3 of California’s “Top” Schools On the Chopping Block, And Good Riddance

What makes a “top” school, top? According to the San Francisco Chronicle (and most other media) it is test scores. Thanks to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Obama’s Race to the Top (RttT), test scores are all that matter these days. This has led to numerous cheating scandals, as well as a reduction in science, arts, physical education and other curricula to make room for more test preparation. It has also led to a number of other scandals, such as the one at Oakland’s American Indian Charter Schools, now under threat of closure for financial improprieties, despite its relatively high test scores.

The American Indian schools are currently being investigated by the Alameda County district attorney for funneling $3.8 million to founder and former director Ben Chavis and his wife for shady real estate deals and services, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. As director, Chavis signed school checks over to himself for properties he rented to the schools. In one case, he charged the schools $1.09 per square foot per month, when Oakland Unified was charging one-fifth of that ($2.50 per year).

The Oakland school board has asked the school to shape up and convince them their books are now in order. The board will make its final decision on March 20.

The problem is that it is not just financial improprieties that call the schools’ quality into question. Chavis, who ran the schools from 2001 until 2007, has been accused of humiliating students, swearing at them and calling them names publicly. The East Bay Express reports that he also made racist and sexist comments in front of students, while the WSWS reports he physically abused an adult visitor to the campus and forced a student to shave his head as a punishment. The Express also found that the schools’ high test scores had nothing to do with good teaching or school structure, but were the result of cherry-picking higher performing students—a form of cheating that violates OUSD’s own policies. In essence, the schools were phony “top” schools that rigged the system in order to look good, maintain high enrollment, and serve as a cover for Chavis’ embezzlement schemes.

While the OUSD is threatening to revoke the schools’ charters and shut them down, they should not be seen as the hero riding in on their white horse. According to the Express, the school board had known for years about Chavis’ abuses and misconduct, yet continually renewed the schools’ charters, citing their wonderful test scores as justification. Indeed, the OUSB, due its lack of effective oversight, was complicit in both the cheating scandal and Chavis’ embezzlement of millions of dollars from the district

The OUSD likewise had no problem with the schools’ refusal to hire unionized teachers or its rabid anti-communism (one of the schools’ “10 Commandments” was “Thou shalt be aware of quacks who believe in communism. Hast thou ever heard of illegal immigrants risking their lives to enter Cuba?”

 

The AFT is Finally Fighting Testing (Not)

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The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is expanding its drive “against excessive testing” with a pithy and pathetic new campaign called “Learning Is More Than a Test Score.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten said the campaign is intended to de-emphasize testing and bring back arts and physical education. However, according to the Washington Examiner, she conceded (as she has always done) that testing has a crucial role to play. Indeed, Weingarten has supported legislation and helped broker contracts with school districts that promote the use of student test data to evaluate teachers (see here, here, here, here and here).

The AFT is not really opposed to high stakes tests. The name of the campaign, “Learning is More Than a Test Score,” implies that the union accepts the tests as one aspect of learning, while its reference to “excessive” testing implies that it simply wants less of it. Either way, the union has accepted the inaccurate and discredited assertion that high stakes tests improve learning outcomes and capitulated to the corporate education “reformers” attempt to rationalize and profit from public education (i.e., testing is big business for the test and textbook publishers).

From a purely selfish perspective (the only perspective a fighting union should take since its purpose is supposedly to improve the working and living conditions of its members), all high stakes tests should be opposed since they can only tell us how well students answer multiple choice questions compared with their peers, under timed and stressful conditions—not where, when or how they learned to do this. The fact that test scores (and student achievement) correlate more strongly with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds than with teaching ability (see here, here and here) should draw into question their validity as a measure of teacher skill in the classroom. Furthermore, the data show that the tests cannot an accurately or consistently measure performance for the majority of teachers and may only be accurate for those at the extremes, and only if averaged out over three years—something that is rarely done.

