Today in Labor History—January 26

January 26, 1886 – In Decazeville, France, miners attacked the home of their sub-manager at Watrin Mines, after he slashed their wages by 10%. He died when he jumped from his window. (From the Daily Bleed)

January 26, 1897 - The Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America received a charter from the American Federation of Labor to organize "every wage earner from the man who takes the bullock at the house until it goes into the hands of the consumer." The union merged with the Retail Clerks International Union in 1979 to form the United Food and Commercial Workers. (From Workday Minnesota)

Free Speech Costs Money--Dole Corporate Person (Image from Flickr by takomabibelot)

January 26, 1907 – Over 100 years before the OWS movement, anti-corporate personhood activists won a small and short-lived victory when Congress blocked corporations from contributing to election campaigns for national office. (From the Daily Bleed)

January 26, 1937 – A two-day sit down strike occurred at a Brooklyn power plant leading to a large scale organizing drive in New York subways. (From TWU)

January 26, 1983 – The National Commission on Excellence in Education, using bad statistics, called U.S. education mediocre. The commission recommended greater emphasis on English, math, social studies, and computer science; longer school days; abolition of seniority and merit pay for teachers. (From the Daily Bleed)

January 26, 1991 – 200,000 marched against the Gulf War in New York City, 200,000 marched in San Francisco and 200,000 in Bonn, Germany. (From the Daily Bleed)

Idaho Voters Reject Merit Pay, Super Intends to Bring it Back

On November 5, voters rejected free market education initiatives in several states in what many have called a referendum on corporate education reform. These “reforms” are not going away any time soon, however. Their backers are plowing ahead with plans to expand the reforms or reinstate them in places where they lost ground.

In Idaho, for example, voters overturned their “Students Come First” laws, which had imposed merit pay on the state’s teachers for the past year. Immediately after the election, state superintendent Tom Luna jumped into the fray saying he intended to bring back part of his Students Come First package, including merit pay, during the 2013 legislative session.

Regardless of what happens in 2013, teachers who earned merit pay during the previous school year will still receive their merit paychecks by Dec. 15, according to Magic Valley News. Close to 80% of the state’s teachers earned merit bonuses, amounting to $38 million in bonuses.

While this might seem like a high percentage, there were many schools that saw gains in state test scores whose teachers still did not earn bonuses. Twin Falls Superintendent Wiley Dobbs said he wasn’t aware of any teachers at any of the state’s alternative schools who received merit bonuses, despite the many fine teachers who work at these schools.

One of the problems with the rejected law was that it required teachers to meet both state and local goals in order to receive a bonus. The state goals were based on student performance on the Idaho Standards Achievement Tests. Local benchmarks would have varied from district to district and could include factors like graduation rates and attendance. This created an inequitable system that varied widely across the state and relied heavily on factors influenced far more by students’ socioeconomic backgrounds than their teachers’ skill in the classroom.

Thanks for Your Vote, Now Prepare for Your Punishment

Obama handily won reelection yesterday, promising in his victory speech to work with both parties to slash the deficit (which means large cuts to social programs like Medicare and Social Security and generally reducing living standards for the majority of Americans).

Based on what he didn’t say during the campaign, he is unlikely to do anything different or more on climate change, which means U.S. carbon emissions will hold steady or climb and a continuation (or increase) in super storms, droughts and food insecurity.

Education policy will continue as it has for the past 12 years, with a proliferation of high stakes testing for children and accountability and punishment for teachers. We should expect more districts and states to adopt Value Added evaluation deform, merit pay, blended learning, common core and other giveaways to private education corporations.

The U.S. will continue the slaughter of civilians throughout the world by use of unmanned drones. There will be plenty of U.S. troops killing and being killed on the ground in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. The war on immigrants will carry on with mass deportations and incarceration.

And the transfer of wealth from the majority of Americans to the very rich will continue unabated.

Thanks for your vote, suckers. Enjoy the ride!

