Shutting Parents Out to Shut Them Up

(Image by t0msk)

What is the best way to get your way? Make sure that your way is the only way being discussed. Charter schools achieve this by cutting parents out of their governing boards and operating in secret. Republicans are attempting to achieve this by crushing unions and destroying their ability to fund Democratic candidates. The ruling elite achieve this by influencing members of both parties, controlling the media and by framing every issue in terms of whether it is good for “jobs” and the “economy” (i.e., profits).

There are plenty of stakeholders who oppose corporate education reform and who are shut out of the debate, the most obvious (and vocal) being teachers. However, there is another vocal group that is also left out of some of the most important education reform decisions: parents. Leonie Haimson (from Class Size Matters) & Julie Woestehoff (from Parents United for Responsible Education) have outlined many of the consequences of this in their commentary, SHUTTING OUT PARENTS: Obama's Disappointing Blueprint for Reform.

Excerpts are below (in quotes), with my comments in italics:

“As public school parents and parent advocates, we have grave reservations about the Obama administration’s "blueprint for reform" laying out its proposals for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Along with 16 other parent activists from throughout the country, we recently wrote a letter to the president and Congress, which hundreds more signed on to, registering our opposition to the administration’s agenda for the nation’s schools.

As this letter from “parents across America” pointed out, the parent voice has been missing so far from the national debate on education, and is entirely absent from the top-down, often draconian policies put forward by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.”

While the Duncan plan is certainly top-down and detrimental to students, the lack of parent voice in the debate is not an innocent oversight. The parent voice has been deliberately shut out because it is a nuisance and a hindrance to corporate profits, the ultimate goal of the Obama/Duncan education reform model. In much the same way that the U.S. cannot tolerate any sort of popular government in Egypt because it might make decisions that limit U.S. corporations’ ability to exploit their workers and resources, the current wave of education reform is all about plundering the public education system for private gain. Low wages, weakened unions and job protections, heavy reliance on testing and accountability, and the use of educational management organizations to run the schools like factories are all part of this strategy. Anyone who resists this, whether it is to protect their living and working conditions or to protect their children’s quality of education, must be stifled.

Haimson and Woestehoff do make reference to this in their critique (see below). However, they do so from the perspective of caring parents, laying out numerous important ways children will be harmed by it, while pleading for a seat at the table and arguing that as knowledgeable stakeholders they could help make smarter decisions. While they are very knowledgeable and certainly could make smarter education decisions, their pleas are likely to fall on deaf ears, as the objective here is not children’s well-being, but profits.

“We object to the reform blueprint’s focus on privatization and its push to radically expand the charter school sector. Though some charters may offer students a quality education, one of the largest national studies shows they are, on average, no better, and frequently worse, than neighboring regular public schools. Charters also draw money, space, and other resources from district schools, while enrolling fewer of their communities’ immigrant, special-needs, and poor children.

Tying teacher pay and tenure to gains or losses in students’ standardized-test scores will make the prospect of teaching in inner cities less attractive. According to the National Academy of Sciences, such tests are also a highly unreliable basis for judging teachers. Too many schools have already become joyless test-prep factories, rather than centers of real learning. All children, especially those in inner cities whose parents cannot afford to supplement their schooling, need and deserve a full complement of social studies, science, arts, and physical education. Yet these subjects are being driven out of the curriculum by the high-stakes testing regime imposed in recent years. The Obama blueprint pays lip service to the need for a well-rounded education, but its proposals to link teacher evaluation and pay to the results of high-stakes exams are likely to make a bad situation even worse.

Education is a public trust, and the very foundation of our democracy. Congress holds a great responsibility in its hands in the pending reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We are well aware that powerful corporate and foundation interests are shaping many federal and local education policies with dollars rather than evidence-based solutions. We hope that Congress and the administration will listen more carefully to parents as they deliberate on this crucial piece of legislation, and that the next version of the ESEA formally incorporates our views. As highly knowledgeable primary stakeholders, we must be permitted to have a seat at the decision making table.”

This last section repeats an oft-cited, but inaccurate premise: The education system exists to bolster democracy. While the notion of an egalitarian society in which all members participate equally and freely is a wonderful goal, it is not the political system we have, nor is it something that the education system was designed to bolster. Furthermore, it says nothing about the cruel conditions that force so many to live with so little. Rather, democracy, Congress AND the education system all exist in order to bolster capitalism, to ensure that there continue to be people who can operate the factories, provide services, purchase products and accept this reality stoically and patriotically.

