Chicago Teachers Tell the Rich to Back Off

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is calling for a march and protest on December 18 to “Tell the Fat Cats:  Get Your Paws Off Our Public Schools.”

While I could make many of the same criticisms of this that I have of the Occupy Movement (see here and here), I would rather call this a step in the right direction. (Plus, I really like their graphic for the protest).

(From the CTU website)

Certainly this is a reformist demand that lacks a meaningful critique of capitalism or public education’s role in bolstering it. Yet a mainstream craft union is unlikely to ever do this anyway. At least the CTU is placing some of the responsibility for their district’s crumbling infrastructure and their members’ declining working conditions directly on the backs of the rich—who have been tripping all over themselves and Chicago’s children in the race to convert CPS school sites into charter schools—rather than the usual vague union complaints about poor funding and belt-tightening by everyone.

The biggest problems with public education are not due to any defect in the schools or teachers. Rather, poverty and the wealth gap are the primary causes of the achievement gap. No reform that is currently on the table even attempts to address this. Certain social reforms, like those of the New Deal and the Great Society served to reduce poverty and close the wealth gap, and graduation rates climbed to their highest levels in response. But these economic gains have largely been reversed over the past 40 years, with an accompanying decline in wages and living standards for the majority of Americans.

Much of this decline has been due to a restructuring of the tax code, allowing the wealthy to keep a greater percentage of their wealth, causing a net decline in the revenue available for social services, like public education.

We are not likely to see the unions demanding an end to capitalism or even a reduction in poverty (though this reform would likely do far more to solve public education’s myriad problems than all the other current pseudo-reforms combined). However, it is not unreasonable to think that other teachers unions might start following the CTU’s lead and at least push back against the corporate-led “reforms” that are weakening the unions, deskilling the teaching profession and undermining the quality of education just so they can make a quick buck.

California’s Inflated Number of Non-Credentialed Teachers

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Everyone knows that the nation’s lowest performing schools (generally also the poorest) have the highest number of poorly trained or Non-Credentialed teachers. This common wisdom may very well be true. These are the toughest schools to teach at, with the greatest pressure for quick, miraculous improvements and the greatest expectations for teachers to work longer and harder to solve the schools’ myriad problems. Thus, it stands to reason that such schools would have higher rates of attrition and consequently have to hire more teachers each year than other schools. The need to hire many teachers in a short period of time would likely force many to hire some teachers who have not yet finished earning their credentials or who are teaching out of their subject area (also known as misassignments).

There has been considerable research to back up this hypothesis. In California, the data suggested that nearly 60% of the teachers in the state’s lowest-performing schools were not properly credentialed for the subjects they were teaching. This appalling statistic led to an intense effort to get these teachers properly credentialed or replace them with colleagues who already were properly credentialed.

The problem is that the data was wrong, very wrong. The actual number of improperly certificated teachers in the 2005-06 school year was only 29%, half the official number, according to an analysis by California Watch. While this is still a very high number that needs to be addressed, the faulty original statistic provided an inaccurate baseline for the state’s monitoring of the problem.

California watch examined the Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC) records in July, 2012, and found many duplications. The CTC later admitted that all the records had been duplicated and has since cleaned up its records according to the Bay Citizen.

Since the 2005-06 school year, misassignments have decreased dramatically and were down to 13% in the lowest performing schools for the 2010-11 school year, the most recent in which data is available, the Bay Citizen reports.

13% is still high and one might justifiably wonder why the state still has so many misassigned teachers in the classroom. After all, it has laid off 10,000s of fully credentialed teachers over the past four years. Why aren’t they filling vacancies and replacing the non-credentialed teachers with the growing pool of laid off credentialed teachers?

One reason is that low seniority teachers are sometimes replaced by non-credentialed long-term substitutes during layoffs, particularly in tough to fill positions with shortages of suitably credentialed teachers. While this example might seem asinine from the perspective of the students, parents and public, who all want the most qualified teachers possible in the classroom, it makes perfect sense to school districts grappling with large budget deficits. Substitute teachers cost a fraction of what districts must pay for their full-time tenured teachers.

