Obama's Pre-K Boot Camp For All

The evidence strongly supports the notion that quality preschool programs benefit all children, especially those from low-income families (click here to see some of that evidence). Thus, it is refreshing that President Obama has made this one of his goals and that he is getting some support from both parties. However, Universal Preschool for All is not a panacea that will erase the achievement gap or solve the nation’s economic woes.

Larry Cuban highlights some of these problems in his recent piece in the Washington Post. Let’s start with Cuban’s first point, “that one issue brings together both CEOs and educational progressives, political conservatives and liberals: investing in tax-supported preschool for three and four year-olds.”

The fact that conservatives are agreeing with liberals on anything should make one suspicious. While they may be asking for the same thing on the surface, their objectives and motivations are likely very different. Cuban alludes to this by suggesting that not all preschools are created alike. Should preschool be “boot camp for kindergarten,” he asks, “or a place where very young children, as Alison Gopnik put it, ’be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover?’” 

The answer to this question depends on the social class of the children, and the parents who are asking it. The wealthy can send their kids to elite private preschools that focus on play, art, music and movement as a way to develop their children’s social and cognitive skills. Most of the rest of America cannot afford this. Even President Obama said in his State of the Union speech that “most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for a private preschool” and the poor and working class are far worse off. Consequently, less than 30% of U.S. four year-olds currently attend a “high-quality” preschool (compared with over 90% in Mexico, France, Spain, and Netherlands).

This is a new education market, yet one that carries with it many of the same benefits of the K-12 market: captive, obligatory consumers; secure annual revenues from the state; subsidies; and the marketing magic of being able to say your business nurtures and protects America’s Innocent Children.

The question is, will the corporate education vultures looking for a piece of the supposed 70% increase in preschool consumers, provide a boot camp for other people’s children, or a “whole child,” Froebelian-Pestalozzian style preschool that nutures children’s creativity, curiosity and enthusiasm through play and social interactions, like the schools where their children attend?

The most likely answer is boot camp. These are not their own children, after all, so nurturing, coddling, fun and play are not their concern. Rather, these are the children of their employees, future employees themselves. They need discipline. They need to be prepared for the 21^st century workforce. This has led to a demand for “cognitively-driven” preschools with direct instruction in skills that give children a leg up in the competition for college and jobs. Driven by the national obsession with standards, testing and accountability, this has led to many private and public preschools now requiring cognitive skills tests.

It is important to note that Froebelian, play-based pre-kindergarten programs do not completely ignore the development of academic skills. They simply approach it differently. Rather than forcing children to sit still for extended periods of time and then repeat after the teacher ad nauseum, they let the children play and explore with provocative and intriguing toys, games, tools and nature, introducing the vocabulary, pre-reading skills, math and science as they go. The children take more initiative and responsibility for their activities and interactions, thus developing their social skills, as well as their reasoning skills, curiosity and self-efficacy.

It is true that lower income children typically enter kindergarten with vocabularies that are substantially lower than those of their more affluent peers. This is because affluent parents on average spend far more time reading to their children than do poor and working class parents. They also tend to use larger vocabularies with their children and introduce them to more complex words and ideas. Consequently, poor children start kindergarten with significantly smaller vocabularies and fewer literacy skills (see Burkam and Lee). This makes high quality prekindergarten programs all the more important for them.

It is not true, however, that low income children must be subjected to the same sort of rote memorization, accountability, testing, homework, worksheets and other nonsense they will likely get in the higher grades. They can still rapidly increase their vocabularies and pre-reading skills in a freer, Froebelian-style pre-K environment.

Pre-K Does Not Erase the Effects of Poverty

Lack of preschool worsens an achievement gap that is already in place well before children are even old enough for preschool (see Hart and Risely). Preschool has been shown to help mitigate this for some lower income children and provide skills that help many become school ready, but it does nothing to improve the conditions in their homes and communities that cause the achievement gap to grow over time, like hunger, illness and absenteeism, or lack of access to intellectually enriching summer activities. Thus, while preschool for all is a potentially positive education reform, it still suffers the same fundamental problem that all other education reforms suffer: It does nothing to reduce poverty and the wealth gap. And as long as these problems persist, there will continue to be an achievement gap.