Certainly a good educator has the power to inspire people to fight for freedom and equality. However, if we truly want to gain control of the education system and empower young people to fight for a better society, we need to empower young people now, together with parents and teachers, to confront the ruling elite head on. We need to wrest control of the entire socioeconomic system, not just the education system. We need to strip away the wealth and power that allow so few to rule over so many.

Merit Pay: The New Euphemism for Downsizing

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

It is no longer just about merit pay. Now the Ed Deformers want merit pay with punishment. If you are deemed a good teacher, (which is to say you work in a middle class school with privileged students who tend to be better prepared and more likely to be at grade level in reading and math), then you would be rewarded with higher pay and larger class sizes, according to a new plan introduced earlier this week by Bill Gates.

Arne Duncan has now jumped on the band wagon, specifically criticizing governors for making “dumb” education cuts, like furloughs and shortened school years, when increased class sizes would save money and possibly even benefit students. He said he would rather have his own kids in a class of 28 with a “good” teacher, than in a class of 23 with a mediocre teacher. Shows how in touch the education secretary is with the reality in California—we typically have class sizes of 32 to 40, with PE and some music and arts classes going even higher. Personally, in 14 years of teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have always had class sizes ranging from 32 to 36, and this is in science classes, with dangerous equipment and chemicals.

Duncan thinks teachers should be paid as much as $20,000 to $25,000 more per year for teaching an additional five to six students per class. Thus, in order to close a class of 30 students, a “good” teacher would have to take on 6 more students in each of his or her five classes. Therefore, firing a “bad” teacher and shunting his or her students to a “good” teacher might save districts $40,000 to $80,000, depending on the fired teacher’s salary. While this can be a huge boon to struggling school districts, it is a terrible disservice to children and it can hardly be called merit pay. In reality, this is just another form of downsizing, squeezing greater productivity from fewer workers, whereas merit pay implies that you are being paid extra for being exceptional at your normal duties. If Gates and Duncan really want to call this scheme merit pay, then they would have to pay these “good” teachers extra for being “good” teachers AND give them an additional bonus for taking on the extra students. Of course this would still be a disservice to students, who would suffer from declining teacher attention, course offerings and safety, and to teachers, who would be rewarded (or not) based primarily on the socioeconomic status of their students.

Teachers should not worry too much about this back door route to phony merit pay. Since the vast majority of “good” teachers will come from middle class schools (these are the ones most likely to have decent test scores), it will be mostly the high performing schools in wealthy communities that get the increased class sizes. This is something that privileged and self-entitled parents will vigorously resist in the courts and at the polls.

While Duncan was busy berating governors for their dumb education policies, he was ignoring the research done by the Institute of Education Sciences, a branch of his own US Department of Education, which shows that class size reduction is one of the very few reforms that have been demonstrated to work. Meanwhile, his buddy Bill Gates has been telling people that 83% of teachers favor taking on more students if they could get a raise. However, according to Leonie Haimson, his data (which is based on survey done by his own foundation) actually showed that teachers preferred a $5,000 raise to a class size reduction of two students. In other words, they did NOT support an increase in class size, they preferred an increase in wages to a tiny class size reduction, two very different things.

Right-Wing Spin: Class Size Just One Way to “Extend Reach” of Best Teachers

It’s not just the lefty ed blogs that are talking about factory-downsizing of schools. David Brooks thinks it’s a wonderful way to “extend the reach” of our best teachers (i.e., get more bang for our buck). EducationNext says, why limit downsizing to bloating class sizes when there are so many other wonderful ways to squeeze more productivity out of our public servants. For example, there is “boundless reach” in which teachers are completely replaced with digital delivery of lessons. There is also “remote reach” in which a live person interacts with students remotely (e.g., taped lectures broadcast to many schools which would pay a subscription fee and/or royalties). Both of these methods are already in place to varying degrees in many districts and colleges.

Ultimately, like other examples of education reform, the goal has nothing to do with improving educational outcomes or making the school experience better for children. Like most other forms of education reform, teachers need to act collectively to resist it. We should be willing to strike to stop NCLB and RTTT and we should be willing to strike to resist this, too. In fact, if we had taken job actions against these abuses of children and our working conditions, the ruling class and their politician allies probably would never have gotten so cocky and gone after collective bargaining and the right to strike. Contrary to the peaceniks, sometimes the best way to deal with a bully is to punch him back.