This example should also seem ridiculous to teachers and their unions since it involves the replacement of dues-paying teachers with an underpaid non-union replacement workers. Yet the unions tend to defer to the districts, citing the districts’ rights under Ed Code to lay off workers during hard times and hire substitute teachers to fill in when teachers are unavailable. However, districts’ right and obligation to hire substitutes is intended to provide continuity and safety for children when a teacher is out sick or has a personal emergency, not to provide districts with a means to lower their payroll costs by firing qualified teachers.

Of course, if we really want the best fully credentialed and properly assigned teachers in every classroom, we need to pay teachers a hell of a lot more, give them a lot more autonomy and decision-making power, give up the testing and accountability mania, and generally treat them with a lot more respect and support. This would go a long way toward attracting people to the profession and keeping them there.

California Millionaires’ Organize Against Prop 30

Three business executives (Floyd Kvamme, David Marquardt, and Mark Stevens) recently sent out a fundraising appeal to their millionaire friends and colleagues seeking their support in opposing California’s Proposition 30, according to the California Progress Report. The initiative on November’s ballot, is supposed to bring in an extra $9 billion a year from increase taxes.

These millionaires and their wealthy allies are upset that the legislation would increase their income taxes by 1-3%. They are also careless: the letter somehow managed to fall into the hands of the California Nurses Association and California Federation of Teachers, which organized a protest in front of the elite St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco on August 21, one day ahead of the America’s Cup race. (You can view photos here).

It is telling that many of the state’s wealthiest individuals are opposing Prop 30, considering that the overwhelming bulk of their wealth comes from capital gains, which will be unaffected if the law passes. Indeed, the so-called Millionaire’s Tax (or Jerry Brown’s tax initiative), is really a tax on everyone but the millionaires. It includes a regressive sales tax increase, which affects lower income people far more than affluent individuals. It also includes an income tax increase which affects working and middle class individuals far more than the wealthy, since the wealthy get only a small fraction of their income from salaries. Even with the 1-3% income tax increase, the state's wealthiest residents' income tax rates will still be at historically low levels.

What their opposition tells us is that they would rather see public health, safety and education collapse than part with any of their income (or they expect everyone but themselves to bail out the state).

Michelle Rhee’s $1 Billion Union-Busting Superpac

According to the Ed Deform movement, teachers unions are the main impediment to student success. All they care about is protecting incompetent or perverted teachers, keeping working hours short and salaries high and blocking real and meaningful reforms like private charter schools, abolition of due process rights, increased high stakes tests, and dumbed down Common Core Standards.

Education reformers should thus be excited to hear that Students First, former Washington D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee’s fake student advocacy group, has dumped $2 million into a Superpac created to counter the corrupting influence of teachers unions in upcoming California legislative races, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Rhee hopes the new Superpac, called “Parents and Teachers for Putting Students First,” will ultimately raise over $1 billion in its fight against the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers. One of their first campaigns has been to back Democrat Brian Johnson, a charter school executive running for the 46^th assembly district in Southern California, pumping over $400,000 into his campaign.

Just Another Superpac to Benefit Corporate Interests

Unions, especially teachers unions, have been increasingly relying on political campaign funding as their primary tool for promoting the interests of their members. From the standpoint of workers this has been disastrous as it has taken resources, time and energy away from organizing and the promotion of direct actions like strikes and working to rule and focused them on the very indirect and fickle beneficence of political leaders whose interests lie primarily with business, not workers. The consequence has been a continuing downward spiral in workers’ wages, working conditions and living standards, with legislation increasingly favoring the interests of bosses over those of workers.

