Teachers are Terrorists and Corporate Shills

Politicians are notorious for saying stupid, embarrassing and downright insulting and hurtful things in the quest to promote their political agendas. Michael Bloomberg’s recent comparison of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) to the National Rifle Association (NRA) ranks right up there with some of the stupidest—but here are a few other ditties (just in case you missed them):

Teachers Unions are Terrorist Organizations

In 2004, Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation's largest teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA), a "terrorist organization" during a White House meeting with state governors.

Schools and Universities Should Be Blown Up

Since the teachers are a bunch of terrorists, it is justifiable to blow up the places where they hang. In line with this sort of thinking, right-wing education privatization cheerleader and Fordham Foundation President Chester E. Finn Jr. said that the best way to reform public education is to “Blow it up and start over,” while his counterpart, Reid Lyon, former Chief of Child Development and Behavior Branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, suggested we blow up the teachers’ colleges.

Deadly Disasters are Great for Capitalism (Er, Children)

Current Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that Katrina was the best thing that could have happened to the New Orleans schools. What he meant was that disasters are fantastic ways to rally popular support for otherwise unpopular ideas, in this case, a massive scheme to convert the entire district to charter schools and destroy the unions.71% of New Orleans children are now attending charter schools, the highest rate in the nation. All employees, including teachers and custodians, were fired and forced to reapply, and all union contracts were canceled. Many of the unionized teachers were replaced by Teach For America interns.

Michael Bloomberg: Teachers Unions are Like the NRA

“It’s typical of Congress, it’s typical of unions, it’s typical of companies, I guess, where a small group is really carrying the ball and the others aren’t necessarily in agreement. . . The N.R.A. is another place where the membership, if you do the polling, doesn’t agree with the leadership.” (NY Times)

The comparison is grotesque and offensive because it likens teachers—who see themselves as defenders of childhood innocence and purity (e.g., Sandy Hook) to gun nuts and corporate shills—who are seen by many as the defenders of psychotic, murderous rampages (e.g., Sandy Hook). Yet if we ignore the offensiveness of Bloomberg’s statement, perhaps substitute AMA or Bar Association for NRA, one can see that there is some truth to Bloomberg’s comments. Most unions are like these organizations in that they invest heavily in lobbying, buying politicians and attempting to buy legislation. It is true that rank and file union members are often alienated from and disagree with their leadership. And it is true that the leadership of unions often put their own needs, interests and agenda above those of their members.

Obama’s Plan to Improve Science Education by Overworking Teachers

It is perplexing to many that we continue to have high unemployment and simultaneously have to import foreign workers to fill so many high tech jobs because of the dearth of sufficiently educated domestic workers. There have been numerous attempts to rectify this problem, but they all suffer from similar fallacies such as the myths that our education system is broken or deteriorating or that our teachers are terrible or disinterested or unwilling to persevere in the profession.

Indeed, 30,000 STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teachers leave the profession each year according to Good Education and this, no doubt, takes a terrible toll on the consistency and integrity of STEM programs. However, K-12 education loses thousands of teachers each year from all disciplines, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the needs and specifics of STEM teaching. For example, over 100,000 teaching jobs have been lost in the last year, while over 300,000 have been lost since 2008, according to Fire Dog Lake, primarily due to budget cuts resulting from declining tax revenue.

Furthermore, significant numbers of teachers from all disciplines quit within their first three years because they were not sufficiently prepared or are no longer willing to deal with the demands, stress and intensity of the job. And, as Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Blog pointed out last year, the attrition rates in other professions are also relatively high and this may actually be a good thing, especially for K-12 education, as it helps weed out those who are ill-prepared or ill-suited for the profession.

Of course it’s not just about retaining STEM teachers. It is also about attracting them to the profession in the first place. STEM graduates tend to have more remunerative options than humanities and social science graduates, like working for a biotech or software company. To this end, the White House announced last week the creation of an elite STEM Master Teacher Corps, the members of which will serve as models and inspiration for aspiring young STEM teachers, according to the Good Education report.

The Obama plan will begin this year with 50 teachers, expanding to more than 10,000 teachers over the next four years. These "master teachers" would be required to lead professional development and school reform efforts in their schools and districts, create lesson plans and novel strategies to improve their peers’ teaching, and mentor novice teachers to help keep them in the classroom. In exchange for all this extra labor, the “master teachers” will receive a national award recognizing their excellence and a stipend of $20,000 per year.