However, even from the perspective of a public servant (the perspective usually taken by the unions, since they are terrified of being accused of putting their own wellbeing above that of their students), the tests should be opposed. Test administration takes considerable class time away from actual learning (as much as 2-6 weeks, depending on the school). The drastic consequences for schools compels many to sacrifice even more class time for test preparation, sometimes even to the extent of slashing entire programs (e.g., physical education, art, music, science). The tests are stressful and anxiety-provoking for children, yet serve no educational purpose (i.e., children cannot learn anything useful from the tests). They also make school seem even more boring and meaningless, contributing to students’ sense of alienation from learning and disdain for school.

Even from a taxpayers’ perspective all tests should be opposed, as they cost billions of dollars and suck revenue out of the classroom, where it can benefit children, handing it over to test and textbook publishers. In California, alone, it is estimated that the new Common Core Standards (CCS) exams will cost $1 billion to implement (most of it going toward new books, test design, and computers and software to administer the tests). Yet there is no evidence that any high stakes standardized test has improved learning.

Indeed, the real impetus behind the testing mania is corporate profits, not improving the learning or wellbeing of children. In California, where $20 billion has been slashed from K-12 education over the past 4 years, the state Board of Education voted to adopt the CCS two years ago, knowing even then that it would cost more than $1 billion and that the state would have to borrow or slash further to get the money. Yet California already had among the toughest standards in the nation. There was no educational benefit from changing the standards, no potential for it to significantly improve learning, graduation rates or the achievement gap.

To a rational, fiscally conservative person, no need plus no money should have equaled no new test. Instead, heavy lobbying by the educational publishers convinced the board to spend money it did not have on a test it did not need, thus further impoverishing California’s schools. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, with Governor Jerry Brown’s supposedly balanced budget and promise not to make any further cuts in K-12 funding. (Proposition 30, while doing nothing to restore the $20 billion cut over the past 4 years, was supposed to hold K-12 funding steady, but it is not yet clear whether the cost of CCS has been factored in).

More is Less?

Rather than opposing more testing, AFT and NEA have come out in support of CCS (see here), arguing that the CCS tests will be better and more meaningful than the previous ones, even though the tests have not yet been created and it is impossible to know how they might differ. By most accounts, though, the new CCS exams will not significantly decrease the amount of class time lost to testing, anxiety for children, pressure on schools to improve at all costs, or cuts to “nonacademic” programs.

To be fair, the AFT has made a statement in support of Seattle’s Garfield High School teachers who are boycotting Washington’s MAP test. This is a unique and positive step, as neither the AFT nor the NEA have supported this kind of teacher civil disobedience in the past. The unions’ historical perspective has been that this is tantamount to insubordination and failure to fulfill one’s job responsibilities—thus administrators would be justified in disciplining them. On the other hand, the AFT is not providing any material, logistical or tangible support, nor are they promoting similar boycotts or civil disobedience elsewhere—actions that would be necessary if they really want to see an end to the testing mania.

Education Dollars at Work: The DOE’s Private Arsenal

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In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, there has been considerable talk about how to make our schools safer, including the NRA’s proposal to put armed guards in every school. However, this is not why the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) Office of Inspector General bought 27 new Remington Model 870 police 12-gauge shotguns in 2010. Nor were these weapons purchased to improve graduation rates or close the achievement gap. Rather, these guns were obtained for the benefit of DOE’s secret identity as an elite education fraud fighting unit.

According to Valerie Strauss, the guns were purchased to replace their old guns, weapons they argue are necessary for their “high-risk” crime fighting duties. Strauss’ piece in the Washington Post quoted a DOE spokesperson who said the Office of Inspector General arrests people with criminal backgrounds, including some with “histories of murder or violence toward law enforcement officers,” and has “full statutory law enforcement authority.”

The one example that Strauss gave of such an investigation was a recent search of a Stockton, California home as part of an investigation of waste and fraud involving federal education funds.

It seems to me that if being robbed and embezzled by highly armed, violent insiders is pervasive enough to warrant having its own heavily armed police force, the DOE has been wasting taxpayers’ money with NCLB, Race to the Top, and all its other expensive “reforms.” Instead, they should be implementing sting operations in every district in the country, creating departments of internal affairs, hiring undercover agents and turning teachers into Serpicos to root out all this corruption and vice, and then using the billions of dollars recovered by these operations to buy schools more books, computers, support staff, librarians, nurses, counselors and decently paid teachers.