The most explicit recent example of the bankruptcy of this strategy is the teachers’ unions’ continued support for President Obama despite the fact that Obama has promoted numerous programs that are terrible for students and teachers (e.g., private charter schools, Race to the Top, Common Core Standards, evaluation reform, etc.). It is irrelevant that Romney might be even worse for teachers. A union is supposed to promote the interests of its workers and therefore should never endorse a political leader with a demonstrated track record of attacking those interests. They should especially not waste their members’ dues on that campaign, when those resources would be much more effectively spent resisting the candidate’s anti-worker policies.

From the perspective of the ruling elite, however, this strategy by unions has been much more of a frustration than a disaster. It has not stopped them from consolidating political power and increasing their wealth to levels unseen in nearly a century. Yet unions are one of the few remaining entities with bankrolls large enough to mount even a modicum of resistance and contest the wealthy in the political arena. Hence, destroying unions outright, or at least their ability to make campaign donations, has become one of the main priorities of the ruling elite. (An example is the Payroll Deception initiative being proposed in California).

MAD Madness

Amassing a stockpile of nuclear weapons large enough to annihilate the world several times over was a cold war strategy that proponents argued would make us safer by deterring the Russians or Chinese from using their huge stockpiles against us. If you nuke me, I’ll nuke you and the planet will be destroyed—Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

This arms race contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union by redirecting limited resources away from human needs and increasing their public’s disgust with their regime. However, according to many historians, it was the drawn out proxy war in Afghanistan between the U.S.-supported Mujahedeen and the Soviet-backed communist government that really blew their wad and brought down the U.S.S.R.

There has been an ongoing political arms race between wealthy individuals and the corporations versus unions and liberal nonprofits. It has always been an unequal race with the wealthy almost always outspending their opposition, often by a ratio of ten to one (or more). With the Citizens United ruling and the super spending by the Superpacs, this has only become more extreme and it threatens to do the same thing to the unions that military spending did to the Soviet Union.

It may not happen immediately. Unions will continue their copious spending in a desperate attempt to elect the lesser evils and block the most onerous legislation, all the while resisting strikes and other direct actions, discouraging their members from fighting back and continuing to give away more and more concessions to the bosses.

In the end, how different is this from withdrawing completely from political campaigns? In either case, the workers lose out. However, by withdrawing from the political game, unions at least retain their war chests, which can be used to organize and mobilize their members to directly pressure the politicians and the bosses, make their lives uncomfortable, cut into their profits, and make some real gains instead of always fighting just to make the losses less bad.

Republican Ninny State Says No to Teacher Gestapo

Republicans are not only ignoring calls to tone down their vitriolic rhetoric, they seem to be hell bent on turning every one of their pet projects for enriching themselves into a circus of absurd and violent ranting. In one of the latest examples, Rep. Sondra Erickson, R-Princeton, Minnesota, chair the House Education Reform Committee, demanded that the “Teacher Gestapo” back off their plan to include 90 days of classroom supervision for teachers undergoing an alternative licensing program. The “Gestapo” to which she referred was none other than the state’s teachers union, Education Minnesota (EM)

While Erickson later apologized, it should be pointed out that she is a former English teacher, herself, and well aware of the high attrition rate for novice teachers, and even higher rate for those who haven’t been credentialed or undergone supervised student teaching. Throwing a bunch of poorly trained novices into classrooms does not result in better educational outcomes. Rather, it results in schools having to replace large numbers of teachers after only one to three years. 

It should also be pointed out Erickson recently praised EM for their willingness to collaborate with her committee in a joint effort to damage public education in Minnesota. EM President, Tom Dooher, said, “We are willing to work with anybody,” which presumably includes Nazis, Commies, as well as Republican nitwits.

