Michelle Rhee Joins L.A. School Board Funding Free For All

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Michelle Rhee’s organization, StudentsFirst, has contributed $250,000 to support the campaigns of incumbent Los Angeles school board president Monica Garcia, as well as those of Kate Anderson and Antonio Sanchez. The donation comes on the heels of a $1 million donation to the same candidates by New York Mayor Bloomberg, and several $100,000 donations by L.A. billionaires Eli Broad and A. Jerrold Perenchio.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Rhee believes her involvement in Los Angeles could advance her school reform agenda statewide. This agenda includes the conversion of public schools into charter schools, increasing reliance on high stakes tests, and tying teachers’ evaluations to student test scores.

Rhee is not unique in this belief. All the big outside money is intended to influence the free market school reform agenda statewide and even nationwide. One of their goals is to weaken teachers unions, both as a voting bloc and as an impediment to their money-making scams. Garcia and Anderson, for example, are outright union busters and the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) has indicated it would spend millions of dollars to defeat them. (Garcia said that if she were president of UTLA she would go on a rampage and fire all “ineffective” teachers and eliminate seniority). Sanchez has been more subtle. Consequently, he was won the support of UTLA, despite having made comments that suggest he intends to bully the union into submitting to the will of the free market reformers. For example, he said he wants to “break” the divide between unions and school choice and accountability advocates, which is just a politically strategic way of saying he wants the union to accept harmful concessions.

All three of the candidates supported by Rhee, Bloomberg and the Coalition for School Reform are backers of privatization and charter school conversions. LAUSD already has one of the largest numbers of charter schools of any district in the nation, as well as its own sordid history of charter school scandals (see here and here).

Considering LAUSD’s history of budget shortfalls, low student achievement and administrator scandals, it would seem politically irresponsible to give away even more oversight and revenue to private education management organizations which can run charter schools with only minimal district oversight and which have a track record that is no better (and often worse than traditional public schools. Then again, it should be obvious by now that promoters of charter schools, vouchers and parental “choice” have no interest in improving educational outcomes. Rather, their motivations are purely financial: increase profit-making opportunities for themselves and for the funders of their political careers.  

Union Busting by Liberal NY Governor

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

New York Governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, proposed legislation last week that would impose a new teacher evaluation system for New York City if the teachers’ union, UFT, refuses to accept the conditions of Mayor Bloomberg’s evaluation plan.

Last month, Cuomo punished New York school children by withholding $250 million from their city’s school budget because the mayor and the UFT failed to come to an agreement by his arbitrary deadline. When this failed to achieve his desired goal, Cuomo said that he would write into this year’s state budget the authority for the state to take over the evaluation system, according to the New York Times. If Bloomberg and the UFT fail to come to an agreement by May 31, the state’s education commissioner, John B. King Jr. will impose a plan by June 1 and the city would have to implement it by September 1, 2013. The sticking point between UFT and Mayor Bloomberg was the mayor’s refusal to let the deal expire at the end of 2015, even though most other state school districts had only 1-year deals (see Labor Notes).

The UFT leadership has already accepted many of the most onerous conditions of the “reform,” including the use of student test data to evaluate teachers, despite the fact that this data is an unreliable and inconsistent way to assess teacher quality (see here and here). However, this irresponsible and stupid concession was made during negotiations between the union and the teachers’ employer during collective bargaining. By imposing changes to the evaluation system, the state, which is not their employer, effectively preempts and strips away teachers’ collective bargaining rights.

Yet the union itself is also to blame for rolling over as quickly as it did on the use of student test data. Teachers unions throughout the state should have resisted evaluation reform from the get go, not only in words, but through strikes and other job actions. By the time Cuomo started threatening the UFT most of the other NY teachers unions had already accepted similar reforms. Illinois has gone through a similar process and its teachers unions have also all buckled to the authority of the law.