Teachers Unions are Failing Kids AND Teachers

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Chip Johnson’s recent hit piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Oakland Teachers Failed Kids,” accused the Oakland Educators Association (OEA) of putting the interests of teachers above kids and cheating them out of millions in federal  Race to the Top (RttT) funds by refusing to accept student test scores (also known as Value Added Measures, or VAM) as a part of teacher evaluations.

If Johnson was really interested in better education funding, he would redirect his anger from the teachers, who have no direct control over the matter, to the legislature, which has cut over $20 billion from K-12 education over the last 4 years. This is the main reason why the feds feel they can blackmail teachers into accepting “reforms” that are detrimental to students, as well as teachers. If he wants to blame partisans, he should look to the state’s 87 billionaires (or its hundreds of thousands of millionaires) who have lobbied to get their tax rates down to record low levels; or the oil companies, which pay lower royalties here than in Alaska or Texas; or the prison guards union, which has succeeded in redirecting state revenue from education to prisons, with a resulting  436% increase in prison spending since over the past 30 years. (For more on prison guards’ impact on education, please see “Lack of School-to-Prison Pipeline.”)

Student Test Score Data is Useless and Detrimental to Student Wellbeing

If he wants greater accountability, he is also barking up the wrong tree.  VAM is inconsistent and unreliable except for teachers at the extremes and only if averaged over three years. (For more on VAM, see here, here and here). In practice, test scores are rarely averaged over three years. Most districts want evaluations every two years and some are moving toward yearly evaluations, thus invalidating the data for all teachers. Yet, even if they are averaged over three years, the data would still be meaningless for the vast majority of teachers who fall somewhere in the middle, away from the extremes. While VAM could still help weed out the very worst teachers, it would likely lead to many good teachers losing their jobs and many mediocre ones slipping through the cracks. The consequence for students could be a net decrease in good teachers and a net increase in mediocre ones because of all the false positives and false negatives.

Johnson is dead wrong in his assertion that teachers are harming students by opposing VAM. The use of student test data to evaluate teachers is terrible for students precisely because it does nothing to improve teacher quality, while potentially forcing many good teachers out of the profession. Furthermore, it encourages the continued use of high stakes standardized exams, which take away class time from real learning, encourage teaching to the test, and unnecessarily increase the stress and anxiety children already face at school.

Teachers Unions are Complicit in the Proliferation of High Stakes Tests and VAM

The teachers’ unions, however, ARE hurting students as well as teachers by their inability to effectively resist free market “reforms” like VAM.

Let’s start with the obvious. The free market “reformers” are winning the propaganda battle: large segments of the public support VAM and it has been an easy sell. Their claim that student test scores will rise with good teaching and remain stagnant or decline with bad teaching not only appears self-evident, but it supports the popular belief in meritocracy. Cheerleading for the merits of VAM has become so ubiquitous in the press and among politicians that it is now considered common sense by much of the public. As a result, the “reformers” have easily pushed it through in districts throughout the nation, including the three largest school districts, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The unions have done little to counter this. On the contrary, whenever the “reformers” invent a problem, the unions typically agree with their premises, and quibble over the solutions. A case in point is evaluation reform. Both the NEA and the AFT have jumped on the bandwagon, joining right wing critics in their proclamations that the evaluation system is broken. Many have even consented to the use of VAM, including most recently the CTU, in Chicago, and UTLA, in Los Angeles. The difference is that the unions also want some say in the matter. For example, many are demanding that the new evaluation systems provide teachers with meaningful data that can be used to improve their practice. Ironically, VAM cannot do this, while existing internal assessments (e.g., unit tests, essays, lab reports) are already being used this way by teachers. Likewise, evaluators observing classroom practice could provide useful feedback, but they typically do not because they are overbooked, undertrained and biased.

Digging Their Own Graves

This has been a mistake for the unions both strategically and in terms of the propaganda battle. Rather than educating the public about how devastating VAM and high stakes testing are to children and working to abolish them, union acquiescence sends the message that teachers support them. This only serves to solidify public support for both VAM and accountability through testing.