Here are just a few of the sellout projects EM is collaborating on:

• Easing rules on alternative teaching programs
• Yearly performance evaluations (possibly more often)
• Teacher pay tied to student performance

Boston School Closures = Pretext For Union Busting

The Boston School Committee voted unanimously on Wednesday to close more schools in order to offset a $63 million budget shortfall. Throughout the summer and fall, Boston School’s Chief, Carol Johnson, claimed that the ensuing closures were part of a reform effort to improve education. The project was euphemistically titled, “Redesign and Reinvest:  Our Path to Academic Success,” in an effort to cover up its true mission: to weaken the teachers union and put the squeeze on teachers’ autonomy and working conditions.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino called for greater power for principals, tying teacher pay to student performance, longer school days and major changes to the teacher evaluation system. Most significantly, the plan also seeks to open more charter schools, often in the shell of the ones that were shut down by the district..

10 Things Charter Schools Don't Want You To Know (About How lousy they really Are)

Here is an amazing reposting from Chaz' School Daze, of an article originally published yesterday, in the Wall Street Journal, by Sarah Morgan.

The Things That Charter Schools And Their Supporters Don't Want The General Public To Know.

Now that the unqualified Cathie Black is expected to become Chancellor on January 3rd we can expect her to follow in the footsteps of Joel Klein and be a strong supporter of the ever increasing Charter Schools as an alternative to the local public schools. This means more neighborhood schools will have reduced funding as Tweed allocates more of their scarce resources to the Charter Schools at the Public school's expense. What is very interesting are that Charter Schools have very serious problems that they hide from the general public. Some quite serious and are ignored by the pro-Charter School education reformers. Let's look at some of these issues closeup. A must read is what Smart Money published, an Article called "10 Things Charter Schools Won't Tell You". Many of the statistics come from the article.

1.Many Teachers Are Inexperienced And Not Certified:

Believe it or not, many teachers who are offered teaching positions in Charter Schools are not certified. Furthermore, once they achieve certification they leave for the local school district teaching positions.

According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, charter school teachers are, on average, younger and less likely to hold state certification than teachers in traditional public schools. In a 2000 survey, 92% of public school teachers held state certification, compared to 79% of charter school teachers. A 2008 survey found that 32% of charter school teachers were under the age of 30, compared to 17% of traditional public school teachers. Charter schools often recruit from organizations like Teach for America that provide non-traditional paths into the profession and are known as the "two year wonders" because they do their two year obligation and leave., More-experienced teachers who already have jobs in traditional public schools may have little incentive to give up the protection of tenure, pension, and health benefits to work in a Charter School.

Relying on relatively untrained, inexperienced staff may have a real impact in the classroom. “A lot of them don’t have classroom management skills,” says May Taliaferrow, a charter-school parent.

2. Large And Constant Teacher Turnover:

Another fact deliberately ignored by the pro-Charter School reformers is the high teacher turnover in most Charter Schools. In some cases the entire teaching staff could turnover within a five year period!

As many as one in four charter school teachers leave every year, according to a 2007 study by Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University, and other researchers at the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. That’s about double the typical teacher turnover rate in traditional public schools. Charter schools typically pay teachers less than traditional public schools do, and require longer hours, Miron says. Meanwhile, charter school administrators earn more than their school-district counterparts, which can also make teachers feel underpaid, he says. The odds of a teacher leaving the profession altogether are 130% higher at charter schools than traditional public schools, according to a 2010 study by the National Center on School Choice at Vanderbilt University. That study also found that much of this teacher attrition was related to dissatisfaction with working conditions.

3. Charter Schools Are Always Trying To Skim The Best Students And Will Advertise For These Students:

The Charter Schools will do just about anything to get "good students" to go to their school and will send out flyers to the parents of these students to get them to attend their school.

Walking around New York City, it’s impossible to miss the ads on buses and subways for the Harlem Success academies, Haimson says. The school is legally required to reach out to at-risk students, and it has been opening new schools over the past couple of years. However, some schools elsewhere have gone beyond marketing. A charter school in Colorado gave out gift cards to families that recruited new students, and another school in Louisiana gave out cash.

4. Charter Schools Discourage Students With Disabilities & English Language Learners From Applying:

Another well-kept secret is that the Charter Schools don't want students with disabilities, discipline problems, attendance issues, or English language learners.