The Good Education article suggests that while the stipend “might not put them on par with a hot programmer at Google, the compensation will close some of the gap and make their salaries competitive with other careers they might be qualified for.”

Now $20,000 might seem like a substantial sum of money, particularly when many teachers are making only $40,000 per year (or less). However, for a teacher earning $30-40,000 per year base pay, their new salary would hardly be competitive with the IT or Biotech industries. Furthermore, Good’s estimation looks only at the take home pay, not the amount of pay relative to the amount of labor, status and stress.

The typical workload of a teacher includes managing and controlling classrooms of up to 35-40 students while identifying and serving their diverse and unique needs. This, alone, accounts for 5-6 hours (66-80%) of a teacher’s workday. In the remaining time, teachers must design and prepare creative and effective lesson plans; set up labs and projects; read and grade essays, lab reports, exams and other assignments; attend meetings; fill out reams of paper work; satisfy the sometimes contradictory and often overwhelming demands of administrators and local and state ordinances; and regularly communicate with parents. During this time, they have dozens of intense interpersonal interactions, generally with people who are not very good at articulately or respectfully communicating their needs, thus adding stress and frustration to an already overwhelming work day.

Considering these demands, all teachers, regardless of their discipline or location, should be earning six-figures as their base pay, without having to do a lot of extra work, as required by Obama’s STEM plan.

While it is certainly nice to be offered extra money for extra work, $20,000 does not come close to compensating teachers for the amount of work required by Obama’s STEM program. Mentoring novice teachers, alone, could add another 5-10% to a teacher’s already busy workday, especially if it includes frequent observations and meetings to debrief the observations. Curriculum design, too, can be extremely time extensive. Many teachers devote entire summers and/or additional hours after school (without pay) to curriculum design. Likewise, school redesign and reform efforts can eat up weeks or months during the summer, followed by additional daily or weekly labor during the school year.

It should also be pointed out that all this extra work can burn teachers out, taking away attention, patience and focus from their students. Many teachers no doubt have the energy and drive to make this work in the short-term, but the Obama plan calls for a minimum four-year commitment. It is difficult to imagine 10,000 martyrs across the country not only being able to give up so much of their personal lives to the cause of improving STEM education for four or more years, but being able to do it well, without sacrificing the wellbeing of their students and colleagues.

Under the Obama plan, STEM teachers will still to have relatively low status and autonomy (like other teachers), thus contributing to high attrition and difficulty attracting people to profession in the first place. They will continue to be subjected to arbitrary and ill-conceived reforms and legislation (e.g., No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top), attacks on their working conditions and job security (e.g., tenure and evaluation reform), and little to no academic freedom and autonomy in the classroom. They will also continue to be subjected to unreasonable expectations to solve major socioeconomic problems that are beyond their capabilities (like ensuring that low income 9^th graders who are reading at the 2^nd grade level are able to graduate on time ready to enter a four-year university).

This brings up another faulty premise of the Ed Deform movement: Kids aren’t graduating prepared for career and college because of defects with their schools or teachers. In reality, the minority of students who are not graduating on time or who are graduating without the necessary basic skills for career or college are overwhelmingly low income students who started kindergarten far behind their peers in pre-reading and math skills and who fell further behind as they progressed through school, not because of bad schools or teachers, but because their more affluent peers had a host of after-school and summer advantages that were unavailable to them.

Therefore, if we want to see more students graduating prepared for STEM careers or college we need to address both the increasing poverty of our students and the growing societal wealth gap, as well as the declining revenue available to K-12 education, since education funding can help ameliorate some of the negative educational impacts of poverty (e.g., free and reduced lunch and breakfast programs; after school childcare for young children of working parents). A much more effective use of the $100 million the Obama administration plans on spending on his STEM program would be to increase funding for programs like free and reduced lunch, restoring nursing and counselors to the schools, and adding more after-school and summer enrichment programs for low income children.

This, of course, is unlikely. First, virtually no policy maker acknowledges how much poverty affects educational outcomes and none is willing to invest in programs that reduce poverty, let alone tax the wealthy to do so. Furthermore, the STEM push is coming primarily from industry which wants greater control of its future workforce and increased consumption of its products. It’s not about helping children, especially poor children.