The argument in support of accepting state evaluation reform laws—it is the law, we are law abiding teachers (and our union can’t afford the jail time, injunctions and fines for resisting it)—is completely irrational and absurd. If workers always obeyed unjust laws, we would not have weekends, child labor and worker safety laws, or even the legal right to form unions and go on strike. The idea that teachers must obey laws is rooted in teachers’ inaccurate self-identification as selfless nurturers and do-gooders, rather than as workers, with the same needs as any other worker (e.g., material security, protections from arbitrary and vindictive treatment, workplace safety). Lastly, the legal costs associated with resisting unjust laws may be far less than the vast sums unions spend to buy fickle, untrustworthy politicians.

Blockhead NY Teachers Demand Harsh Treatment

Meanwhile, a group of blockhead (i.e., naïve workers who trust that their bosses have only their best interests in mind) NYC teachers have taken to the airwaves to demand the state impose a teacher-evaluation system, the New York Post reports. This particular group of blockheads are members of Educators 4 Excellence (E4E), which has created a 30-second ad calling on Albany to impose a new system on the recalcitrant union, the New York Post reports.

E4E, which has branches throughout the U.S., is an astroturf (i.e., fake grassroots) organization with corporate ties (they receive funding from the Gates and Carnegie Foundations) and members who are not even teachers. Consider that the New York ads are expected to cost more than $250,000—not something that the average teacher is capable of financing.

E4E wants the new evaluations to include multiple observations, “student growth data” and student surveys. Their first demand is reasonable. Observations of teachers in the classroom are the most accurate and direct way to assess teacher competence. However, few administrators have the time to do this often enough and many lack sufficient training to do it well. Without substantially increasing education funding, this is unlikely to change. Furthermore, administrators have an inherent bias, as they can manipulate the evaluations to punish or rid themselves of teachers who are outspoken critics of their policies, union activists or advocates for students and families. To have truly effective observation-based teacher evaluations, states need to train and fund objective, outside evaluators to do the job.

Student surveys can provide useful data to help teachers improve their practice, but they are terribly biased and fraught as a method for evaluating teachers. At the lower grade levels, children lack the maturity, experience and language skills to articulate whether their teacher was any good. They are certainly capable of describing whether their teacher was nice or mean, but they are not necessarily capable of determining whether they learned what they were supposed to learn. At the higher grade levels, students can use surveys vindictively to punish teachers who were strict or who refused to give them undeserved grade boosts, or to reward teachers who made it easy for them.

NY Mayor Buys LA School Board Race, Starts Arms Race With UTLA

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

One might well wonder why New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending $1 million of his own hard-(hardly)-earned cash to influence the Los Angeles school board race (the largest donation yet in this hotly contested race). Yet it is not just Bloomberg—several other billionaire outsiders have also ponied up large sums to help their favorite candidates win and it is not because they care about the wellbeing of LA’s children. Los Angeles Unified (like New York) is a battleground school district in the quest by wealthy investors and entrepreneurs to siphon off tax dollars from public education and crush their biggest enemy—the unions. What goes down in LA, they hope, will soon follow throughout the country, aiding their ability to weaken or destroy public sector unions, while increasing their share of the profits.

Bloomberg’s donation to Coalition for School Reform was meant to aid incumbent L.A. school board president Monica Garcia, in District 2, challenger Kate Anderson, in District 4, and Antonio Sanchez, who is fighting for an open seat in District 6. Each of these candidates has been a strong supporter of Superintendent Deasy’s reform agenda and two (Garcia and Anderson) have been vocal critics of the teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA).

While Bloomberg’s $1 million has been the largest single donation, Coalition for School Reform (CSR) has also raised more than $1.5 million in smaller donations, according to the LA Times, from other billionaires ($250,000 each from veteran free market education “reformer” Eli Broad and former Univision chief A. Jerrold Perenchio). CSR also includes Megan Chernin, who runs a nonprofit formed by Deasy to raise funds for LAUSD schools and who used to head L.A.’s Promise, which managed three LAUSD charter schools. A smaller donation of $10,000 was made by Steven Prough, the current head of L.A.’s Promise.