LAUSD Wins Large Merit Pay Grant

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

What could be more appealing than the idea that if you work hard, play by the rules, and generally excel at what you do, you will be rewarded with higher pay, status and power? This, of course, is known as meritocracy and it is something that most Americans believe prevails in this country. And why not, it seems perfectly fair and reasonable? People shouldn’t get ahead by cheating or because they know the right people or because they have the money and power to game the system. 

Of course it is easier and more appealing to believe in meritocracy than to accept the reality that wealth begets more wealth and that few people ever transcend the socioeconomic status of their parents. The sad fact is that you can play by the rules, work your butt off, perhaps even kiss up to the boss, and still make little, if any, progress up the ranks in status or income.

Nevertheless, free market education reformers have been crying for years that the educational sky is falling, and that merit pay would encourage the competition necessary to make public education profitable, er successful. Thus, the Obama Administration has been giving away millions of dollars to school districts willing to implement this “reform.”

Los Angeles Unified has won the lion’s share of these grants in the form of a five-year, $49.2 million award from the Teacher Incentive Fund, a Department of Education program, to Daily News reports. The fund doled out a total of $290 million to 35 recipients in all. In addition to LAUSD, there were three L.A. area charter school networks that received federal funds for implementing merit pay schemes: Aspire Public Schools ($27.8 million), Green Dot ($11.7 million), and Alliance College-Ready Public Schools ($8.9 million).

As with meritocracies, in general, Merit Pay for teachers does not result in better societal or educational outcomes, nor does it ensure that the rewards go to the best teachers. For example, a mediocre teacher who happens to work in an affluent school may see large gains in her students’ standardized test scores through no fault of her own, while a superb teacher in a lower income school might work 80 hours per week, make home visits, offer weekend tutoring and still see declines in test scores. Consequently, a teacher could receive a merit bonus even though she did not work any harder or teach any better than her colleagues.

Aside from student test scores, which are nominally objective, teachers are still evaluated by their administrators, which is incredibly subjective and biased. Administrators tend to be poorly trained and lack the time to make sufficient and competent observations and evaluations of their teachers. Furthermore, administrators are often biased in favor of teachers who share their philosophies, experiences, goals and pet projects, which could lead to a more positive evaluation and merit raise for a mediocre teacher simply because he has kissed up to the principal, volunteered on the principal’s favorite committee or agreed to pilot one of her pet reforms.

Since there really is no accurate, consistent or reliable way to quantify teaching quality or to determine who deserves merit pay, teachers’ unions and school districts have, until recently, mutually agreed to contracts that pay teachers according to their years of teaching experience and additional education beyond their teaching credentials. This prevents districts from paying people more based on their gender, ethnicity or willingness to kiss up to their bosses.

In addition to creating an unfair and unaccountable system of rewards, the LAUSD grant will be used to encourage overwork and stress among teachers. Indeed, Superintendent John Deasy said the money will be used, in part, to ". . . develop teacher leaders without teachers having to leave the classroom, and principals can develop new leaders in their schools." In other words, some teachers will get bonuses for working additional hours beyond their normal school day to become “leaders,”—a code word which generally means shock troops for pushing other “reform” efforts.

Though they may get compensated monetarily for the extra work, they will not be compensated with extra time, which is what they will really need if they are to continue providing the best quality teaching for their students. Any extra responsibilities necessarily eat into the time teachers spend designing and preparing new lessons; meeting with parents, students and colleagues; attending meetings; and reading essays, lab reports and projects. Overwork does not necessarily translate into better teachers or students.

Chicago Schools CEO Brizard Out After 17 Months

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Just like the CEO of a private company that fails to act aggressively enough to maximize profits or to suppress worker discontent, Chicago Public Schools CEO, Jean-Claude Brizard, is out after only 17 months on the job. He is leaving by “mutual agreement,” the Chicago Sun-Times reports. In all likelihood, however, he saw the writing on the wall (the mayor was pissed off) and, like a good capitalist soldier, took a dive for the team.

