their students resources.  Mr. Bradford looked, to me, like he was trying to figure out a way to sidestep that or dismiss it when time ran out.

When the echo chamber is filled with more voices and when the host has studied the issue, the corporate reform advocates have a much harder time of it.

I want more.

 

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August 7, 2014 · 6:33 am

Going After Tenure — Missing the Real Needs of Students

There is a character in the 1984 movie “Teachers” starring Nick Nolte and JoBeth Williams, who is unaffectionately named “Ditto,” played by Royal Dano.  Ditto is old, orderly, mind-numbingly boring and tenured.  His “teaching” consists of running off enough mimeographs each day for all of his students, sitting in the back of his classroom where he can see all of his students in rows, having his ditto sheets distributed, reading his newspaper and having students turn in the dittos when the bell rings.  So rigid is his routine that the students can do the entire process without him, a premise tested when he suffers a fatal coronary in class and none of his students notice.

The movie’s satirical take on jaded teachers strikes a humorous note by playing off of a lot of stereotypes and some common experiences.  Many people, sadly, have experienced classrooms with teachers either out of their depth or beyond their professionally useful life.  In a system of 60 million students and over 3 million practitioners, quality cannot possibly be uniformly excellent.  The situation in the movie also speaks to a number of popular if misinformed stereotypes, the most persistent of which is that once granted tenure, a teacher has no need to remain vigorous or skilled or even all that present in the classroom.

This movie must keep Michelle Rhee, Campbell Brown and Whoopi Goldberg up at night.

The argument against teacher tenure goes approximately like this:  1) children need a quality education in order to have opportunity to succeed 2) a quality education requires quality teachers 3) teachers of low quality are concentrated in schools that serve poor and minority students 4) poor and minority students do not do well on examinations because of those low quality teachers 5) doing poorly on standardized examinations is the main blocker of opportunity for poor and minority students  6) some low quality teachers have tenure 7) firing low quality teachers with tenure takes too much work 8) we need to do away with tenure so we can fire low quality teachers and replace them 9) replacing low quality teachers will raise test scores and improve opportunity 10)  if you don’t want to do that you care more about low quality teachers than you care about children.

The problem, however, is that a lot of that is hooey.

Assume, for example, that tenure is a problem, as reformers do, because it keeps low quality teachers in teaching for too long. This, however, is as much a function of administrators not doing their evaluative job as it is the due process guaranteed by tenure.  Further, if it was tenure that was the actual problem, we would expect to see negative impacts on the performance of those districts that have the largest portion of their faculty with tenure – suburban districts with the most experienced faculties compared with urban districts that have extremely high turn over rates.  This, however, is not the case.  When the PISA examination scores that give our political class such concerns are broken out by the poverty characteristics of communities, we see startling effects:

U.S. Reading Literacy Scores By Poverty Characteristics

David Berliner writes:

On each of these three international tests, U.S. public school students did terrific in the schools where poverty rates of families were under 10%, or even when poverty rates were between 10% and 25%. But we did not do well in schools where poverty rates were above 50%, and we did even worse on those tests in schools where poverty rates for families were in the 75-100% bracket.

So students who do the worst on international examinations are those who live in high poverty districts which, because of income segregation, tend to be urban and rural.  Despite the movie “Teachers”, those students do not attend schools that are full of dusty, burnt out teachers who are waiting to die at their desks.  Quite the contrary.  They are far more likely to attend schools with extremely high concentrations of novices.

Helen F. Ladd, professor of economics and public policy at Duke University, notes that today, over a quarter of the teacher workforce has less than five years of experience teaching.  This is a problem because experience actually matters in teacher effectiveness, and research supports the need for teachers who have made it through the steep learning curve of their early years in the classroom.  Teachers improve in effectiveness measures dramatically in this period, and while their gains level off, a workforce that is perpetually inexperienced is a workforce that is not optimally effective.  According to research from the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, districts that are urban, high poverty, high minority and rural are far more likely to have high numbers of first year teachers than suburban counterparts. Ten percent of the districts in their sample had a “critical value” of more than 17% novices teaching classes, which was double the overall sample average and is correlated with other effects such as teachers leaving the profession altogether.

It is crucial to pause for a moment and consider the contradiction here.  Our lowest performing schools are not plagued with teachers who are sit behind the mythic protections of tenure and do not do their jobs so much as they are burdened with a continually changing faculty who begin a steep learning period but who cannot be guaranteed to stay past five years.  Further, such schools are burdened with the attendant costs that come with high turnover rates such as recruitment and training, giving fewer resources for other forms of support.  So the attack on tenure has it backwards because the real problem for staff at our most struggling schools centers on too little retention of teachers.

Nicole S. Simon and Susan Moore Johnson of Harvard’s Project on the Next Generation of Teachers note many of the new teachers who leave working in urban and high poverty districts do so because of working conditions in such schools rather than any student demographic.  In fact, negative school climate and organizational factors are such powerful predictors of why teachers leave schools, that no student based factors remain statistically significant.  “Positive, trusting, working relationships” and “a strong sense of collective responsibility” prove to be strong predictors of schools that manage to retain teachers over schools with nearly identical student demographics.  Considering all of this, if reform advocates TRULY wanted to assist children who suffer because of bad teachers, they ought to advocate for the following:

1) Ways to support administrators doing their evaluative role seriously. As has been pointed out from numerous sources, tenure grants teachers due process in any effort to remove them from the classroom.  Administrators need to do this function, and they need to do it carefully and well, but that role is frequently an add on to an already extremely time consuming job.  Principals can be supported in this function by robust peer observation and mentoring systems, but this would require that teachers also have additional time needed to mentor and evaluate each other.

2) Improve teachers’ working conditions. High poverty schools are notoriously difficult places to work, but not for the stereotypical reasons people presume.  Teachers who seek out such careers are often highly motivated by a desire to do good, but face overcrowded classrooms, decaying facilities and inadequate resources.  Further, lack of planning and collaboration time isolates teachers and makes it more difficult to access the expertise and insights of their peers.  The saying that a teacher’s working conditions are a student’s learning conditions needs to be seriously considered.

3) Remove the Sword of Damocles. We know that high poverty correlates to low test scores, and we know that the reasons are far more complicated than reformers’ preferred explanation of blaming teachers for everything.  But the past 15 years of education reform have constantly increased the pressure on schools and teachers to raise test scores without our nation taking the least collective responsibility for alleviating our appalling child poverty rate.  We should still test, but for diagnostic and triage purposes rather than to increasingly motivate skilled teachers to flee districts where they are professionally threatened without adequate support.

4) Discuss poverty and its effects of children.  Education reformers have been consistently silent on this front except to accuse people who want to talk about it of “making excuses” for bad teachers.  That is dishonest of them.  Over 20% of our children come to school from homes that are in poverty with the negative impact on resources and development that comes from that.  Many of our urban schools have student populations that top 75% in poverty.  As David Berliner notes, we are obsessed with “one-way accountability” for schools and teachers to change this without requiring anything more of ourselves as a society.