Six-year-old Makala was throwing regular tantrums in school, so her mother, Latrina Miley, took her for a psychiatric evaluation, eventually ending up with a district-mandated plan that stated the girl should be taught in a smaller class where half the students have special needs. The charter school’s response, Miley says, was to tell her she could either change her daughter’s educational plan, or change schools. She moved Makala to a nearby public school – where, she says, teachers have been more effective at managing her daughter’s behavior issues. The school says it can’t talk about specific cases.

Critics say charter schools commonly “counsel out” children with disabilities. While a few charter schools are specifically designed to serve students with special needs, the rest tend to have lower proportions of students with special needs than nearby public schools, according to a review of multiple studies conducted by the University of Colorado’s Education and the Public Interest Center. Charter schools also appear to end up with students whose disabilities are less expensive to manage than those of public school students. A Boston study, conducted by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, found that 91% of students with disabilities in the city’s charter schools were able to be fully included in standard classrooms, compared to only 33% of students with disabilities in the traditional public schools.

5. The Charter Schools counsel out students who struggle Academically:

To keep up with the propaganda that Charter Schools have a greater percentage of graduates than the local public school, the Charter Schools counsel out low-preforming students so that they do not count in the percentages.

For all the hype about a few standout schools, charter schools in general are not producing better results than traditional public schools. A national study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford found that while 17% of charter schools produced better results than neighborhood public schools, 37% were significantly worse, and the rest were no different. (Not that public schools are perfect, as many parents know.

A host of other studies on charter school outcomes have come up with sometimes contradictory results. As with traditional public schools, there are great charters – and some that are not so great. “There’s a lot of variation within charter schools,” points out Katrina Bulkley, an associate professor of education at Montclair State University who studies issues related to school governance. “In fairness to organizations that are running high-performing schools, many of them are very frustrated with the range of quality, because they feel that it taints charter schools as a whole,” Bulkley says.

6. Charter Schools Do Not Preform Any Better Than Public Schools:
Despite the propaganda by the pro-Charter School supporters that the Charter Schools provides better educational opportunities, the reality is quite different.
For all the hype about a few standout schools, charter schools in general are not producing better results than traditional public schools. A national study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford found that while 17% of charter schools produced better results than neighborhood public schools, 37% were significantly worse, and the rest were no different. (Not that public schools are perfect, as many parents know.

A host of other studies on charter school outcomes have come up with sometimes contradictory results. As with traditional public schools, there are great charters – and some that are not so great. “There’s a lot of variation within charter schools,” points out Katrina Bulkley, an associate professor of education at Montclair State University who studies issues related to school governance. “In fairness to organizations that are running high-performing schools, many of them are very frustrated with the range of quality, because they feel that it taints charter schools as a whole,” Bulkley says.

7. Where Does The Money Come & Go?:

Unlike public schools where all the money has to be accounted for, the Charter School funding can be a mystery.

An investigation by Philadelphia’s City Controller earlier this year uncovered widespread financial mismanagement among the city’s charter schools, including undisclosed “related party” transactions where friends and family of school management were paid for various services, people listed as working full time at more than one school, individuals writing checks to themselves, and even a $30,000 bill from a beach resort charged to a school.

Financial scandals have come to light in schools around the country, but what’s more troubling, says advocate Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters in New York City, is that charter schools have opposed state audits of their finances. The New York Charter School Association won a lawsuit against the state comptroller last year, with the court ruling that the legislature had violated the state constitution when it directed the comptroller to audit charter schools. Charter schools in the state are already overseen and audited by at least two other agencies, Murphy says. “We have never objected to being audited, being overseen, and being held accountable. In fact, this organization has come out in favor of closing low-performing charter schools,” he says.

Walking around New York City, it’s impossible to miss the ads on buses and subways for the Harlem Success academies, Haimson says. The school is legally required to reach out to at-risk students, and it has been opening new schools over the past couple of years. However, some schools elsewhere have gone beyond marketing. A charter school in Colorado gave out gift cards to families that recruited new students, and another school in Louisiana gave out cash. Talking about bribing?