Brizard had been handpicked by Emanuel to push through the his corporate education agenda, including the massive conversion of public schools into private charters, the unilateral imposition of a longer workday without commensurate pay, evaluations based on student test scores and merit pay. The teachers, not surprisingly, resisted, launching the city’s first teacher strike in 25 years and successfully rolled back some of these reforms. In short, Brizard failed the mayor and made him look the fool.

Brizard will be replaced by Barbara Byrd-Bennett, a former teacher, principal and Cleveland schools CEO. She had also been filling in as Chicago’s interim chief education officer for the past six months, helping to negotiate the deal with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) that ultimately got the teachers to return to the classroom. The final terms of Brizard’s departure have not yet been disclosed, but are expected to include a year’s salary of $250,000, according to the Sun-Times.

The Chicago Tribune reports that business leaders told Brizard that the mayor would blame him if the struggle with the CTU got out of hand (i.e., not crushed quickly with a decisive victory for CPS). Not only did Brizard fail in this, but he enraged the mayor by going on a family vacation just prior to the strike and he was absent during much of the contract negotiations. The teachers’ ability to spin the strike as a struggle against standardized testing and privatization was certainly an embarrassment to the mayor and he likely blamed this on Brizard, as well.

Byrd-Bennett is not planning on filling the position she vacated to become CEO and is expected to serve both roles, thus consolidating her power and sending the message to the teachers that her rule will be autocratic and decisive. This is important for CPS and Emanuel, as many teachers are already grousing about the rotten deal they got with their new contract (e.g., the raise doesn’t cover the extra hours they’re being required to work and 25% of their evaluations will now be based on unreliable and inconsistent student test data). Furthermore, the district has been withholding pay from teachers who participated in the strike and it is doing little about the dilapidated facilities, including many schools that lack air conditioning. The new contract also gives principals greater leeway in hiring outsiders and ignoring the pool of recently laid off CTU members.

The last thing Emanuel wants is a renewed strike or an escalation of discontent. Yet he is setting the teachers up for this with his new pension plan (see accompanying article below), which would cut benefits, delay the retirement age and increase employee contributions, thus further eroding teachers’ take-home pay and living standards.

Chicago Teachers Penalized by CPS and CTU

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Teachers who participated in the recent 10-day strike in Chicago saw smaller October 5 paychecks. Some received no pay at all. Yet the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which did not extend strike benefits to the teachers, continued to collect full dues from them, according to the WSWS.

While many hailed the strike as a victory, noting that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) dropped its demand for merit pay and did give the teachers a raise, the new contract accepts student test scores as a substantial portion of teachers’ evaluations. Considering that these test scores have little to do with teacher quality and that they provide unreliable and inconsistent data, they have no place at all in teacher evaluations. The new contract also accepts a longer school day without compensating teachers fully for the extra time they will be required to work.

According to the WSWS, the CTU told members they “will pay a temporary penalty this week . . . For now, however, they will continue their sacrifice in defense of quality public education, as they draw from the savings they set aside in preparation for the strike.” The CTU also told members they “may” be eligible for personal loans from the United Credit Union. During the strike, instead of offering strike pay, the union’s parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), offered low-interest loans.

It is noteworthy that the Chicago teachers went on strike at all and that they were initially opposing the corporate reform agenda, including merit pay and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. It was particularly significant because unions have all but given up labor actions such as strikes as a means of achieving their goals, focusing more and more on lobbying and political campaign funding, which are far more expensive and less effective than job actions. It is interesting, but sad, to observe that the AFT was unwilling to support the Chicago strike or to use members’ dues to provide strike pay, yet they readily coughed up $31 million on electoral campaigns last year.

Chicago Teachers Strike Ends in Defeat for Teachers and Unions

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) voted today to end their strike. 98% of the 800 delegates voted in favor of ending the strike, according to the New York Times, though the union’s 26,000 members would still have to ratify the new contract, which could take several weeks.