The coalition has also received six-figure donations from Lynda Resnick, creator of POM Wonderful juice, and journalist Jamie Alter Lynton, who is on the board of Deasy’s nonprofit and who is married to Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Lynton has used her journalism connections as a bully pulpit to criticize UTLA and its defense of due process rights for its members. Former New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein has also ponied up $25,000 to support the cause.

The Coalition for School Reform is a pro-charter and pro-accountability outfit that Mayor Villagairosa set up to fund his pro-privatization candidates back in 2011. In that election, the coalition raised over $1 million from right wing billionaire Phillip Anshutz (a “reactionary that makes the fascist-friendly Koch Brothers look moderate” wrote Robert Skeels), as well as billionaires Eli Broad, Jerrold Perenchio and others. Skeels, an education and social justice activist who writes for Schools Matter and Solidaridad, is also running against Garcia, but has raised his comparatively infinitesimal funding entirely through small donations and community organizing.

So who are the candidates the coalition is supporting in this current election and what is their agenda? Let’s start with current Board President Monica Garcia, a raving union-buster, who said that if she were president of UTLA she would go on a rampage and fire all “ineffective” teachers and eliminate seniority. This only shows that she has no clue how school districts actually operate (e.g., the district is the boss, with the power to hire and fire; the union is the employee of the teachers, with the responsibility to defend their interests and no ability to fire teachers). More significantly, it implies that she despises teachers, presuming great numbers of them to be incompetent, or at least an expensive burden, who should be replaced en-masse by lower-paid and more compliant novices.

The coalition’s candidate for District 4, one of LAUSD’s more affluent districts, is Kate Anderson, an attorney who once worked for Munger, Tolles & Olson, a high-powered law firm with members who are currently working in President Obama’s cabinet and who have served (or who currently serve) as CEO’s and directors of large investment firms, like Salomon Brothers and Berkshire Hathaway. One of the coalition’s priorities for District 4 is “stand[ing] up to special interest groups that make it impossible to remove poorly performing teachers.” In other words, they are counting on Anderson to attack collective bargaining and weaken the union by eviscerating teachers’ due process rights. Anderson’s supporters include Ben Austin, founder of Parent Revolution, the astroturf group behind most of LAUSD’s Parent Trigger battles, and another charter school advocate and profiteer.

Anderson, like Garcia, has publicly expressed ignorance about how the school district operates, calling into question her credibility as a future board member. She was quoted in the L.A. Weekly saying “I’m really frustrated by the lack of a teacher evaluation system. . .” though LAUSD does in fact have a teacher evaluation system, one that was negotiated by the district with the union and signed into a contract by both parties. Like Garcia, she, too, is disdainful of teachers, saying “We need a system that. . . when appropriate, helps teachers gracefully exit from the system.” This is essentially a euphemism for, “we need a more efficient way to get rid of teachers.” It is probably safe to presume she is referring to expensive veterans, union organizers, student advocates, charter school critics, and others who stand in the way of CSR’s privatization schemes. Ironically, Anderson’s opponent, Steve Zimmer, is a Teach for America alumnus who is supported by both UTLA and several charter schools.

In response to the large donation by Bloomberg, UTLA has asked for outside funds from the state and national teachers unions to help it support its own favorite candidates for the L.A. school board and has said it planned to spend several million dollars on the election.  As of last week, the NEA was unwilling to get involved, but the California Teachers Association and AFT have left the possibility open, according to the LA School Report. Regardless, it is unlikely that UTLA will be able to keep up the coalition’s spending, as it has no billionaire supporters.

The third candidate being pushed by CSR is Antonio Sanchez, another Villaraigosa ally, who also once worked for the County Federation of Labor, making him seem like a pro-union (rather than pro-privatization) candidate. Indeed, the Daily News reports that several unions have endorsed Sanchez, including UTLA and SEIU. However, despite his labor credentials, Sanchez supports much of Villaraigosa’s “reform” agenda, according to the L.A. School Report, saying that he wants to “break” the divide between unions and school choice and accountability advocates. This ought to give UTLA pause, as “breaking the divide” means getting the union to accept harmful concessions. For example, Sanchez supports the use of student performance data in teacher evaluations.