Obama’s Pre-K for All Plan Leaves Out the Middle Class

Obama’s plan is to provide quality pre-K for all the lower income families who currently cannot afford it. But what about all the middle class families who cannot afford it, or those who are borrowing on their retirement plans to pay for it? Will they get any relief?

Probably not. Without relief, they will continue to borrow and save and spend more than they want to because they know the educational value of preschool (and they need day care for their children so they can go to work). Thus, the risk of middle class children missing out on preschool is less of a problem.

The government’s interest in providing free public education is to aid the employing class in providing their future employees with the basic skills necessary for work at the lowest cost possible. A small increase in expenditures to help the lowest achieving kids increase the chances that they’ll graduate might be considered a reasonable investment, but providing superfluous relief to the already self-sufficient middle class would be wasteful. More importantly, this subsidy will allow private companies to make large profits providing pre-K educational services to the poor, much like many urban charter schools are already doing at the K-12 grade levels.

NY Mayor Buys LA School Board Race, Starts Arms Race With UTLA

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

One might well wonder why New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending $1 million of his own hard-(hardly)-earned cash to influence the Los Angeles school board race (the largest donation yet in this hotly contested race). Yet it is not just Bloomberg—several other billionaire outsiders have also ponied up large sums to help their favorite candidates win and it is not because they care about the wellbeing of LA’s children. Los Angeles Unified (like New York) is a battleground school district in the quest by wealthy investors and entrepreneurs to siphon off tax dollars from public education and crush their biggest enemy—the unions. What goes down in LA, they hope, will soon follow throughout the country, aiding their ability to weaken or destroy public sector unions, while increasing their share of the profits.

Bloomberg’s donation to Coalition for School Reform was meant to aid incumbent L.A. school board president Monica Garcia, in District 2, challenger Kate Anderson, in District 4, and Antonio Sanchez, who is fighting for an open seat in District 6. Each of these candidates has been a strong supporter of Superintendent Deasy’s reform agenda and two (Garcia and Anderson) have been vocal critics of the teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA).

While Bloomberg’s $1 million has been the largest single donation, Coalition for School Reform (CSR) has also raised more than $1.5 million in smaller donations, according to the LA Times, from other billionaires ($250,000 each from veteran free market education “reformer” Eli Broad and former Univision chief A. Jerrold Perenchio). CSR also includes Megan Chernin, who runs a nonprofit formed by Deasy to raise funds for LAUSD schools and who used to head L.A.’s Promise, which managed three LAUSD charter schools. A smaller donation of $10,000 was made by Steven Prough, the current head of L.A.’s Promise.

The coalition has also received six-figure donations from Lynda Resnick, creator of POM Wonderful juice, and journalist Jamie Alter Lynton, who is on the board of Deasy’s nonprofit and who is married to Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Lynton has used her journalism connections as a bully pulpit to criticize UTLA and its defense of due process rights for its members. Former New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein has also ponied up $25,000 to support the cause.

The Coalition for School Reform is a pro-charter and pro-accountability outfit that Mayor Villagairosa set up to fund his pro-privatization candidates back in 2011. In that election, the coalition raised over $1 million from right wing billionaire Phillip Anshutz (a “reactionary that makes the fascist-friendly Koch Brothers look moderate” wrote Robert Skeels), as well as billionaires Eli Broad, Jerrold Perenchio and others. Skeels, an education and social justice activist who writes for Schools Matter and Solidaridad, is also running against Garcia, but has raised his comparatively infinitesimal funding entirely through small donations and community organizing.

So who are the candidates the coalition is supporting in this current election and what is their agenda? Let’s start with current Board President Monica Garcia, a raving union-buster, who said that if she were president of UTLA she would go on a rampage and fire all “ineffective” teachers and eliminate seniority. This only shows that she has no clue how school districts actually operate (e.g., the district is the boss, with the power to hire and fire; the union is the employee of the teachers, with the responsibility to defend their interests and no ability to fire teachers). More significantly, it implies that she despises teachers, presuming great numbers of them to be incompetent, or at least an expensive burden, who should be replaced en-masse by lower-paid and more compliant novices.