In the short-term, increased STEM education means more computers and iPads in the classroom, which means more profits for tech companies. In the long term, even if it does result in companies hiring more domestic employees, it will be primarily the elite upper echelon of public K-12 educated students who reap the benefits of high paying, high status tech jobs, as it is today. Lower income kids who are behind in their academic skills and course work will continue to have lower graduation and college admission rates, higher unemployment, and fewer job opportunities. Having better trained science teachers will not erase the effects of poverty, improve students’ reading from the 2^nd to 11^th grade level, or provide a safe, quiet place for them to study.

Fox Guarding Hen House: Rhee Buddies Up to Duncan During Investigation of DC Cheating Scandal

Michelle Rhee was the chancellor of Washington, D.C. schools from 2007 to 2010, during the time D.C. school officials cheated to raise test scores. The Office of the Inspector General in Arne Duncan’s Education Department has been investigating the case for the past six months. Considering how much the outcome the investigation could influence her career, it would seem a no-brainer that Duncan should not be fraternizing with her.

Nevertheless, the two sat side by side last month, as two of four featured panelists at an education conference in Washington. The conference was about the use of educational data.

Supposedly they did not talk about how to exploit educational data to further one’s career, as both Duncan and Rhee have done, or how to massage the numbers and game the system, as Rhee and her underlings supposedly did. It is also unlikely that the panelists discussed how much of a cash cow the testing and accountability mania have become for test and textbook publishers or revealed how much of their personal portfolios are invested in these companies. They most certainly did not talk about how little the tests and their data reveal about the quality of teachers and schools or how they undermine the quality of education by focusing on memorization and multiple choice guessing, while taking away class time and resources from arts, music, science, critical thinking and inquiry.

As the New York Times correctly pointed out today, Rhee’s reputation as a national leader of the education reform movement is based on the inflated D.C. test scores.

In March, USA Today published the results of an investigation of the D.C. schools that found unusually large gains at 41 schools and a suspiciously high rate of erasures on tests. This was one-third of the elementary and middle schools in the district.

In a rather amateur attempt to redirect blame to the Times, Duncan’s spokesman Justin Hamilton said, “It’s irresponsible for a New York times columnist to presume guilt before we have all the facts,” as if by not appearing publicly with Rhee Duncan might be biasing the jury.

The problem is that there is no jury—at least not yet.

This is an investigation by Duncan’s office. By socializing with a suspect under investigation, it gives Duncan and the entire Department of Education the appearance of being in bed with her, biasing the investigation and destroying what little confidence the public may have had that they would get to the bottom of the scandal or prevent any further cheating.

Evaluation Deal is Major Defeat for NY Teachers—Harbinger for Others?

A statewide deal was announced last week setting the stage for performance-based evaluations for New York teachers, with state officials finally settling a lawsuit brought by the state teachers union. 700 local districts throughout the state will still have to negotiate the fine points with local unions.

The new framework bases 40% of a teacher’s evaluation on student performance, with 20% being based on student progress on high stakes standardized exams.  The other 20% would also consider test scores, but would be measured using a union-supported method. The plan also makes it easier to fire teachers after two years of “ineffective” ratings.

According to the Wall Street Journal, all sides considered the deal a victory, with UFT President Michael Mulgrew saying that the new appeals process provides a "much greater degree of fairness."

VAM Evaluations Are Bad For Students as Well as Teachers

Regardless of the merits of the new appeals process, any use of student test data to evaluate teachers should be considered a defeat for teachers, as well as students and their schools.

First of all, the test scores and students’ progress on them are most strongly correlated with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds, not teacher quality. Consequently, teachers who have more affluent students will tend to get better evaluations, increasing the diaspora of quality veteran teachers from challenging, low income schools, where they are most needed, but least likely to get good evaluations and keep their jobs.

Secondly, there is no accurate, consistent or commonly accepted method for using student test scores to measure teacher quality. Various accounting methods tend to cause wildly fluctuating Value Added Measures (VAM) from year to year. Thus, an excellent teacher could easily get a “false negative” and get fired as a result, which would also be unfair to students, as well as the unjustly fired teacher.

Thirdly, the tests themselves are terrible waste of time and resources, sapping states and districts of much needed revenue for instruction and teacher retention. They do little or nothing toward improving the quality of schools or students’ educational outcomes. They take away class time from authentic learning, critical thinking and problem solving. They encourage teaching to the test and discourage creativity and curiosity.

