Corruption at CTC Placed Kids at Risk, Denied Teachers Credentials

A recent lawsuit against the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), filed in November by former government lawyer and CTC whistleblower Kathleen Carroll, alleges that CTC lawyers and administrators engaged in numerous illegal acts that prevented qualified teachers from obtaining or maintaining their credentials. The charges against the attorneys include tampering with case outcomes, acting outside their legal jurisdictions, nepotism, cronyism, and conflict of interest.

According to Steve Zeltzer, writing for Daily Censored, the suit’s allegations imply that the CTC may have been used as a tool for preventing qualified teachers from receiving their credentials so they would be unable to get hired at traditional district schools and be forced to seek jobs at alternative schools with less stringent credentialing requirements, like charter schools, which are often nonunionized.  Consequently, Zeltzer argues, thousands of teachers may have been illegally or inappropriately denied their credentials, thus creating a small army of well-trained teachers willing to accept low-paying jobs with poor working conditions at private charter schools.

The CTC is responsible for licensing California teachers, administrators and other education personnel; investigating charges of misconduct against credentialed teachers and applicants; and approving teacher training programs. The agency has been involved in the development of curriculum, tests for teachers, and teacher evaluation policies, often by outsourcing to private testing and publishing companies like NCS Pearson (which is currently being sued by the state of New York (among others) for illegal kickbacks to officials involved in deciding whether or not to use their tests. Pearson is also a big player in the design of Common Core Standards (CCS) which will require a whole new series of high stakes exams from which Pearson hopes to profit.

Zeltzer reports that several CTC Commissioners have had personal or financial ties with private charter schools and would thus benefit from having a large pool of teachers desperate for jobs, but unable to acquire them at traditional public schools. Ting Sun, for example, was chair of the CTC at the same time she worked at the Natomas charter school—which she founded with her husband—and was being paid by the California Charter Association. She is also on the board of the corrupt Gulen charter school chain Magnolia Public Schools (for more on Gulen, see here, here and here). According to Zeltzer, Sun failed to report these conflicts of interests, as required by CTC commissioners, since they vote on contracts paid for with public funds.

Carroll had been an attorney at the CTC for four years until she was fired for whistleblowing in the middle of the audit of the commission that she helped initiate. One of her allegations was that the CTC had a long backlog of misconduct reports, many of which were specious. The CTC admitted there was a backlog of more than 12,000 reports. The actual number was never verified. Regardless, this is a serious safety concern for parents and students (as some potential abusers may have remained in the classroom) and a serious due process violation for accused teachers (many of whom may be innocent, especially since many of the reports were trumped up).

Carroll told Ting Sun that the Director of Professional Practices at the CTC, Mary Armstrong, had lied about the backlog. She told CTC Director Dale Janssen that the misconduct reports were not being processed quickly enough, including those involving sexual misconduct, thus placing students at risk. According to the suit, Janssen responded by hiring a private investigator to discredit Carroll, including the release of her private medical records.

There may also be evidence of tampering by the office of California Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, which initiated the audit at Carroll’s request. Steinberg’s office made changes in the audit request and failed to investigate some of Carroll’s allegations. Steinberg’s office, like many in the CTC, had its own conflicts of interest. His education advisor, Susanna Cooper, is married to Eric Douglas, who owns Leading Resources Inc., which represents the Bureau of State Audits, which was doing the CTC audit. Cooper is also on the board of West Ed, which receives funding from Pearson and numerous other public and private education profiteers, and has a vested interest in many of the CTC’s projects, including testing and credentialing, thus further drawing into question the objectivity of the audit.

State Auditor Elaine Howle said the commission was “one of the worst run” organizations she had ever investigated. Janssen and Armstrong resigned not long after the auditor’s report came back (June 2011), but the backlog of unprocessed complaints continues and questions remain about the agency’s integrity. Sun remained as chair until her term ended in November. Janssen and Armstrong were replaced by Gov. Brown appointees, Nancy Ramirez, from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Michael Cooney.