5) Recognize that tenure protects teachers who rock the boat on behalf of their students.  The due process rights with tenure may make removing a bad teacher more complicated than simply saying “you’re fired”, but it comes with important freedoms that teachers need.  Many teachers have pointed out that tenure protects teachers from being threatened with capricious or political removal when they advocate for their students’ needs or call out bad behavior that harms students.  John Goodlad called this “good stewardship” and it is a vital characteristic that we want to encourage among teachers.

Those attacking tenure seek to take that away from all teachers.  That’s why I oppose them.

 

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August 5, 2014 · 1:32 pm

Whoopi Goldberg Gets Taken to School on Tenure

This came across my Twitter feed this morning.

Keith Reeves is a teacher, and he decided to help Whoopi Goldberg better understand tenure.  Ms. Goldberg needed the lesson because in the wake of Campbell Brown’s publicity tour for her lawsuit against New York State’s tenure laws, The View did a brief segment on the suit, and, charitably, the segment could have been written by Michelle Rhee’s publicity agent.  One host repeated the boilerplate claim that teachers have a union but nobody is watching out for the kids (as if teachers, on the whole, did not do that).  Another host said, with emphasis, that a HARVARD ECONOMIST had estimated that a good teacher makes a difference of a quarter million dollars per child in the classroom — despite the fact that said economist, Raj Chetty, is hardly beyond professional criticism of his research techniques.

Then it was Ms. Goldberg’s turn who professed herself a “thinker” and then more or less demanded that all teachers go after the “bad teachers” and even suggested that “maybe some of those folks should go” from the Democratic party.  Presumably, she meant people who think that going after teacher tenure is not a good policy and who oppose changing it via lawsuits funded by — well, we don’t know by who.  Nobody is telling us.

The segment was brief and extremely low information.  Nobody disputes that there are bad teachers in classrooms, but nothing has been presented that demonstrates that tenure rules specifically are the main reason that they are there.  Nor has anything been presented that demonstrates that removal of tenure for ALL teachers is an effective policy for addressing that portion of the teacher corps that should be removed from teaching.  No amount of sincere shouting for the cameras is going to make that evidence appear.

Teachers and supporters took to Twitter to explain some of Ms. Goldberg and her compatriots’ misconceptions:

That’s obviously a small sample.  Well, Ms. Goldberg heard the words, but not the message and offered what can only be described as a trite and trivial self defense:

In steps Mr. Reeves with an eloquent and high information response for Ms. Goldberg:

His complete reply can be found at his blog, here.

As Dr. Alyssa Hadley Dunn of Michigan State University made clear in the Washington Post, the standard arguments against teacher tenure lack evidence and they are often thin on logic as well.  If teachers having tenure protections were highly correlated to ineffective teachers being in the classroom, then our wealthy suburbs that have the most experienced teachers with the lowest rates of teacher attrition (and thus the highest proportion of teachers with tenure) would have ineffective classroom after ineffective classroom.  Stripping all the teachers of a state of the due process rights they are afforded by tenure because it “makes sense” to people who have either not examined the research or who are falling for blatant distortions of the truth is not the best way to serve students.

I would like to think that with enough exposure to this argument, that it will begin to make sense to Ms. Goldberg, and that it will be taken into account the next time this topic is discussed in front of millions of viewers.

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August 4, 2014 · 9:14 am

Campbell Brown’s Brings the Anti-Tenure “Argument” to Stephen Colbert

As a former broadcast personality, Campbell Brown has some advantages when appearing on the media to discuss her campaign to end teachers’ workplace protections.  She has experience in interview techniques.  She understands what works well on camera and what does not.  She knows how to pitch her voice and use facial and body language to convey deep sincerity and earnestness regardless of what she really believes.  These served her well on Mr. Colbert’s program last week.

Campbell-Brown

Mr. Colbert is similarly skilled, but he plays a satirical representation of a right wing ideologue in order to lampoon a segment of the media and to keep his guests off balance.  I would argue that he did not level the full weight of his satirical talents upon Ms. Brown, but rather he waited until the end of the interview to present her with some serious challenges that she could not respond to adequately.  More on that later.

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post provides a pretty thorough assessment of Ms. Brown’s many prevarications and reliance on talking points over evidence courtesy of Dr. Alyssa Hadley Dunn of Michigan State University.  Dr. Dunn makes it very clear that there simply isn’t a research base to support any of Ms. Brown’s assertions, and since she had made those assertions in the media prior to her appearance on The Colbert Report, I wish that Mr. Colbert had been more ready to take on some of the more stubborn and egregious talking points.  For example, Ms. Brown repeated her claim that New York State’s teachers cannot possible be as effective as job evaluations say they are because student test scores are too low:

SC: Okay, how’s the crisis in New York? What’s the problem here?

CB: So, if you look at, if you look at the, um, outcomes, student outcomes in New York, okay? So, 91 percent of teachers are around the state of New York are rated either “effective” or “highly effective,” and yet [SC: Sounds good.] 31 percent, [SC: Yep.] 31 percent of our kids are reading, writing, and doing math at grade level. How does that compute? I mean, how can you argue the status quo is okay with numbers like that??

SC: Well, I went to public school in South Carolina and 31 percent sounds like a majority to me.  (transcript is courtesy of Mercedes Schneider, teacher and author)

Mr. Colbert chose to lightly mock his own education, but there is a major, I would argue deliberate, flaw in Ms. Brown’s favored talking point.  First, the 31% figure does not measure students’ grade level performance; it measures the percentage of students who scored “proficient” or above on the new Common Core aligned testing piloted by the Pearson corporation in New York.  Second, the 31% proficiency rate was gamed by the process to determine the cut scores and openly predicted by New York State Education Commissioner John King before the tests were ever deployed.  From the Times-Union in 2013:

State Education Commissioner John King said he expected some push-back. At a Times Unioneditorial board meeting on Tuesday, he said the number of students considered proficient will likely drop by 30 points. He said, while that number is intimidating, it provides a more honest assessment of what New York’s students know. He acknowledged that makes for nervous educators, but said the state can’t afford to roll back the tougher new standards students will be expected to meet because just 35 percent of New York’s high school freshmen leave ready for college or a career four years later.

How could the commissioner so accurately predict the drop in test scores for the new examinations?  According to award-winning Principal Carol Burris, it is because his office deliberately sought to peg the cut scores between proficiency levels to markers that would leave just a third of New York students making the cut.  The condensed version of Burris’ analysis:  NY DOE sought information from the College Board on what SAT scores (widely considered only a loose predictor of college success) correlated to a successful first year in college, and set measures of that “success” that are clearly aimed at that 30% target.  Once in possession of the desired SAT scores in reading, writing and mathematics for a combined 1630 points, the state’s committee went about setting cut scores for each level of performance on the new CCSS aligned tests.  From Principal Burris again:

When the cut scores were set, the overall proficiency rate was 31 percent–close to the commissioner’s prediction.  The proportion of test takers who score 1630 on the SAT is 32 percent.  Coincidence?  Bet your sleeveless pineapple it’s not. Heck, the way I see it, the kids did not even need to show up for the test.