It also sends the message to the “reformers” that the unions are easily bamboozled. All you have to do is cry “the sky is falling and our precious children will be hurt by the fallout” and teachers will go on the defensive, bitch and moan, and then accept some slightly watered down version of the “reform.” This only encourages the “reformers” to continue with their agenda of slashing public education funding, destroying the unions, and giving away as much of the system as possible to private entrepreneurs.

What a Good Evaluation System Could Look Like

Since VAM cannot accurately assess teacher quality, nor provide useful feedback to help improve their practice, the unions should refuse to accept it in any form. What they should be demanding is a sufficiently-funded system of well-trained outside evaluators (not administrators) who observe teachers blindly (i.e., they do not know the teacher and have no stake in the school or district) and often enough to be able to make valid assessments and critiques. The system should be primarily remedial, not punitive—that is, the goal should be to provide the feedback and support necessary to help improve struggling teachers who want to remain in the classroom, while providing a fair and accountable system for removing teachers who are incapable of or uninterested in doing their job correctly. This would not only help prevent future teacher shortages, it would help all teachers grow and it would improve their morale—an important component of a healthy, collaborative learning environment for children.

A Winning Strategy?

In a sane and rational society, the arguments against VAM would be sufficient to end debate and consign VAM to the dustbin of history. The problem is that few people are aware of these facts, something that could easily be rectified with an effective, large scale public outreach campaign. Unfortunately, the teachers unions have been asleep at the wheel, allowing the free market education “reformers” to frame the debate and then impose their will, leaving the unions in the weak position of constantly having to constantly fight back.

Such campaigns are not cheap, but the teachers’ unions have relatively large war chests and could afford it if they chose to use their vast resources in this way. Instead, they spend the lion’s share of their resources on lobbyists and political campaigns which have done little to stem the decline in education funding and student services, or to educate the public about the implications of the various snake oil “reforms”  they are being sold.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Testing Kindergartners

Kindergarten Entrance Exam (image from Flickr, by emrank)

It is already crazy how much we test high school students. In addition to the usual internal quizzes and exams used by teachers to assess whether their students are grasping the concepts and skills being taught in their classes, there are increasing numbers of high stakes standardized state and federal exams like No Child Left Behind and high school exit exams.

The teacher-initiated exams generally take up less than a class period and are a useful self-check of learning and teaching. The high stakes exams, on the other hand, take up days or weeks of instructional time and have little or no benefit to students or teachers. They are almost entirely a manifestation of right-wing paranoia that teachers are spending instructional time teaching communism and the homosexual lifestyle to children instead of the 3 R’s and thus need some sort of tool (regardless of whether it works) to hold them accountable for teaching what really matters (bubbling in multiple choice answers to math problems and vocabulary questions).

In reality, student test scores are a measure of what students know, not how they learned it, and are therefore meaningless as an accountability tool. The high stakes test scores correlate far more strongly with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds than with their teachers’ skill.

Of course the testing mania is also terrible for children. High stakes tests are extremely stressful for students. Their teachers and administrators need them to perform well so their schools do not get closed down, converted to charters or have to fire everyone. Even when not intended, the stress and anxiety of the adults is often passed on to the children, who want to make their teachers and parents happy and do well on the tests. The tests themselves take away instructional time that could be used for real teaching and learning, rather than data collection. Furthermore, the high stakes involved compels many schools and districts to slash even more instructional time and replace it with test preparation. Consequently, many districts no longer offer science, art, music or physical education.

There is also a question of age-appropriateness. Are K-3^rd graders really capable of reading and understanding multiple choice questions and accurately bubbling in their answers? And is it fair to the kids to be put under this kind of pressure and have song-, play- and inquiry-based learning replaced by rote memorization, drills and testing? Yet, if a district is requiring teacher evaluations to be based on these tests, then even kindergarteners would have to take the tests so that kindergarten teachers would face the same level of pseudoscientific scrutiny as their colleagues.

Unfortunately, more and more school districts are testing earlier and more often. WHTC.com reports that at least 25 states now require at least one formal assessment during kindergarten, while many local school districts now implement their own tests starting just a few weeks into the academic year. The Obama administration’s Race to the Top program has offered $500 million competitive grants to promote early childhood education. In order to win these grants, though, states must pledge to assess all kindergarteners. 