The new contract would give teachers a modest raise and prohibit merit pay, but it would also lengthen the work day by 90 minutes and require that 30% of teachers’ evaluations be based on their students’ test scores. The new contract would also reserve half of new job openings for laid off teachers, but only if they had strong ratings based on these test scores.

Virtually everyone is reveling and calling it a victory for teachers and a defeat for corporate Ed Reform. Mike Klonsky called it a “Big victory for teachers.” His brother, Fred Klonsky, said “Most thought it was a win. Few of those I talked to were satisfied. None thought the strike should continue. All mistrust the Mayor. Most know that the fight doesn’t stop here.”

Am I missing something?

How is it a victory for teachers (or students), or a defeat for the corporate ed reform agenda, to accept that 30% of teacher evaluations will be based on unreliable and inconsistent student test data (see here, here and here)? Considering that student test data, also known as Value Added Measures, or VAM, is almost entirely worthless as a measure of teacher effectiveness, it should not be allowed at all. Furthermore, the 30% rule will only encourage more teaching to the test, dumbing down and narrowing of the curriculum, and laying off of perfectly good teachers because they happen to work in low income schools, where student test scores and gains on those scores tend to be lower.

Likewise, how is it a victory for teachers if only half of new job openings go to laid off teachers and only to those who have high VAM scores? What about the good teachers who were laid off from low income, low performing schools? What about all those current teachers who will be laid off over the next five years as Chicago shuts down another 120 schools and converts 60 more to private charter schools? How is it a victory for the union, if they will lose thousands of members as a result of these layoffs? How is it a defeat for the corporate ed reform agenda when they will get another 60 charter schools and a weakening of the union as a result?

Yes, a prolonged strike would have been difficult to maintain and could have cost the union millions of dollars in fines and legal fees if the injunction sought by Mayor Emanuel were to go through, which it likely would. Yes, it would have been difficult to maintain public support. And yes, according to Illinois state law (SB 7), teachers are forbidden from bargaining anything less than the 30% floor they won for the percentage of their evaluations that will be based on student test scores. So, yes, this 30% is certainly better than 50%.

Nevertheless, SB 7 was an attack on collective bargaining and union power. Therefore, by accepting the 30%, CTU is capitulating to state-mandated restrictions on union activities. For the rest of the nation, the message is clear: Collective bargaining does not have to be banned outright, as it was in Wisconsin. It can simply be so hamstrung by legislatively-imposed pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo (e.g., VAM) that it becomes an impotent and meaningless endeavor.

Ending the strike may have been the most expedient tactic under the current circumstances. It certainly is easier, cheaper and less fraught than continuing to fight. And the teachers did halt some of the most onerous concessions that were being sought. However, the 30% should be seen as a defeat, not only because it will cause many good teachers to receive bad evaluations and potentially lose their jobs, but because it will encourage further legislative and legal attacks on union power.

Chicago Teachers to Strike on Sep 10

Chicago Public Schools has made another offer to the Chicago Teachers Union and the union has rejected it, saying that the strike set for September 10 is still on, according to the Chicago Sun Times.

CPS have moved away from their demand that raises be linked to merit pay, a small concession to the union. However, they are still only offering 2%, which is not enough to keep up with inflation and rising health care costs. Thus, even with a "raise" on paper, the teachers would be accepting declining take-home pay and spending power in the long run. CPS is also still holding strong to their plan to end step increases for experience.

Another UTLA Sellout—Evaluations Can Include Test Scores

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) recently agreed with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to allow the use of student test scores as part of performance reviews beginning this fall, the Los Angeles Times reported, though a UTLA attorney later said the commitment was contingent on whether the union and LAUSD could negotiate an agreement on how the scores would be used in the evaluations.

I am calling the agreement a sellout not only because UTLA had recently opposed using such data in teacher evaluations, but because the data are not an accurate measurement of teacher skill or ability.