So is it honest for Ms. Brown to keep repeating that only 31% of NY students are at “grade level”? Absolutely not — first, because this is not a “grade level” measure and second, because the result was gamed from the beginning.

This also brings up another question.  If the goal of the “proficient” rating on the exams is “college and career ready” is a 31% proficiency rating actually wrong?  In 2013, 33.6% of the U.S. population aged 25-29 had a bachelors degree, which is up over 11 points from 22.5% in 1980 when the education “crisis” rhetoric began in earnest.  More of our young population is in possession of college degree today than ever before in our history, and the economic data does not suggest we are in a crisis of too few people with such degrees in the economy.  48% of recent college graduates are underemployed, and in 2010, over 5 million college graduates were employed in jobs requiring only a high school diploma.  Moreover, according to Pew Social Trends, today’s wage benefit for obtaining a college degree comes less from rising wages for college graduates than from cratering wages for those without college.

One could argue that more students need to be on path to be “college and career ready” by their third grade exams because college is increasingly necessary to keep from falling behind economically moreso than it is necessary to get ahead.  Something tells me that today’s reform advocates don’t want to emphasize that point.  We would do better to question if the distribution of students who qualify for and are successful at college are concentrated in specific communities and neighborhoods, but discussed honestly, that would require examining America’s rising Residential Income Segregation Index, another topic education reform advocates don’t like to discuss.

Mr. Colbert made a feint at this late in his interview with Ms. Brown:

SC: You can mention. I’ll edit it out, but you can mention it. [CB: Okay.] [Audience laughter.] All right, now, but, here’s, the thing is aren’t you opening a can of worms there, because [4:00] if you say the kids are entitled to e, equal education, if that’s your argument, doesn’t that mean eventually, you’re going to say, “Every child in the state of New York should have the same amount of money spent on their education”—rich community, poor community—pool it all in, split it all up among Bobby and Susie and Billy—everywhere. [Audience applause.] Because the argument is, everyone gets the same opportunity. [Audience applause.]

CB: But, but you, you’re suggesting that mon, that it’s all about the money, and I think it’s not about the money.

SC: Well, you’re suggesting it’s about equality, and money is one of the equations in equality, or have I just schooled you? [Audience laughter.]

Mr. Colbert did not let Ms. Brown duck the question of money and school funding entirely, but she quickly professed how she wants to “pay teachers more” AND treat them like “professionals” through evaluations.  Then she sidestepped to her “safe” territory by claiming it is almost impossible to fire a teacher with tenure.  As previously noted, Dr. Dunn of Michigan State makes it clear that these claims are completely problematic because first, new evaluations using student test scores focus on formulations of teachers’ impact that only accounts for 1-14% of variability between student performance and second, Ms. Brown’s information on the length of time needed to remove a tenured teacher is badly out of date and her assessment of that time is possibly off by more than a factor of four.  This all tied to her previous claims the “least effective” teachers are concentrated in schools with high levels of disadvantaged students, but her argument against tenure is not remotely related to that because measuring effectiveness via test scores automatically makes urban teachers less effective regardless of their experience and skill. Additionally, these school have far fewer tenured teachers because the turnover rate in many urban districts tops 50% in three years, resulting in a dearth of teachers with the skills that come from experience.

If tenure were truly the problem with teacher quality, then wealthy suburban districts with more stable and experienced teacher corps would not be the districts with high test scores and large percentages of college bound graduates.  In this sense, Ms. Brown’s fight against tenure resembles Republican led drives for voter ID laws that threaten to block 100s of 1000s of currently eligible voters in order to stop a “problem,’ voter impersonation, that occurs so rarely it does not statistically exist.

Mr. Colbert then pivoted to what appears to have been his most important question of the interview — what is the money involved in Ms. Brown’s lawsuit?

SC: Just trying to win, Campbell. Just trying to win, all right? Um, your organization, where does it’s money come from? That’s one of the things they asked me to ask you.

CB: I, I saw that on my Twitter feed today. The, the, who’s funding this effort?

SC: Yeah, who’s funding your, your effort, [CB: Kirkland Ellis.] your organization.

CB: The law firm…

SC: The law firm is funding it?

CB: Well, the law firm is doing this for free, so we haven’t gone out…

Ms. Brown’s point here appears to be that despite her fronting the organization that is facilitating the lawsuit, the efforts on behalf of that suit are, in essence, charitable.  This may be true as far as legal fees are concerned, but it is absurd on the face to even hint that there is no monetary value to the assistance Ms. Brown is giving the plaintiffs her organization recruited.  First, her connections and celebrity almost certainly played a role in obtaining the legal services.  Second, Ms. Brown is a media ready spokesperson who has been giving interviews and penning opinion articles on behalf of this cause, and such services would cost dearly if they came from a private consulting firm.  Further, Ms. Brown has managed to sign up the services of Incite Agency, led by former Obama administration alumni Robert Gibbs and Ben LaBolt to do publicity for the cause on a national level.  The plaintiffs in this case are enjoying pro bono legal services, Ms. Brown’s celebrity and public relations services from former White House personnel.  I think it is sufficient to say that those are no small levels of support.

Mr. Colbert pressed on about financial support and finally got Ms. Brown to admit to something which I find astonishing:

SC: So, the Partnership for Educational Justice [7:00] has not raised any money so far?

CB:Yeah, we are raising money.

SC: And who did you raise it from?

CB: I’m not gonna reveal who the donors are because the people (pointing toward window) are out…

SC: I’m going to respect that because I had a super PAC. [Audience applause.]

CB: I hear you. But, part of the reason is the people who are outside today, trying to protest, trying to silence our parents who want to have a voice in this debate…

SC: Exercising First Amendment rights…

CB: Absolutely, but they’re also going to go after people who are funding this, and I think this is a good cause and an important cause, and if someone wants to contribute to this cause without having to put their name on it so they can become a target of the people who were out there earlier today, then I respect that.

 

Ms. Brown is married to Dan Senor, who was the former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq following the fall of the Hussein Regime.  He sits on the board of of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirstNY, and he joined hedge fund Elliot Management before becoming a top adviser to Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  Ms. Brown is on the Board of Directors of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy chain of charter schools, an organization that boasts massive financial support from Wall Street.  Her ties to people who have been pouring money into education “reform” in the interest of charter schools is not difficult to establish, as blogger Mother Crusader has demonstrated.  Suffice to say that these are incredibly wealthy and politically connected people who are the most likely donors to her organization.

And Ms. Brown wants us to believe that they need to be “protected”.  That if people want to know who is funding lawsuits to challenge laws that were passed by democratically elected governments and job protections that were subject to open and adversarial negotiations between unions and administrators, they cannot know because the donors seeking to overturn such laws could not abide potential criticism of themselves in the public sphere.