In order to boost test scores, many districts have abandoned or reduced arts, music, athletics and even science to make room for increased test preparation and remediation. Many schools have even implemented test preparation and homework for kindergartners to prepare them for a lifetime of testing and drudgery.

Basing teachers’ evaluations (and thus their livelihoods) on these same tests will only encourage more teaching to the test and discourage creative, student-centered teaching, thus decreasing the quality of teaching overall. It also legitimizes the tests and their publishers, strengthening their grip on this deplorable and brazen taxpayer giveaway.

Why the Sellout?

The deal had been in the works for two years. However, the stakes grew when U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned the state last month that it was in danger of losing nearly $1 billion in federal Race to the Top money if it failed to overhaul of teacher evaluations.

In hard economic times, $1 billion is nothing to sneeze at. But it should not be forgotten that states and the feds have been consistently squeezing education of funding by slashing taxes on the wealthy and their corporations. The money to sufficiently fund public education could be provided, despite the recession, if there were increases in the marginal tax rate for the wealthy, combined with increases in the corporate, capital gains and inheritance taxes. Furthermore, if NY and other states simply refused to participate in NCLB testing, Common Core Standards, and other expensive “reforms,” they would save billions of dollars in expenditures on test printing, scoring and evaluating, new textbooks, making the Race to the Top (RttT) extortion racket  irrelevant.

One other little incentive for the union to sell out was Gov. Cuomo’s threat of a state-mandated settlement, including the threat of cutting state aid to districts. However, it shouldn’t matter which boss is screwing workers, the response should be the same. If VAM and test-based evaluations are bad for students and unfair to teachers, they should be opposed vigorously, regardless of who makes the demand.

Teacher Evaluation Crisis or Red Herring?

Ever since the Nation at Risk report, pundits, politicians and Ed Deformers have been decrying the crisis in public education and looking for causes and culprits under every bed. The problem is that public education is better than it was 30, 40 or 50 years ago.

While it is not without its problems, the single biggest problem is the socioeconomic disparity between students, not teacher quality. Nevertheless, the teacher evaluation system is far from perfect. But the biggest problem is not that too many “bad” teachers are slipping through the cracks. Rather, the biggest problem is that there are too few evaluators with too little training and too much bias to do the job well. In most districts, administrators are responsible for observing teachers and rarely do they have the time and training to do it comprehensively. In 15 years of teaching, I have never been observed more than 3-4 times per year (sometimes never), nor do I know any teachers who have been observed any more than this.

Yet even, if site administrators had sufficient time to observe everyone on a weekly basis, they would still have an inherent bias that potentially undermines the validity of their observations. An independent and creative teacher might deliberately choose his or her own original lessons over an administrator’s recommended ones, or publicly question or critique an administrator’s reforms, leading to biased negative evaluations. Indeed, union organizers, outspoken critics and advocates, and original thinkers are often singled out by bosses and treated unfairly as a result.

The New York City agreement allows the union to send up to 13% of cases to a three-person panel to protect against harassment by principals, according to the New York Times. While Mulgrew has spun this as a victory for UFT, it means that 87% of “at-risk” teachers will simply be tossed aside, without due process or a grievance procedure. Considering how much poverty exists in New York City schools and the heavy emphasis on student test scores, there will likely be a substantial number of good teachers who will fall into this unprotected 87%, abandoned by their own union and without the legal support they paid for with their dues.

There is one theoretically positive outcome from the settlement: the evaluation system will bring independent observers into the classrooms to monitor the weakest teachers, the New York Times reported. I say “theoretical” because, though it is preferable to use unbiased outside observers, these observers will have caseloads of 50-80 teachers, which is far too large to do the job well. Indeed, they are only required to do three observations per year. Furthermore, the “outside” observers will be provided by a private company which stands to profit off the system, creating a new bias.

Tech Giants Take On Publishers for Control of Education

Collage by Modern School (with Images from Flickr, sucello and mikebaird)

In a rare moment of lucidity and honesty, the Los Angeles Times published a piece last week criticizing tech giants’ play for billions of federal and state K-12 public education tax dollars. Reporting for the Times, Michael Hiltzik attended a Digital Learning Day Town Hall meeting sponsored by Google, Comcast, AT&T, Intel and others, with speakers that included Education Secretary Arne Duncan and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

Duncan and Genachowski called for laptops for every child because textbooks will ostensibly soon become a thing of the past. While there are certainly benefits to switching to digital textbooks, like allowing students to “write” in the margins or to interact with multimedia presentations, the real driving force, not surprisingly, is the huge profits to be made by tech giants like Apple, which announced last month that it “dreams of a world in which every pupil reads textbooks on an iPad or a Mac,” according to Hiltzik.