The accuracy of such Value Added Measures (VAM) is still up for debate. Teacher trainer Grant Wiggins argues that VAM “models accurately predict over a three-year period, performance at the extremes,” which means that IF you average VAM scores over three years, you can identify the really great teachers and the really lousy ones. The vast majority of teachers (who fall somewhere in the middle) would thus be getting inaccurate VAM scores and potentially bad evaluations as a result. Furthermore, because most school districts that use VAM are using them to evaluate teachers on a yearly or biyearly basis, even those falling at the extremes may be getting inaccurate VAM scores since they are not averaging their scores over a three year period.

This, alone, is a compelling argument against using VAM. However, there are a host of other good reasons not to use VAM.

One of the assumptions of VAM is that a good teacher can help low income students improve as much as higher income students. This is not necessarily the case. Wealth does not simply cause students to earn higher test scores, but provides a variety of advantages that benefit affluent students throughout their lifetimes, including better health, greater access to enriching extracurricular activities, and a significantly lower risk of low birth weight, malnutrition and environmentally-induced illnesses. This decreases the chances that an affluent child will develop learning disabilities or impaired cognitive development and may increase how quickly they can learn and how much of the learning is retained. In other words, teachers at affluent schools may see greater gains in student learning because of their students’ socioeconomic backgrounds.

How much a student improves from year to year is also dependent to some extent on their previous teachers. For example, a chemistry student who had a bad math or science teacher the previous year may be lacking so much of the prerequisite knowledge and skills that their growth in chemistry is severely limited.

Despite the apparent acquiescence by the teachers’ union, there was still criticism from an attorney representing parents who sued the district for “violating” the four-decade-old Stull Act, which requires the use of student achievement in teacher evaluations. The attorney accused UTLA of saying one thing in court and then changing their position.

The Stull Act, however, requires the use of student achievement data, not necessarily test scores. It also does not specific exactly how that data should be utilized.

As terrible as it is for their members that UTLA has agreed to allow the use of such data in their members’ evaluations, at least they are trying to maintain some involvement in determining exactly how that data will be used. This can hardly be seen as being duplicitous, as the parents’ attorney has suggested. Rather, it sounds more like an attempt by the union to collaborate with management in the abuse of their members.

Chicago Teacher Strike Vote Today

Chicago teachers are taking a strike vote today. While the vote will not necessarily lead to a strike, it is the next step required before a union-sanctioned and legal strike may begin. It is also likely to pass, as strike votes are generally preceded by straw polls to gauge members’ readiness for a strike.

A strike is also the necessary and correct next step for Chicago teachers, who are being required by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to work a 20% longer day for only 2% more in wages, according to ABC news. CPS also wants to bring in merit pay, larger class sizes and 60 new charter schools over the next five years, which would dramatically weaken the union as charter schools are rarely unionized.

The teachers’ contract ends this month. The results of the vote are expected by the end of the week. If successful, a strike action could begin at the beginning of the fall, 2012 school year. The last major teachers’ strike in Chicago was in 1987.

Today in Labor History—January 26

January 26, 1886 – In Decazeville, France, miners attacked the home of their sub-manager at Watrin Mines, after he slashed their wages by 10%. He died when he jumped from his window. (From the Daily Bleed)

January 26, 1897 - The Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America received a charter from the American Federation of Labor to organize "every wage earner from the man who takes the bullock at the house until it goes into the hands of the consumer." The union merged with the Retail Clerks International Union in 1979 to form the United Food and Commercial Workers. (From Workday Minnesota)

Free Speech Costs Money--Dole Corporate Person (Image from Flickr by takomabibelot)

January 26, 1907 – Over 100 years before the OWS movement, anti-corporate personhood activists won a small and short-lived victory when Congress blocked corporations from contributing to election campaigns for national office. (From the Daily Bleed)

January 26, 1937 – A two-day sit down strike occurred at a Brooklyn power plant leading to a large scale organizing drive in New York subways. (From TWU)

January 26, 1983 – The National Commission on Excellence in Education, using bad statistics, called U.S. education mediocre. The commission recommended greater emphasis on English, math, social studies, and computer science; longer school days; abolition of seniority and merit pay for teachers. (From the Daily Bleed)

January 26, 1991 – 200,000 marched against the Gulf War in New York City, 200,000 marched in San Francisco and 200,000 in Bonn, Germany. (From the Daily Bleed)

Gates Right For Once? Of Course Not!