Wow.

Let’s be clear.  Who are “the people who are outside today” who Ms. Brown assumes will bully and intimidate her donors?  According to The Daily News:

 

colbert1n-1-web

colbert1n-2-web

I am sure that Eva Moskowitz’s donors are just quaking in their boots…right after they drop another $400,000 into Governor Cuomo’s pockets.

Mr. Colbert did not sneak a camera crew down to the street to make Ms. Brown look as ridiculous as she richly deserved at that moment, but the fact that he led her to make such a ludicrous statement is telling in an of itself.  Today, it is very hard to trust that major media outlets will take the time and effort to research and interview people trying to lead public debate via deception, and on issues that require a genuine understanding of complex social phenomena, that is even less likely.  I have written before how abysmally the New York Times’ editorial staff have failed in that regard, preferring to take the statements of advocates with wealth and connections at face value.

Mr. Colbert is not a journalist, yet he and his fellow comedians Jon Stewart and John Oliver have become almost guardians of truth in recent years.  It is often more likely that Mr. Colbert or Mr. Stewart or Mr. Oliver will highlight the absurd inanities, half truths and contradictions routinely offered by politicians, pundits and advocates.  In the case of Ms. Brown, Mr. Colbert got her to openly confess to a truth that is gaining greater and greater public awareness: American governance is increasingly oligarchical in nature whereby elected officials craft policy more to serve the interests of their very wealthy donors rather than the interests of the actual voters who put them in office.  Ms. Brown’s undisclosed donor list is a perfect example of this, and her refusal to disclose under the fiction that her donors could possibly be intimidated by moms and teachers with home made posters should be mocked loudly and frequently.

I am grateful to Mr. Colbert for organizing his interview to that point, but I am saddened that we rely almost exclusively on satirists to get to the heart of public affairs these days.

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August 1, 2014 · 7:39 am

Asking Markets to Do What They Do Poorly — School Reform

Early in my graduate school experience, I took a class with Phil Cusick, author of “The Egalitarian Ideal and the American High School” and “The School System: Its Nature and Logic”  .  The class was a seminar on how school systems functions both philosophically and organizationally.  While the course had a number of profound insights, one of Dr. Cusick’s observations has remained at the forefront of my thinking ever since.  “In America,” he said, “we don’t redistribute that much income, so we give everyone a free school instead.”  What he meant was that, politics of taxation and the welfare state aside, America does comparatively little that sets a strict bottom on the deprivations that poverty can afflict upon individuals and communities.  This much is true as any examination of poverty and social expenditures in first world countries can attest:

social safety gap

The purpose of school, therefore, is to provide a forum where any person, regardless of personal circumstance, can fairly demonstrate both potential and accomplishment.  Schools, philosophically, are meant to drive opportunity that we do not provide via leveling the distribution of resources.

That is a weighty mission, and it resonates with certain themes that are popular among American society such as the absence of a titular aristocracy and the belief that merit is properly recognized and rewarded.  Getting Americans to agree on how to deliver the circumstances most likely to deliver meritocracy is another matter entirely.

When it comes to school reform, the movement with greatest momentum currently is dedicated to school choice and the uses of market based forces to improve the opportunities for students enrolled in public education.  School systems across the country, where possible, have changed the ways in which students enroll in schools to deemphasize reliance upon zoned schools within geographic boundaries and to have public schools seek out students across those zoned districts.  Various instantiations of voucher programs encourage parents to seek out even nonpublic schools that will be subsidized with public money.  Straying far from their original conception as temporary laboratories for experimentation on behalf of the most difficult to teach students, charter schools operate in direct competition with district zoned schools and many have become brands unto themselves, aggressively expanding operations.

These ideas originated some decades previously with free market economists like Milton Friedman who in 1955 openly advocated for public education to more closely resemble markets for goods and services that have driven consumer innovation in the past two centuries.  Intellectually, they gained support from the work of John E. Chubb of the Brookings Institution and Terry Moe of Stanford University in their 1990 book entitled “Politics, Markets and America’s Schools” where they concluded that the most important predictor of a school’s success was the locus of control between traditional school boards and privately controlled schools.  Their prescription included the creation of school choice districts where schools would have to compete with each other to attract and retain students.

Despite the omissions from Chubb and Moe’s work, such ideas found powerful patrons among conservative politicians who enthusiastically advocated for school choice and voucher programs as the solution to the school failure narrative that took root with the release of “A Nation At Risk” during the Reagan Administration.  While originating with conservatives, school choice became a growing theme among Democrats in both the Clinton and Obama administrations and for Democratic governors across the country.  Although less likely to support vouchers that take public school budgets and transfer them to entirely private entities, the growth of charter schools and support among Democratic politicians represents a strong toehold for choice as an engine of reform on both sides of the political aisle.  Choice, in various forms, is recognized as the powerful driver of improvement and innovation across the mainstream political spectrum.

But is that a good thing?

The question is far less clear than advocates would have us believe.  Markets are, undeniably, a powerful tool for innovation, but whether or not that does or can apply to public education is quite a different matter.  It is important to consider the ways in which markets work.  As a matter of record,  I am not an economist, but what follows is not controversial ground.  Most markets for goods and services function by supplying the market with a range of innovative products, yes, but also a range of similar products that are available at different levels of quality and expense.  Many people, wealthy, middle class and working class, can afford to purchase personal transportation because the market that provides vehicles such as the Rolls Royce Phantom also provides the Ford Focus and used Honda Civics.  The individual in need of an automobile can usually, within a relatively short distance from him or herself, find an option that takes into account both the need for the good AND the ability of the buyer to go above the most basic fulfillment of the need.  Markets are exceptionally efficient at doing this, so while every person participating in the market may not be able to afford the best it has to offer, most people can find something.

But what about where everyone needs the same thing?

In education that may seem counterintuitive because it is taken as a given that all children can learn, but that not all children learn the same way.  However, taken another way, it is true that all children need the same thing:  they need the resources and the opportunities to accomplish the curriculum to the best of their current abilities in the ways by which they most effectively learn.  In other words, students do not need equal opportunities so much as they need equitable opportunities.  Consider the following illustration:

Can everyone enjoy this?

The Difference Between Equality and Equity

In the picture on the left, all three people have an absolutely equal playing field, but only two of them can achieve the goal of watching the baseball game.  With some minor tinkering, however, the third member of the group can achieve that goal because his specific needs have been accommodated without taking away anyone else’s opportunity to enjoy the game.  In an educational context, this is the why equal is not always the appropriate circumstance when a student is fully capable of accomplishing a task but needs individualized attention.

This sounds like an argument then for the market based and competitive goals of educational choice and policies that break down district zoning in assigning a student to a school, and I can understand that.  After all, if individualized attention is a key to promoting equity, it would make intuitive sense for more choices to provide more setting where that is possible.  However, I am drawn again the observation that market innovation is powerful when it is providing different levels of quality for the consumer.  Innovation and competition has made many kinds of good available to all consumers, but nobody can honestly argue that all such good are of similar quality and durability.  The same observation applies to services provided as well where consumers able to pay more enjoy levels of amenities not provided to those who do not.