The coalition’s candidate for District 4, one of LAUSD’s more affluent districts, is Kate Anderson, an attorney who once worked for Munger, Tolles & Olson, a high-powered law firm with members who are currently working in President Obama’s cabinet and who have served (or who currently serve) as CEO’s and directors of large investment firms, like Salomon Brothers and Berkshire Hathaway. One of the coalition’s priorities for District 4 is “stand[ing] up to special interest groups that make it impossible to remove poorly performing teachers.” In other words, they are counting on Anderson to attack collective bargaining and weaken the union by eviscerating teachers’ due process rights. Anderson’s supporters include Ben Austin, founder of Parent Revolution, the astroturf group behind most of LAUSD’s Parent Trigger battles, and another charter school advocate and profiteer.

Anderson, like Garcia, has publicly expressed ignorance about how the school district operates, calling into question her credibility as a future board member. She was quoted in the L.A. Weekly saying “I’m really frustrated by the lack of a teacher evaluation system. . .” though LAUSD does in fact have a teacher evaluation system, one that was negotiated by the district with the union and signed into a contract by both parties. Like Garcia, she, too, is disdainful of teachers, saying “We need a system that. . . when appropriate, helps teachers gracefully exit from the system.” This is essentially a euphemism for, “we need a more efficient way to get rid of teachers.” It is probably safe to presume she is referring to expensive veterans, union organizers, student advocates, charter school critics, and others who stand in the way of CSR’s privatization schemes. Ironically, Anderson’s opponent, Steve Zimmer, is a Teach for America alumnus who is supported by both UTLA and several charter schools.

In response to the large donation by Bloomberg, UTLA has asked for outside funds from the state and national teachers unions to help it support its own favorite candidates for the L.A. school board and has said it planned to spend several million dollars on the election.  As of last week, the NEA was unwilling to get involved, but the California Teachers Association and AFT have left the possibility open, according to the LA School Report. Regardless, it is unlikely that UTLA will be able to keep up the coalition’s spending, as it has no billionaire supporters.

The third candidate being pushed by CSR is Antonio Sanchez, another Villaraigosa ally, who also once worked for the County Federation of Labor, making him seem like a pro-union (rather than pro-privatization) candidate. Indeed, the Daily News reports that several unions have endorsed Sanchez, including UTLA and SEIU. However, despite his labor credentials, Sanchez supports much of Villaraigosa’s “reform” agenda, according to the L.A. School Report, saying that he wants to “break” the divide between unions and school choice and accountability advocates. This ought to give UTLA pause, as “breaking the divide” means getting the union to accept harmful concessions. For example, Sanchez supports the use of student performance data in teacher evaluations.

“Breaking the divide” between teachers’ unions and “reform” advocates is one of the main goals of CSR and its billionaire funders. As the reform movement sees it, the unions’ opposition to evaluation reform, Value Added Measures (VAM) and charter schools is irrational, selfish and meritless—and something that can be whittled away with persistence and finesse. They have good reason to believe this. UTLA—as well as CTU, in Chicago, and UFT, in New York—have all acquiesced to the use of student performance data or actual test scores to evaluate their teachers, despite the fact that such data is inconsistent, unreliable and correlates more strongly with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds than with teacher quality.

Bill to Undermine Teacher Due Process Revived in California State Legislature

California state senator Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) has reintroduced legislation that is supposed to speed up the dismissal of teachers for gross misconduct, the Los Angeles Times reported this week. The new legislation, SB 10, will be very similar to a failed bill advanced last year by Padilla. The text of the bill was not available as of Monday.

In the wake of LAUSD’s sex abuse scandal (see here, here and here), it is understandable that the public would want a more efficient and effective process for removing child molesters from the schools. However, the problems in LAUSD were not the result of ineffective disciplinary rules. Rather, the school district was asleep at the wheel, routinely ignoring parental complaints, losing personnel records, and not doing the necessary investigative work when it did respond to complaints. Several parents are currently suing the district for its incompetence in handling the Miramonte case.

According to an audit released last week, LAUSD frequently failed to report teacher misconduct to state Commission on Teacher Credentialing authorities and took too long to investigate abuse allegations. In one case, a principal took eight months to notify an employee after it had concluded its investigation. Overall, the audit found that LAUSD failed to promptly notify state authorities about 144 misconduct cases. Some of the cases were report as much as three years after the allegations were first made.