A new study released last week by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found that rating teachers by watching them teach is possibly the best way to help them improve, the Los Angeles Times reported this week. It also found that observing teachers infrequently (once a year or less) is insufficient, and that the observers, generally school administrators, often don't know what to look for.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 Both findings should come as no surprise to teachers (except for the seeming about face by the Gates Foundation, which has been at the forefront of merit pay, value-added, and other attempts to undermine teachers’ job security). Not surprisingly, Gates is still calling for the use of student standardized test scores to evaluate teachers, along with a host of other measures.


The Times article highlighted Memphis, which uses a new evaluation system (supported by Gates to the tune of $90 million), in which teachers are observed four to six times annually by more than one evaluator, each of whom must pass a certification program. Teachers supposedly get detailed feedback on observations within seven days. However, only 40% of their evaluation is based on observations, while 35% is based on a value-added formula, 15% on other measures of achievement, 5% on student surveys and 5% on the teacher's demonstrated content knowledge. Thus, contrary to the his Foundation’s own findings, Gates is funding a program that weights the best method for evaluating teachers—direct observations (40%)—lower than student achievement (35% + 15%).

Observing teachers or most other workers, for that matter, is often the best way to determine how well they do their job. Ensuring that the evaluator is well-trained and knows what to look for (and how to observe it) and provided ample time to make several observations also seems pretty obvious. However, the evaluators’ objectivity is seldom questioned and this, too, has considerable influence on the accuracy of the observations and the effectiveness of the evaluations and feedback. Administrators have the power to hire and fire and are therefore biased and should not be doing the observations, even if well-trained. For example, if they want to get rid of a troublesome teacher who is too outspoken or active in the union, but who is otherwise a good teacher, they can still observe and write whatever they like in their evaluations.

Training and hiring sufficient outside evaluators would be expensive and time consuming and, under current economic conditions, very unlikely to occur, which is one reason for the popularity of value-added assessments. Since districts are mandated to give the high stakes tests anyway, it costs them little to crunch the numbers and determine if a teacher’s scores are improving. The problem is that the test scores are correlated more with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds than any other factor, including the quality of their teachers. Furthermore, a student’s ability to improve on the tests is also correlated with familial wealth. Thus, teachers in low income schools are less likely to see substantial improvements in their students’ scores, even if they are exceptional at their jobs. Also, no one has yet come up with a reliable and reproducible value-added formula, with the consequence that some teachers rate well one year and poorly the next (see here, here and here).

The demand for value-added assessments of teachers is also a giveaway to the test manufacturers, the proponents of NCLB and the “Teacher-Effectiveness” Industry (see here, here and here). As long as administrators are required to use student test data to evaluate teachers, students will be required to take high stakes tests, instructional time will be sacrificed to test prep and testing, and electives and other courses will be dropped to make room for more test prep.

California Says No to Teacher Evaluation Reform

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

As the Obama Administration gets ready to offer waivers to states for No Child Left Behind, it is looking more and more like states will be required to accept a number of onerous conditions to win these waivers, including tying teacher evaluations to student test scores. This is Obama’s stick to beat teachers into submission. A few years ago he offered a carrot that looked very similar: use test scores to evaluate teachers and ease restrictions on charter schools in order to be eligible for some of the $4.3 billion in federal Race to the Top grants.

There goes crazy California again.

California is poised to buck this trend and many conservatives are rolling their eyes at “crazy California,” (which just got crazier with the passage of the rectal injection law).

AB5, which would have required school districts to use student test scores as part of teacher evaluations, died in the state assembly last week, according to the Orange County Register. However, John Fensterwald - Educated Guess, says that in reality the vote on the bill was merely postponed for a year.

Regardless, it is not California, but the test mongers who are crazy for believing that student test scores are an accurate measure of teacher quality.