But we demand very different from our compulsory education.  There is no “used Honda Civic” or “economy class seating” when it comes to teaching a child how to read, and providing equitable opportunities means that education “consumers” sometimes need to utilize MORE resources regardless of their ability to pay.  In order for a market system of schooling to really provide for equitable opportunities, several conditions seem extremely important.  First, the number of choices available would have to be sufficient to the task of every family having a genuine ability to enroll in a school or schools that meet their needs.  Even in major metropolitan areas, this is unlikely as a selection of schools cannot simply be packed onto a display wall like a selection of shoes, and after a certain point, families would incur unacceptable costs simply to transport their children to the array of schools they need.  Second, families would have to be equally engaged and knowledgeable about what children need and how to evaluate the claims of different schools about their accomplishments.  That also seems doubtful because when one makes a mistaken choice in typical markets for goods and services, there are options for returning or foregoing use of the item which does not exist when it comes to schools.  Certainly, the high turnover rates among many of the more prominent charter school operators suggests that even in a limited market, families seek out schools that are either “poor fits” for their children or that are unwilling to adjust themselves to meet the needs of the children they have.  Without zoned schools, such children would be at risk of having to “return” their educational opportunity every year.  Third, school choices cannot become more stratified than they already are due to income segregation in our communities.  In a marketplace, it is fully acceptable to provide consumers in different income strata different quality goods, but this cannot be permitted in education without the system perversely betraying promised opportunities.  Finally, a market of educational choices has to demonstrate that it truly provides better outcomes for the vast majority of students, both quantitatively and qualitatively, than a system of zoned schools.  To date, such metrics have been extremely elusive in research on both vouchers and charter schools to the point that one can reasonably question just how much more expansion of such ventures is really warranted.

Jan Resseger, a former education advocate for the United Church of Christ, recently noted that one of the primary advocates of the “portfolio” strategy of school choice, a mix of zoned schools and choice options promoted by the Center on Reinventing Pubic Education at the University of Washington, had recently admitted that troubling outcomes in many districts that have tried the strategy.  While Ms. Lake did not suggest the cycle of disruption was actually failing to improve education for the most vulnerable, the CRPE report levels heavy criticism at the way such reforms have been implemented without strict oversight to ensure all students have excellent school choices.  What is missing is an admission that market based forces are not necessarily the way to improve our national commons which includes compulsory education.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that local control of zoned schools has resulted in excellent schools for all children.  But it is much more disingenuous to subsequently ignore the impacts of our deep levels of income segregation and modest state and federal spending to alleviate the conditions of poverty in communities.  Faced with depleted local revenues and populations struggling to maintain subsistence levels of income, many of our school districts operate under conditions that make their work vastly more difficult even as we lay upon them the nearly sole responsibility for lifting those same communities out of poverty.  As David Berliner notes:

It does take a whole village to raise a child, and we actually know a little bit about how to do that. What we seem not to know how to do in modern America is to raise the village, to promote communal values that insure that all our children will prosper. We need to face the fact that our whole society needs to be held as accountable for providing healthy children ready to learn, as our schools are for delivering quality instruction. One-way accountability, where we are always blaming the schools for the faults that we find, is neither just, nor likely to solve the problems we want to address.

So what does this mean?  My own suggestions center around reemphasizing public education as a common good for society, and bringing our emphasis back to improving zoned schools.  This would require renewed interest in fully funding schools regardless of their needs and improving curricula and teaching locally, a major campaign to improve the infrastructure of zoned schools that still enroll a vast majority of our children, and efforts to invigorate school and community ties by deeper connections to civic organizations and the placement of community services within schools themselves to broaden the number of people who see the school as essential to their neighborhoods.  However, as Berliner notes, the accountability for alleviating poverty has to be two directional, and we as a society need to admit that we cannot place the entire burden of children climbing out of inter-generational poverty within communities whose economic prospects are dismal at best entirely upon the backs of teachers and schools.  As long as we continue to pass that buck and believe that the same economic forces that allow us a wide and varied choice of breakfast cereals are equipped to provide excellent schools for everyone we will continue to be disappointed.

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July 29, 2014 · 2:24 pm

David Berliner Responds to Economists Who Discount Role of Child Poverty via Diane Ravitch

From Diane Ravitch’s blog — incredibly important response to slight of hand “research”:

 

David Berliner Responds to Economists Who Discount Role of Child Poverty.

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July 21, 2014 · 6:58 am

Donna Brazile, Ted Strickland and Jennifer Granholm To Defend Public Education

Opponents of current reform trends in education (and even just those with some skepticism) have had few ways to get their messages out in the past decade.  While charter school chains have found wealthy investors and enthusiastic politicians, public school teachers have traditionally relied upon their unions to publicly advocate on their behalf.  However, until very recently both the AFT and the NEA have openly supported reforms such as the Common Core State Standards despite rank and file concerns, and both unions offered endorsements to Democratic candidates who have openly courted the same money that has backed charter school expansion, CCSS and evaluating teachers by high stakes tests, many teacher concerns have had limited means to reach the public.  Add to that a media that has seemed completely incapable of asking a single teacher about the combination of reform forces that have potential to greatly damage public education, it has been lonely work to try to raise alarms.

That may be changing.

First, there are some in the media actually asking hard questions about how such a narrow slate of characters have managed to push nearly all 50 states in the same curriculum direction without having a robust public debate.  The luster of charter schools as the proposed cure all for urban education is coming under question with more and more reporting of the opportunists who have rushed into the poorly regulated sector of education.  As Common Core has begun to reach classrooms with plans to begin mass testing of students and to implement value added measures for teacher evaluations, union leaders have backed away from initial support of the standards themselves.  They are joined by a small but growing movement of parents at the grassroots who are choosing to “opt out” their children from the increasing testing regimen that has characterized education reform of the past decade and a half.

These are all developments that promise to change the direction of our education reform discourse.  But it is likely not enough.  Proponents of Common Core, mass testing, test-based teacher evaluations and the rapid expansion of charter schools have the ears of major media figures, federal and state governments and are able to call upon deep pocketed allies to pummel those who try to slow down their goals.  Eva Moskowitz’s allies unleashed more than 3 million dollars in a 3 week advertising blitz against New York Mayor Bill de Blasio when he dared give her only 80 percent of what she wanted.  They also seem to recruit new front people easily — former NBC and CNN personality Campbell Brown has joined Michelle Rhee’s campaign against teacher job protections by taking the Vergara lawsuit on its first cross country tour to New York.

The balance of voices is changing.