Padilla’s previous attempt at “improving” the disciplinary process would have done nothing to make school districts more accountable, more effective at record keeping or better at their internal investigations. It would, however, have significantly reduced due process for teachers, by taking the final disciplinary decisions away from an objective state body and placing them in the hands of local school districts, which are often biased against their own teachers and which have a strong stake in controlling public perception, even at the expense of teachers’ due process rights. LAUSD demonstrated this last year when it fired the entire staff at Miramonte Elementary, even though only two of its teachers had been accused of abuse.

The state audit concluded that the lengthy and expensive dismissal process for teachers in California contributes to districts making settlement agreements with them instead of fully investigating and disciplining them. This is because certificated employees (i.e., teachers) who appeal their dismissals are currently entitled to a hearing before the Commission of Professional Competence (CPC). One of the goals of the Padilla legislation is to reduce settlements by speeding up the dismissal process, in part by ending teachers’ rights to a hearing before the CPC.

While it is certainly desirable to get molesters out of the classroom as quickly as possible, the right to an appeal is a necessary due process right, as innocent teachers are sometimes arbitrarily or vindictively accused of misconduct by administrators, parents and students. Ending this right will do nothing to protect children, as districts already have the right, as well as the legal obligation, to immediately remove accused abusers from the classroom, even while investigations are pending. While the new legislation would do nothing to expedite the removal of molesters from the classroom, it would reduce the amount of time it takes from the end of the investigation until a teacher is dismissed, thereby saving districts money that would have been spent housing teachers in “rubber” rooms or paying them salaries during the appeals process.

Fuentes Caves to Insatiable Conservatives With More AB 5 Compromises

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Felipe Fuentes, author of California’s new teacher evaluation bill, AB 5, has added more anti-teacher revisions to the legislation in an attempt to placate conservatives and win a waiver to the federal No Child Left Behind law. The problem is that conservatives will never accept AB 5, no matter what compromises are made, as long as AB 5 continues to allow teachers to collectively bargain any changes to their districts’ evaluation systems.

The changes might make California eligible for a NCLB waiver. According to John Fensterwald, of Ed Source, this would halt penalties for low performing schools and districts and make it easier for the state to access $350 million in Title I revenues for low performing districts. One of these changes is particularly onerous for teachers and could be devastating for schools and students: the mandatory use of student standardized test scores as a measure of student growth which would be part of teacher evaluations.

In order to get a waiver, the feds want these scores to be a “significant” part of how student growth is measured. The revised version of AB 5 does not use the word “significant.” Each school district will be allowed to determine what portion of student growth will be measured by the state tests, and how much will be measured by other factors, such as student portfolios or internal assessments.

CTA Sellout or Victory?

The new requirement that student test scores be used to evaluate teachers is a direct challenge to the CTA. The union’s support for AB 5 was due in large part to the requirement that changes to evaluations be collectively bargained at the district level. The new student test data mandate undermines this. Unions would have no say in whether or not the tests could be used to assess teachers, though they could collectively bargain how much the tests count toward teachers’ evaluations. Furthermore, while the CTA has expressed a willingness to accept the use of student test data, they have argued that the forthcoming Common Core assessment would have to be studied first to see if it was appropriate for this use. The legislature, on the other hand, is imposing the use of such data first, with the assumption that “any assessments developed by a national consortium and adopted by the State Board and used for the purposes of this section meet statistical and psychometric standards appropriate for this use.” In other words, the tests can and will be used to assess teachers and the CTA will have to trust that the consortium will make the tests statistically and psychometrically valid for this purpose.

It is unclear how the California Teachers Association (CTA), which had come out strongly in support of AB 5, will respond to the revisions, (though unofficially I have heard they are supporting them). Their continued support would not be a surprise. While the CTA has opposed using the existing STAR exam to assess teachers because it was not designed for this purpose, they were strong backers of the shift to Common Core Standards (CCS) and the continuation of the use of high stakes standardized tests for their students. Furthermore, they have already accepted other forms of student assessments to measure teacher competency. Thus, they are not necessarily opposed to standardized test scores for this purpose.