They are crazy for several reasons. First, student test scores are a measure of students’ ability to pass a multiple choice standardized exam, not a measure of teachers’ skill in the classroom. Students may perform poorly on these exams for numerous reasons that have nothing to do with teachers like test anxiety, insomnia, stress at home, or apathy toward the test itself. Often the tests have no bearing on graduation or college entrance, yet take up entire school days or weeks, making students feel burned out, oppressed and disinclined to take them seriously. However, even when students take the tests seriously their scores are correlated more strongly with their socioeconomic backgrounds than any other factor, including their schools and teachers. Affluent students tend to get higher scores and show stronger improvement when schools make changes to improve test scores.

Perhaps the craziest aspect of this plan is that states want the NCLB waivers precisely because the tests are such a terrible measure of anything. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says that as many as 80% of all American schools will soon be failing under NCLB’s interpretation of these test scores, while the Orange County Register says that California state superintendent of schools Tom Torlakson expects a similar number of failures in California. Torlakson, to his credit, asked Duncan for an unconditional waiver. His reasons, however, had nothing to do with the irrationality of the tests and their assessments. Rather, he argued that it would be unfair for the federal government to demand overhauls without providing money to implement them.

The high failure rate is not just due to increasing rates of childhood poverty, which is certainly an important factor, but also to the very design of the assessment. NCLB deems a school a failure if any one subgroup of students does not make “adequate yearly progress (AYP),” even if all other subgroups do. For example, if boys, girls, special education, English language learners all improve, but those on free or reduced lunch do not, the entire school is considered failing. Yet if the majority of subgroups are improving, it would suggest that the quality of teaching is good and the schools’ interventions are, for the most part, working.

Another problem with the testing scheme is that the scores are a moving target. If a school improves over the previous year, but does not improve as much as other schools, it will not meet its AYP and could still be deemed a failure. Considering that the law requires students to be “proficient” in math and English, it would be much more appropriate, honest and meaningful to set fixed benchmarks that students must meet rather than comparing them with each other.

Who’s Running the Asylum?

Despite the insanity of tying teacher evaluations to student test scores, over two dozen states now use students' scores on standardized tests to evaluate teachers and many even tie pay raises, promotions and the loss of tenure to these scores. In Indiana, Ohio and Michigan, for example, school districts can promote and fire teachers based on students’ performance on state tests and in Washington state teachers are financially rewarded for student academic gains.

Et Tu NEA?

The teachers unions have largely opposed tying teacher evaluations to NCLB tests. However, in July, the nation's largest teachers union, the 3.2 million-strong National Education Association (NEA), said it would support test-based evaluations if the tests were “developmentally appropriate, scientifically valid, and reliable for the purpose of measuring both student learning and a teacher's performance.” This was a terrible concession as there is no such thing as a student test that measures teacher performance. If we want to know how good teachers are then we need to assess them, not their students. If we depend on an unreliable proxy like existing state tests, many good teachers who happen to teach in low income schools will be mischaracterized as bad teachers, while some mediocre and bad teachers who happen to teach in affluent schools will fall through the cracks.

The NEA’s move was also a capitulation to the anti-teacher hysteria that dominates the public education discourse. At the very root of the teacher evaluation debate is the assumption that there are too many terrible teachers that must be punished or fired. Yet there is no valid evidence that this is the case. Furthermore, the hysteria is being promoted by politicians and capitalists who want to weaken or crush the teachers unions and the labor movement as a whole. Rather than accepting the assumption that there are a lot of bad teachers requiring discipline or firings, the unions should be challenging the assumptions of the Ed Deformers and attacking their irrational metrics.

Worst of all, by even engaging the education deformers in this game, the teachers unions are complicit in the continued obfuscation of the biggest cause of the achievement gap—the wealth gap. The teachers unions ought to be investing the vast majority of their resources and energy into public outreach and organizing around this issue. In fact, ending poverty will result in the largest educational gains that can possibly be achieved, much more so than improving teachers or schools.