The AFT announced the formation of a new lobbying group, Democrats for Public Education that will be chaired by former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and DNC vice-chair Donna Brazile.  Ms. Brazile addressed the AFT convention:

Why does this change the balance?  For starters, it says that the leadership of America’s teacher unions is pivoting from hoping that reforms will be both disruptive AND productive to realizing that many reforms threaten the very nature of public education.  More importantly?  It provides media allies for defending public schools and their students and teachers.  Although the research on many reform efforts’ problematic outcomes is solid and growing, voice and access has been much slower.  What does Donna Brazile bring that academic research and the concerns of parents and classroom teachers does not?  Access.  Ms. Brazile’s phone calls get returned.  Mr. Strickland and Ms. Granholm are known in all 50 state capitols and Washington.  While Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and pro-reform politicians have had the media’s ears all to themselves and have, to date, successfully portrayed their opponents as not caring about kids, now there is an organization headlined by well-connected and well-known allies to provide the alternative perspective.  In an age of media driven by sound bites 24/7, that matters.

How did Democrats for Education Reform, the hedge-fund financed group that has donated to numerous Democrats in exchange for support of charter school expansion, respond to the announcement?  “Welcome to the jungle, baby” was it.

Think about that for a second.  They could have written about welcoming a public debate.  They could have written about their “disappointment” that such prominent people could not see the value of their ideas, but that they look forward to engaging the public.  They could have written a spirited defense of charter school innovation for students.

Instead, they offer what could be Gordon Gekko’s back-up tag phrase.  Someone is either arrogant or worried — and someone is not thinking about the kids first and foremost.

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July 15, 2014 · 10:25 am

Four More Things To Tell President Obama

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post wrote last week that President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had a meeting with teachers over lunch.  Her column provided space for the 2007 Arkansas Teacher of the Year, Justin Minkel, to offer his insights into how the meeting went and what the President and Secretary heard from the teachers present.  Mr. Minkel, who is a member of both the National Network of State Teachers of the Year and the Center for Teacher Quality and who blogs for Education Week and for CTQ, wrote cogently and intelligently about four key points:

1. There’s Nothing Wrong With the Kids

2. “Responsibility and Delight Can Co-exist”

3. It’s not about good and bad teachers.  It is about good and bad teaching.

4. If we want students to innovate, collaborate, and solve real-world problems, we need to make it possible for teachers to do the same things.

These are outstanding points, and I thank Mr. Minkel and his fellow teachers for communicating them directly at such a high level.  There are, of course, many other points that the President and his Secretary of Education need to genuinely hear and know.  I would like to offer my own four points to build upon these:

1. You are looking for teacher effectiveness in all the wrong places

Teachers matter.  Nobody should ever suggest otherwise.  But No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top both represent sustained efforts to locate how teachers matter in standardized test scores, and since Race to the Top, the strongest proxy for teacher effectiveness written into state and federal policy has been annual student progress on standardized testing. This is a flawed approach for several reasons.  To begin with, the tests that are designed to demonstrate if a student has mastered a body of knowledge or a set of skills are designed for that purpose and that purpose only.  As Dr. Nunoz of Concordia University Chicago notes, testing and measurement is a precise field and it is improper and inaccurate to use an examination for a different purpose because it would not be designed the same way.  The American Statistical Association released a statement on value added measurements earlier this year that clearly stated that the association does not believe any examination currently used to measure teacher effectiveness meets the strict criteria necessary for such a test, and they noted that most studies on VAMs find that teachers’ input only accounts for between 1-14% of the variability among student results on such tests.  Looking for teacher effectiveness in the results of standardized examinations is essentially playing dice with teachers’ futures.

Even the research that claims such models are useful is suspect.  As Dr. Jesse Rothstein of U.C. Berkeley found, even the Gates Foundation funded research on “Measures of Effective Teaching” makes claims that are poorly supported by their own data. Despite the MET study’s endorsement of VAMs, Dr. Rothstein notes that “teacher evaluations based on observed state test outcomes are only slightly better than coin tosses at identifying teachers whose students perform unusually well or badly  on assessments of conceptual understanding (p. 5),” and goes on to note that teachers whose students did well on standardized exams did far less well on measurements of critical thinking.  Using standardized examinations as a measure of teacher effectiveness can reward a weak teacher who focuses on test preparation and punish a highly skilled teacher who emphasizes higher order thinking and creative problem solving.

Teachers, of course, do make a difference for students.  And there are teachers who do not teach well, and there are teachers who excel at the work.  But the impact of that teaching is simply poorly represented in paper and pencil standardized examinations.  It can be found in student produced artifacts that explore rich content in creative and insightful ways.  It can be found in a classroom that “buzzes” with the constant hum of excited work.  It can be found in the individual lives of children who are inspired to explore a field they never knew held interest before.  It can be found in the children who find a mentor and reliable adult among the body of teachers in a school and stick with their education when nobody thought they could.  It can be found the eyes of a student whose talents and passions are affirmed for the first time in his or her young life.  This is what happens in millions of classrooms across the country on a daily basis that cannot be captured on a standardized examination.

Taylor Mali, teacher and poet, captures quite a lot of that nicely in this poetry performance:

2. It’s the poverty

You’ve been told by a lot of current reformers that talking about the extraordinary difficulties of educating children born into poverty is just “making excuses” for “bad teachers”.  I cannot say not only how much this refrain hurts  teachers who have dedicated themselves to working with our most needy students, but also how much it hurts those very same students.  It places upon the teachers a burden to, on their own, lift children of poverty to a level playing field with their more advantaged peers.  It thrusts upon those children schools that keep cutting out critical thinking and aesthetic enrichment in favor of test preparation because of draconian  layoff and reorganization threats while offering the students a brutally unlevel playing field if they graduate. I can think of few practical jokes more cruel than this.

Poverty is not an “excuse”; it is a fact that broadly impacts the earliest childhood of 22% of our young people.  It is a fact that we do much less to alleviate poverty’s deprivations than our peer democracies in the West.  And because our residential income segregation is very high and has risen by over a third since 1980, it is a fact that poverty disproportionately impacts specific schools and school systems.

And it is not a fact that is fully constrained to those meeting the federal definition of poverty.  Income, housing and food insecurity impact the lower middle class, many of whom are clinging to that status solely because of federal assistance programs and the Earned Income Tax Credit.  In 2011, only North Dakota and New Hampshire had child food insecurity rates below 15%.   The Hamilton Project report also notes that food insecurity can have potentially life long consequences in both educational outcomes and economic security, but teachers are going to be held accountable for children who will suffer lower birth weights, worse lifetime health outcomes and lower economic outcomes because Congress refuses to fund expanded SNAP benefits that amount to less than half of the cost of USS Gerald Ford.

This is not meant to “excuse” those teachers and administrators who give up on children in poverty or near poverty and do not do their utmost to educate, inspire and mentor those in their care.  However, it is intellectually and morally bankrupt to ignore that our much lamented gap in PISA can be located almost entirely within our poverty level, and to blame teachers and schools for failing to single-handedly overcome a phenomenon much larger than our schools and about which the billionaires driving today’s “reforms” refuse to discuss.