Are Charter Schools really better than the neighborhood public schools? No they are not.

Government Death (Er Deficit) Panels, Sell Out Unions and The War Against Workers

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Why was the 11 to 7 vote by the deficit panel considered such a victory, even though it fell short of the 14 vote super majority required to enact its onerous recommendations?  The vote showed that even liberals, like Dick Durbin, could be turned, and that ruling class support is mounting. Even Andy Stern, former boss of the SEIU, said he supported the general thrust of the measure, though he voted against it, implying that Big Labor plans to sell out the rest of us to Big Business. Of those voting against the plan, three were Republicans who opposed it only because it didn’t also abolish Obama’s health care plan. In short, with the support of labor and congressional liberals, it’s only a matter of time before European style austerity measures hit Americans, too.

The Deficit Reduction Plan is supposed to cut $4 trillion from the budget by 2020, by attacking social security, imposing a regressive sales tax, cutting Medicaid and federal jobs, while giving away huge tax breaks to the rich and to corporations. The fact that social security has no connection to the deficit, and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue to be fully funded, while the rich will get tax cuts, should make it abundantly clear that “deficit reduction” is not the real goal.

The deficit crisis, like so many other crises, is a fabrication to justify further transfers of wealth from the masses to the richest 1%, allowing the Stinky Rich to Become Even Stinkier. Durbin’s explanation for his support was the same as everyone else’s: “We all have to acknowledge the deficit crisis in this nation.” Yet the federal government is not like the rest of us, who do have to “live within our means.” They can continue to print money, as they always have during times of economic crisis. During the Great Depression, the federal government amassed a huge deficit to fund public works that put millions of Americans to work repairing infrastructure that was later used profitably by business and leisurely by the public. The comparisons with European countries like Greece and Ireland are also bogus, as those countries, being members of the EU, cannot print their own money.

The notion that tax breaks for corporations and the richest 1% are necessary for job creation is an equally absurd notion. They have had these same tax breaks since the beginning of the recession, and did little to create jobs. Banks used TARP and other bailout money to pay huge bonuses to their executives and to gobble up weaker institutions, but created few jobs and didn’t even increase lending. In contrast, the tax rate on the richest Americans was raised from 24%, in 1929, to 64%, in 1932, right in the middle of the Great Depression, when unemployment was nearing its highest point. Government spending also increased dramatically in 1932, when FDR started to implement New Deal public works projects.

1934 Minneapolis Teamster Strike

The main difference between then and now is that then there was a vibrant and militant labor movement, as well as strong socialist, communist and anarchist movements, all able to organize direct actions that terrified bosses and politicians. In 1931, there was a bloody coal miners strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, in which several miners were killed. There were coal strikes, farm strikes and auto worker strikes in 1932. In 1934, during the heart of the depression, there was a bloody textile strike involving over 400,000 workers on the Eastern seaboard, the largest strike in U.S. history. There was also a general strike in San Francisco in 1934, involving workers across many industries, effectively shutting down the city for four days. There were also violent strikes in Minneapolis (teamsters) and Toledo (auto workers), along with numerous sit down strikes and farmers’ strikes throughout the 1930s.

1934 San Francisco General Strike

These strikes paved the way for the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1934, which legitimized unions, but also created rules by which they had to abide, promoting the bureaucratization and timidity of union leadership. Even with the rules of NLRA favoring the bosses, they fought it tooth and nail, finally winning passage of the Taft Hartley Act, in 1947, which weakened NLRA by blocking unions from engaging in secondary boycotts, solidarity actions with other unions, and general strikes. Today, only 12% of the workforce is unionized, and even those who are unionized are hamstrung by hugely bureaucratic collaborationist union leaders who spend more time and money on buying politicians than on organizing their members. They tend to avoid strikes and other militant actions, even when desired by the rank and file, out of fear that this will lose them the chance to have a seat at the table with the bosses.