Online Ed: Trojan Horse for Destroying Teachers Unions

Beware of Capitalist Bearing Gifts of Cheap Canned Curricula (Image from Flickr, by Perfecto Insecto)

Idaho teachers and parents are pissed off: Last year, their state Legislature passed a law requiring all high school students to take some online classes to graduate, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. They also mandated that students and teachers be given laptops or tablets to take and manage these online courses. In order to pay for the hardware the state will likely have to slash teachers’ wages. Adding insult to injury, the state expects teachers to manage the online classes, simultaneously adding extra responsibilities and deskilling the teaching profession.

In response, teachers marched on the capital last year to oppose the legislation, accusing lawmakers of being in bed with lobbyists from the tech industry like Intel and Apple. Together with parent groups they gathered 75,000 signatures to put a referendum on the ballot in November to overturn the law.

Online education is one of numerous education reforms currently being pushed by billionaire philanthropists and education entrepreneurial vultures. Supporters argue that it opens up doors for students, providing opportunities to take classes not normally offered at their school, make up classes that they have failed or get ahead. Many also make the claim that kids today are so hooked up to their electronic devices that flesh and blood teachers can’t motivate them anymore, but inanimate computers miraculously can.

While there is no compelling data to support the claim that online courses are better motivators or more effective teachers, one might reasonably ask what’s the harm in letting kids voluntarily take a few online classes at home or on weekends to makeup missing credits or to get ahead, especially if it is the parents’ responsibility to pay for the courses and there is no extra burden placed on school districts and teachers?

In Idaho and many other states, however, the opposite is happening, with online classes being imposed on students, parents, teachers and school districts, without their consent. Everyone pays for these programs because the funding comes from tax dollars. It is a Trojan horse for education privatizers who recognize they can’t outright privatize the education system, but can make billions of dollars by using their lobbying muscle to convince legislators to transfer tax dollars from education budgets directly into their pockets. It is a pretty safe investment, too, since they get millions of obligate consumers (i.e., students). Of course it is even better when the online courses are made a mandatory graduation requirement, as in Idaho. Furthermore, once they have sold their product to a school district, they can lock the district into their hardware and software for years or even decades.

For teachers, managing online courses could be trivial, or not, depending on the course, the software and the technical support provided. However, it certainly deskills and trivializes their profession, turning them into over-trained babysitters, whose main job is to make sure students are working, staying on-task, and not surfing the web and messing around on Facebook. Every minute that a teacher gives up to an online course is a minute that the teacher has relinquished his or her expertise and responsibility for teaching to Microsoft, Apple, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, or some other corporate Ed Deformer, whose objectives are profits, not the wellbeing of students.

Perhaps more insidious are the long-term implications for teachers’ salaries and collective bargaining. So-called “unskilled” and “semi-skilled” workers typically earn less money and have less organized strength than their “skilled” allies because they are more easily replaced by the bosses. Car and electronics manufacturers, for example, can easily export assembly line jobs overseas because little training and expertise are required to handle the work. As teaching and other occupations become deskilled, workers in these fields also lose collective strength for similar reasons. (For more on how this can weaken teachers’ unions, please see Carnegie, Steel and the Busting of Teacher Unions ...)

Consider school librarians, who are being replaced by parents, volunteers and non-credentialed staff in order to save money (see “Less Than 25% of California Schools Have Librarians”). In the past, schools hired librarians who were credentialed and trained both as teachers and librarians and who could deliver curricula and collaborate with teachers to design and implement complex research projects. Today, many school districts are treating librarians like retail checkout clerks, whose only responsibilities are to swipe barcodes on books and prevent theft.

Once online classes become a mandated and normal part of school, the door is opened to getting rid of teachers entirely. What need is there for a highly trained, unionized teachers to make sure a room full of kids is completing an online assignment that was prepared and will be assessed by a private corporation? Districts will argue that the job can be done noncredentialed and lower-paid proctors, which will save the districts lots of money and force more teachers into the unemployment lines. They will also be able to use the threat of downsizing as leverage against the unions to extract pay and benefits cuts and increased responsibilities and work for the teachers.