3. There is no “secret sauce” for educating our most struggling children

Former White House Chief of Staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel opined that Noble Network of charter schools in Chicago had the “secret sauce” for motivating students to perform.  An element of that recipe?  Collecting $400,000 in disciplinary “fines” from its students since 2008.  Advocates of the rapidly expanding charter sector of education like to paper over such practices, but it is vitally important to expose them because while their sponsors and leaders like to hype test performance, they often achieve those results at the expense of up to half of their students.

This should be absolutely clear: with 1000s of charter schools across the country, there must be many schools and teachers who do a genuinely great job with the students in their care.  Unfortunately, they are overshadowed by the high profile charter schools that are essentially corporate entities and that tout themselves as miracle factories based upon high test scores.  They consume public dollars, refuse public accountability, have astonishing attrition rates usually at the expense of the neediest children enrolled in them, and have formed powerful lobbies to influence politicians to continue to favor charter schools over fully public schools.

This is not to say that none of these schools do a good job of educating the students that they do accommodate and that there are not students and families who are sincerely grateful to be in those schools.  But it does mean that they cannot legitimately claim to have found any “secret sauce” for educating our neediest students when they engage in extreme cream skimming, refuse to let the public examine their finances and rely upon their extremely wealthy patrons to strong arm politicians on their behalf.  To put this in perspective:  In 2012, the NEA spent $13 million in campaign contributions total across the country, and the AFT spent $5.9 million.  Success Academy Charter’s supporters spent $3.6 million in THREE WEEKS just because Mayor de Blasio slowed down the expansion of the network.

Truly working with our neediest takes far more than advertising and cherry-picked student bodies.

4. Arts and the humanities matter

Despite very shaky evidence to back up the claim, we have been treated to nonstop rhetoric about our “crisis” in graduates with STEM degrees, and policy has pushed hard to create more pipelines for people to enter such fields regardless of the actual employment picture for them.  There is, however, evidence that in the age of test based accountability, we have marginalized endeavors that are critical to both our civic life and our general well being.  Social studies instruction has shrunk from 9.5% of instructional time to 7.6%, meaning that our students spend less time today learning history and engaging in critical thinking about their civic life.  While instruction in the English Language Arts has increased because of its status as a tested subject, there are legitimate concerns that the emphasis on reading informational texts in the Common Core State Standards and associated testing, will drive more classrooms away from reading great works of literary fiction and poetry.

And then there is the long term and precipitous decline in arts education which fell below 50% for 18 year olds in their childhood education in 2008.  That means that half of the children in America born in 1990 received no arts education in their entire education K-12.  Research is very clear that participation in the arts has a wide range of academic benefits from higher test scores to higher rates of college completion among low income students.  Eliot Eisner of Stanford University notes the lessons that the arts teach such as: making judgments about relationships, seeing multiple answers to problems, accepting multiple perspectives, complex problem solving, learning that cognition is not limited by language, seeing large effects from small differences, and thinking through materials to fruition of an idea.  It is not hard at all to see the connection between these capacities and the capacities that lead not simply to STEM competencies but also to STEM understanding and innovation.  No wonder, then, that there is a small but growing movement to “move from STEM to STEAM” and place arts at the center of our drive for more STEM education.

While this is admirable, it is also not enough to envision the importance of the arts and humanities as a partner to scientific and technological advancement because they possess their own warrants.  Eisner’s “ten lessons” also include:  teaching children how to say what “cannot be said” via “poetic capacities,” experiencing things that cannot be experienced in any other way and exploring one’s capacity for feeling, symbolizing what is important in society.  The arts and humanities, therefore, enrich us in ways that cannot be measured via test based accountability but which are part of our essential humanity.  That 50% of our young people experience no arts education means that their education was fundamentally inattentive to their humanity.  As we advocate for literature, poetry, music, visual and performing arts for all children, we must remember this — the arts and humanities cannot become yet another preserve of the wealthy and we cannot allow test based accountability to squeeze what is left of them from our public schools.

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July 9, 2014 · 3:42 pm

Jonathan Chait Joins His Esteemed Colleagues at the New York Times in Not Understanding a Thing About Teachers

I was reading my news feed yesterday morning, when I saw that Chalkbeat had retweeted an article from New York Magazine entitled “Teachers Unions Turn Against Democrats.”  Having noted that NEA members voted to call for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s resignation, and knowing that a significant factor in Fordham Law School professor Zephyr Teachout’s campaign to challenge sitting Governor Andrew Cuomo is Cuomo’s enthusiastic embrace of current education reforms, I was prepared for an interesting article.  Certainly, someone with Jonathan Chait’s experience and rhetorical talent would have an interesting examination of reform advocates’ efforts and rationales combined with the growing frustration of rank and file teachers and the balancing act attempted by union leaders trying to maintain their traditional coalition with Democrats and advocate for their members.

Boy, was I wrong.

Chait does acknowledge that Democrats have been forceful in pushing reform efforts that are more historically comfortable ground for Republicans, but his portrayal of the reforms themselves is entirely problematic and he ultimately chalks up firm opposition as the work of reactionary “hard liners”.  In Chait’s view, the center of this hard-liner coalition is New York University’s Diane Ravitch who has been blogging on the agenda of education reformers for several years now.

The leadership of this movement has fallen to Diane Ravitch, formerly a right-of-center education activist who has converted to the cause of teachers-union absolutism with an evangelical fervor, maintaining an almost superhuman schedule of public speaking and prolific blogging.

Ravitch has depicted education reform as a plot by corporate elites to privatize schools and destroy unions. If charter schools claim to help poor children by providing longer school days, then Ravitch is certain thatlonger school days cannot work. Having identified their enemies with the cause of pure evil, Ravitch and her fellow hard-liners have taken to defending not only the practice of paying teachers by length of service, but the structure and form of the school day (created in an era of stay-at-home mothers and designed around the summer harvest) as a standard of perfection that must be defended absolutely. Ravitch and her allies have found the leadership of the unions disturbingly faint of heart.

Goodness.

Does Chait expend even minimal effort in examining what in education reform is actually agitating teachers?  Beyond acknowledgement that the administration and its allies have embraced accountability and charter schools and implying that resistance to those efforts is the work of unthinking hardliners, not much.  He doesn’t examine teachers’ frustration and anxiety that the largest curriculum experiment in American history has been implemented with almost no study and little time to prepare at the behest of one man’s exceptional wealth.  He doesn’t examine how the “accountability” measures favored by reformers come from statistical models that are not accepted as valid measures of teachers’ impact on student learning.  He doesn’t look at the impact on students, teachers and schools of the constant drive for more testing of students, nor does he look at the corporations that are eager to monetize the results of those tests.