A fundamental problem is that all student tests measure student ability, not teacher ability. At best they might serve as a proxy for part of a teacher’s skill in the classroom. They cannot come close to assessing the bulk of what teachers do and in practice they are a terrible proxy for any aspect of teacher skill. Student success and growth on standardized tests (and most other assessments) are influenced by many factors, especially their socioeconomic backgrounds. They are also influenced by previous teachers, familial support, English language proficiency, special education status and disabilities. Furthermore, Value Added scores for teachers are inconsistent for all but those at the very extremes. Even for those at the extremes the scores are inconsistent if they aren’t averaged over three years.

For these reasons, the use of student test scores should not be used to assess teachers at all. If they are used, many good teachers will receive bad evaluations and potentially be denied tenure and promotions or even get fired as a result. This is not only unfair to the teachers, but also a disservice to students, who may lose good quality and beloved teachers simply because they are poor or have a learning disability. It will also encourage even more teaching to the test than already occurs, as teachers focus more on saving their jobs through test preparation than on good teaching. And it will encourage veteran teachers at low income schools to jump ship and head for safer shores in affluent neighborhoods, where their students are less likely to have a negative impact on their evaluations and job security.

Insatiable Ed Deformers

Even with the revisions, there is continued opposition to the bill and not just from right wing pundits. The Association of California School Administrators and the California School Boards Association are expected to continue their opposition to the bill, according to Fensterwald, because of the high cost ($18 million per year to cover costs like principal training and the expense of increased teacher observations) and the fact that “all” aspects of evaluations will still be subject to collective bargaining.

Many school boards and district administrators believe they have the right to determine all factors in an evaluation. This has not yet been tested in court, though an attorney for LAUSD has written a brief outlining the district’s authority. If AB 5 passes, lawsuits would be likely, particularly by LAUSD, which has invested considerable resources into its new VAM evaluation system.

Regardless, it sounds like the use of student test data will be a mandate under the law: all teachers will be subjected to it. California would not be in the vanguard—there are already 21 other states that require the use of student test data to evaluate teachers. It would be one more reason not to go into teaching or to look for other work (if there were any other jobs out there).

The CTA could try to spin it as a victory by claiming they preserved collective bargaining. This would be inaccurate. In order to save collective bargaining for some aspects of teacher evaluations they will have given up that right for one of the most important aspects: whether or not to allow student test data at all. By supporting the use of student growth data they hope to show the public and their opponents that they are reasonable, professional and truly care about improving the quality of teaching in California. In reality, this position bolsters the straw man argument that teachers are to blame for low student achievement and helps perpetuate the delusion that good teaching can overcome poverty.

FL Teachers Required to Work Longer Without Compensation?

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Modern School has covered several of the ways that No Child Left Behind and the testing/accountability mania benefit private business (see here, here and here), such as forcing schools to convert to charter schools, hiring private tutors and increasing purchases of canned curriculum and test preparation materials. Florida is on the verge of implementing a new backdoor gift to private education profiteers: using state tests to increase workloads, thus decreasing hourly wages for teachers.

As wages and working conditions deteriorate at traditional public schools, they start to look more and more like private, for-profit charter schools, where unions are rare and working conditions and pay have always tended to be poor.  Not only does this make it harder for the traditional public schools to hire and retain the best teachers, thus harming students by depriving them of quality teachers, it allows the bottom-feeding charters to continue paying poorly and demanding longer hours, which helps their bottom line.

The Florida state legislature passed a law in March, the Huffington Post reports, that requires the 100 lowest-performing schools on the reading FCAT test to provide an additional hour of reading instruction each day. Considering that this extra hour is over and beyond their normal work day, teachers should be recompensed at an overtime rate of at least time and a half. Yet there is no guarantee that they will even be paid their normal hourly rate.

The state supposedly has earmarked $30 million to pay teachers. However, according to Karen Aronowitz of United Teachers of Dade, this is not enough to cover all the affected teachers’ actual hourly rate. According to the Palm Beach Post, their district, alone, will require $7-8 million to cover the new program. Miami-Dade is expected to suck an additional $3 million for the program, leaving only $19-20 million for the rest of the state.