“Breaking the divide” between teachers’ unions and “reform” advocates is one of the main goals of CSR and its billionaire funders. As the reform movement sees it, the unions’ opposition to evaluation reform, Value Added Measures (VAM) and charter schools is irrational, selfish and meritless—and something that can be whittled away with persistence and finesse. They have good reason to believe this. UTLA—as well as CTU, in Chicago, and UFT, in New York—have all acquiesced to the use of student performance data or actual test scores to evaluate their teachers, despite the fact that such data is inconsistent, unreliable and correlates more strongly with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds than with teacher quality.

Union Sells Out Bus Drivers For Nothing

Image from Flickr, by Michael Fleshman

In one of the clearest examples of the folly and stupidity of unions’ love affair with political action, the leadership of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) called off the New York City bus workers’ strike last week, after only one month. Their justification was a letter signed by the five Democratic Party candidates for mayor calling for an end to the strike. The union never asked for a vote of the membership and got literally nothing in return for the back-to-work order aside from a nebulous promise by the mayoral hopefuls to “revisit the school bus transportation system and contracts” if elected, the WSWS reported today.

Without a solid victory, the drivers face losing their jobs entirely or being forced to reapply for a fraction of their old wages, as the Employee Protection Provisions (EPP) that once protected their seniority and wage scale, regardless of which bus company was hired by the school district, came under attack. The assault on the EPP was launched by Mayor Bloomberg in January and the ATU’s initial response was to ask him to reconsider. Even after it became clear that negotiations were going nowhere, the ATU leadership, like most unions these days, made little effort to promote and support the strike, according to the WSWS, even going so far as to interfere in the dissemination of strike information among the workers.

An obvious question is why would the union leadership acquiesce to a request from a group of wannabe mayors to end the strike without getting anything concrete in exchange? There is no way of knowing whether any of them will actually be elected or whether they would actually do anything to preserve the drivers’ wages and job security if they were elected.

Historically, the goal of strikes has been to aggravate the bosses to the extent that they were willing to compromise and make concessions. The workers remained on strike until they won concessions or were forced to give up because of the hunger and poverty that resulted from going too long without a paycheck. In the case of the New York school bus drivers, many were clearly pleased with the prospect of once again earning a paycheck, but it was premature to argue that poverty was killing their solidarity. In fact, many were angered that the one paycheck they did give up may have been for naught.

Some of the drivers speculated that the union leadership colluded with the bus companies to drive down wages. While this may have been the case, there is also another more basic reason why the ATU leadership sold out its members: Their role (like that of all unions) is to help maintain the profitability and efficiency of business by keeping workers on the job and content with their lot. To this end, capital accepts unions and the occasional concession as a cost of business, while the leaders of the large unions have an incentive to keep their members on the job and paying dues so they can maintain their high salaries (ATU leaders make $200,000 per year). Furthermore, because union leaders generally make so much more than those they represent—often for sitting in an office and wining and dining with politicians, rather than doing the same work as their members—their interests tend to align more with the bosses than with the workers.

In contrast, protracted strikes can result in jail time for union officials, while injunctions, lawsuits and loss of union dues because workers are not getting paychecks sap money from union coffers, thus jeopardizing unions leaders’ income and personal freedom. Yet, if they want to maintain their jobs and high salaries, they must also seem like they are fighting for their members’ interests. Therefore, they often make forceful public statements, pretend to be aggressive, criticize (and sometimes insult) the bosses, and occasionally even go through the motions of taking a job action in order to legitimize their positions and win their members’ support. This creates a fundamental strategic conflict in which strikes, which are workers’ most powerful weapon, are also feared and consequently avoided by their leaders.