He does not consider the ways in which the rich and influential have used charter school expansion to line their own investment portfolios, nor does he consider the corrupting influence on Democratic politicians of hedge fund manager created political action committees that use campaign donations to ensure charter schools keep expanding. He does not examine that many charter school “successes” come at the expense of their appalling attrition rates, nor does he reference the new reports of widespread fraud and abuse of public money in the rapidly growing and poorly regulated charter sector.  He mentions the Vergara decision in California and opines that it “embarrasses” teacher unions by highlighting the “least-defensible aspect of their agenda and its most sympathetic victims,” but he does not mention the extremely questionable research that was used to support the case, nor does he mention that the victims in question could not name a single teacher who was “grossly ineffective”. Since Mr. Chait deems Dr. Ravitch to be unreasonable, here is the post trial brief that explains the issue.

Jonathan Chait is an experienced journalist and editor.  He had it entirely within his power to write an interesting piece on the potential of a rift between Democrats and one of their traditionally reliable constituencies, and to examine, fairly, the different sides of the issues.  Instead, he took it as a given that charter schools are successful alternatives and only union absolutists have any qualms about accountability and tenure reforms.

That, of course, would have taken more work than portraying Dr. Ravitch as the Abigail Williams of the teaching profession.

 

How Jon Chait Sees Diane Ravitch?

How Jon Chait Sees Diane Ravitch?

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July 7, 2014 · 2:13 pm

“The best anti-poverty program around is….” a strong union.

In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama reviewed the legislation his administration had passed as favoring “reform” and “innovation” in our schools, and observed that “In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education.”  Since that address, we have seen the “reform” and “innovation” that the President was talking about: CCSS, high stakes testing, teacher evaluations tied to those evaluations, charter school expansion.  And now former members of the President’s administration are joining corporate reformer Campbell Brown in an effort to sue away teachers’ workplace protections.

But is the underlying assumption of the President’s statement that is driving all of these efforts to replace public education as we have known it with an amalgam of public and public-in-name-only schools with teachers who lack strong union protection and who are assessed primarily via student test scores even accurate?  Does a “world class education” function as the “best” anti-poverty program or was the President engaging in dangerously simplistic rhetoric that places a burden on primary, secondary and higher education without asking what conditions need to exist in the market for labor?

There isn’t a simple answer for this, and there are plenty of competing voices.  For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that only 27% of the workforce need college degrees for our jobs, and they project only 23% of the labor force will need college or post graduate degrees in 2022.  This is disputed by Anthony Carnevale and colleagues at the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce, who note that the “college wage premium” has grown 37% since 1976, indicating that employers are currently willing to pay a premium for graduates with post secondary education.

Recent data and analysis suggest that college is worth the effort and even the debt in gained economic output over the course of one’s career.  The Federal Reserve notes that those with a bachelors degree are likely to earn up to a million dollars more over their lifetime than peers with only a high school education, and even those with associates degrees earn 100s of thousands more.  Once  cost of money out of pocket for the degree and inflation are considered, that still amounts to an additional 500 thousand.  However, these numbers should be read with additional research on the lifetime cost of debt accrued in obtaining the degree which can amount to over 200 thousand dollars in net assets by retirement and which disproportionately effects minority college graduate who take out higher debt loads on average.

So is that case closed?  Everyone should aspire to college education and secure themselves in the middle class? Not so fast.

While a premium exists in wages for college graduates over their peers, that premium has gone up for reasons other than demand for college educated workers.  Pew Social Trends demonstrates that one contributing factor in the increased gap is the sharp drop in wages for non college educated citizens even while wages for those with a college degree have remained stagnant when adjusted for inflation.  In 2012 dollars, a Millennial with a college degree earns $6600 more than a “Silent Generation” graduate in 1965, but only $730 more than a “Late Boomer” did in 1986.  Meanwhile, those Millennials without a college degree earns almost $3400 less today than in 1965.  College education, then, is indeed becoming a minimum requirement, but just to keep up at current, stagnant, levels of opportunity and to not fall off the cliff into chronic economic insecurity.

And this is where the decline in union representation in the workforce needs to be discussed.  It does not appear to be enough to grow a healthy and vibrant middle class simply to say that all middle class aspirants need to attend college, especially when the gap between college and non college income can be at least partially attributed to falling wages.  According to a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by Emin M. Dinlersoz of the Census Bureau and Jeremy Greenwood of University of Pennsylvania, the decline of organized labor can be attributed to technological innovation that either replaced or outsourced non-skilled jobs that traditionally enjoyed union representation.  While there is no doubt that globalization and technology have been highly disruptive forces to organized work forces, it is also insufficient an explanation.  To begin with, trade agreements and tax policies that lead to jobs being sent offshore are partially the result of choices made by elected officials as well as the result of innovation.  Second, the drop off in labor unionization is distinctly steep in the United States compared with other industrialized economies. If labor’s decline in the United States was solely the result of especially “creative destruction” in the economy and not at least partially the result of choices made by those who influence the economy, our labor decline would be far less steep.

Labor’s decline and the overall dismal growth of inequality in our economy have marched hand in hand since the late 1970s.  In this video, Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa maps the decline of union participation in the United States with the steady growth of the Gini coefficient:

Correlation may not be causality, but certain trend lines call our attention to possible causes, and Gordon reports research that notes up to a third of the rise in inequality in the 1980s and 1990s can be attributed to the decline of labor.  If we want to address what has been happening to America’s widely stagnating middle class and especially to the cratering lower middle class, we must look at the decline of unions.  While labor unions cannot revitalize by organizing jobs that no longer exist, there are credible arguments that even large swaths of the IT sector could benefit from unionization.

Which is why the full frontal assault on teachers’ unions since the Great Recession is both disheartening and an existential threat to the remains of the middle class.  The NEA and AFT represent more than 4 million unionized teachers, but more than that, their representation provides those teachers with an ability to negotiate openly and fairly for their wages, working conditions and job security.  Those negotiations help our children’s teachers maintain a middle class status they might not be able to achieve individually, and the due process rights they obtain from negotiations protect them in a job environment that has inherent political elements and can risk confrontation with the community.  Given the mass of new job pressures layered on to the teaching profession since No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, it is unthinkable that teachers’ collective bargaining rights and job protections should be subject to legislative and legal challenges across the country.

But that is exactly what is happening, and it isn’t merely a challenge to teachers’ due process rights — it is aimed directly at one of the largest bodies of unionized middle class professionals left in the country.  Where will our Gini coefficient be in ten more years if teaching is no longer a unionized work force?

The contradictions of what we demand of teachers and with whom we entrust them and the goals of anti-union “reform” efforts to reduce teachers’ job securities and ability to negotiate fair wages and benefits are manifest.  President Obama tasks a “world class education” with reducing poverty in the face of the multitude of social and economic factors that have entrenched poverty in our society.  Every parent who sends a child to public school entrusts the teachers of that school with the well being of that child.  That breaking the strength of teachers’ collective bargaining rights has appeared as an urgent need to make education better belies are far more malicious intent behind the well financed campaigns of Michelle Rhee and Campbell Brown. Teachers should not be the only ones who take notice — the entire middle class should as well.

From Mike Thompson of the Detroit Free Press

From Mike Thompson of the Detroit Free Press

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