In reality, the medium makes no difference to education outcomes, according to Richard Clark,
from the Center for Cognitive Technology at USC. And with school districts already incapable of retaining teachers and purchasing printed textbooks due to budget cuts, the idea of buying $500 ipads for every child seems outlandish (unless they are donated by Apple in order to get school districts hooked on their software and support services, for which they could collect hefty yearly fees).

This possibility is not just Luddite paranoia, but standard business practice. Consider the desktop publishing app iBooks Author, which allows users to create textbooks. While the software is free to use, products made with iBooks Author can only be sold through Apple's iBookstore, with Apple keeping 30% of the purchase price. And since the books are only readable on an Apple device such as an iPad, the software also helps guarantee more Apple hardware sales.


It is also questionable whether digital books will actually save school districts money. If the laptops or ipads are donated or purchased by parents and the districts only have to pay for subscriptions or site licenses, then maybe they will save money, as digital copies are not subject to ripping, graffiti, water damage or getting lost. However, the notion that ipads are somehow more durable than textbooks is absurd. If students treat their digital hardware as cavalierly as many treat their textbooks, many will destroy all of their “textbooks” simultaneously with a single toss, instead of just one at a time as is currently the case.

Punished For Having Too Many Poor Black and Latino Students

A federal civil rights investigation found that LAUSD has been failing to effectively teach its English Language Learners and black students and, as a result, will lose federal funding if it cannot rectify the problem promptly, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday. The school district agreed to sweeping changes in order to remedy the problem, despite its huge budget shortfall.

As usual, policy makers are conflating the symptom with the cause. There is no question that black and Latino children are doing poorly in LAUSD schools, as they are throughout the country. But there is no logical reason to believe that it is the fault of the district or its teachers or that the district is guilty of institutional racism.

Black and Latino children are the poorest in the country (over 35% of whom are living below the poverty line). Poverty and other “out-of-school” factors have a substantially greater influence on student achievement than curriculum, teacher quality, school structure or any other “in-school” factor (see here, here, here, here and here).

Blaming LAUSD for low achievement by these students is misguided, naïve and completely disregards the facts. By ignoring poverty and societal racism and doing nothing to mitigate them, LAUSD will necessarily see continued low performance for the majority of these children and will still lose the federal funds. This shell game does, however, let policy makers and affluent members of society off the hook.

According to the Times, the Department of Education launched its probe last year, to see if English Language Learners (ELLs), the majority of whom were Latino, were receiving adequate instruction. LAUSD has more ELLs (about 195,000, or 29% of its total enrollment) than any other school district in the United States. As a result of pressure by local activists, the investigation was widened to include African American students, who make up about 10% of the district's enrollment.

In order to satisfy the feds, LAUSD agreed to provide students learning English and black students with more “effective” teachers. However, this is just more of the “blame the teacher” game and a continued denial of the socioeconomic, cultural and political influences on the problem.

LAUSD certainly could hire more experienced veteran teachers who have undergone extensive training in English language development and literacy. They could provide greater professional development opportunities for teachers to gain these skills. They could provide smaller class sizes so that teachers can give more attention to struggling students. They could offer additional language and literacy support classes. There are numerous other reforms they could implement, as well. However, all of these reforms cost money, something the district currently lacks, and they do nothing to address the underlying socioeconomic causes of low student achievement.

Arne Duncan visited Los Angeles and joined L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to praise the district’s cooperation. Both are pleased because it gives them another weapon to attack teachers, while doing nothing substantive or effective to help improve schools or support struggling children.

Not surprisingly, student test scores will be used to measure whether the reforms are working. LAUSD is one of the few major school districts in the nation to implement value-added methods for assessing teachers. With the pressure on L.A. schools and teachers to preserve federal funding by improving test scores for black and Latino students, the district will have greater leverage in using value-added measures to fire teachers, despite the inaccuracy and inconsistency of this form of assessment or the fact that teacher quality is only one tiny factor that influences student performance.