LAUSD To Apply for Paltry RttT Grant

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3 Easy Tricks to Maximize Profits From the Public Sector

1.      Demand low taxes to increase personal income while decimating school budgets, thus making public education look like a disaster in need of corporate management

2.      Claim your private enterprise will solve these problems and should be funded with public tax dollars (e.g., charter schools, Common Core Standards, laptops for every child, new textbooks or ebooks, tutoring services, etc.)

3.      Insist that teachers’ unions are the main impediment to reform and lobby to have them weakened, eviscerated or outright banned

All of the above have been on the table for years at Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), one of the 176 California school districts currently at risk of going bankrupt. The district’s budget deficit for the 2012-13 school year was projected to be $390 million as of 3/13/12, according to the LAUSD website.

There is no question that record low tax rates combined with revenue losses due to the housing market collapse have contributed to LAUSD’s budget woes, which in turn have led district officials to attempt all sort of ludicrous shenanigans, like asking teachers to take 20 furlough days (and consequently asking students to give up 20 days of instructional time). The latest absurdity is Sup. Deasy’s plan to plug the nearly $400 million dyke with a measly $25 million federal Race to the Top (RttT) grant (see the Los Angeles Times).

For the first time, RttT grants will be offered to individual school districts, and not just states, willing to sell their souls for chump change. Aside from the fact that the grant would only cover 6% of the current budget hole, the one-time grant would expire at the end of the school year, leaving the district with the same problem the following year unless it can increase its revenue stream or find longer-term and bigger cuts.

There are those who would argue that $25 million is better than nothing and in these dark times one must take what one can get. However, one must consider what must be sacrificed in order to get this “free” money before one can call it a good deal.

Interestingly, the state of California found the eligibility requirements for RttT so burdensome that it voluntarily withdrew its grant proposal because the money was too little for what was being asked. Unfortunately, it did not make this realization until after it had already implemented some RttT requirements, like adoption of Common Core Standards (CCS), which are projected to cost the state more than $1 billion in new textbook and curriculum costs—far more than it would have won in RttT grants.

One of the biggest sticking points is that the state or local districts would need to get union support before moving ahead, since RttT requires the use of student test score data in teacher evaluations, something that cannot occur without changes to teachers’ contracts. Some NEA and AFT locals around the nation have rolled over and accepted this, despite the fact that the data is inconsistent and often inaccurate even when used properly and, in many cases, it is not even used properly (see here, here and here). Consequently, many good teachers could be mischaracterized as ineffective and possibly fired as a result, thus depriving students of good teachers. Worse, it could drive many good teachers away from challenging lower income schools, or from the profession entirely, thus worsening the problem evaluation reform purports to fix.

DfER Defiles the Holy Name of Democrats

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Democrats for Education Reform (DfER) is a veritable who’s who of Education Deformers, privatizers, vultures and union busters. In California the group includes Gloria Romero, an anti-teacher Democratic state legislator, as well as Ben Austin, a leader of the astroturf organization Parent Revolution.  One of DfER’s primary objectives is to get pro-charter school, anti-teachers’ union officials elected to office.

Eric Bauman, chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, says the group’s name sows confusion and implies Democratic Party support for DfER-backed candidates when none exists. The Los Angeles Times reported this week that Bauman sent a letter to DfER accusing it of violating California’s election code and ordering it to "cease and desist" its "unlawful" use of the word "Democrat."

Bauman said his fight was ". . .about preventing voters from being fooled."

However, the Democratic Party itself is engaged in the much larger deception of suggesting that it is somehow defending Public Education when many of its members have supported and promoted the same agenda as DfER.

It is true the DfER is all about gutting teachers’ unions, tenure and due process rights, as well as promoting charter schools, vouchers and other privatization schemes. But what has the Democratic Party done for education lately? Gov. Brown is currently extorting the public by threatening to slash another $5-6 billion from K-12 education if it does not support his tax increase this November, a tax increase that would temporarily increase taxes on the wealthy, while also imposing a regressive sales tax increase that would disproportionately harm lower income residents.

The Democrats did virtually nothing to halt the looting of $20 billion from K-12 education over the past four years. They have sat idly by as class sizes have mushroomed, while nurses, counselors, librarians and course offerings have been decimated. They have worked side by side with Democratic Gov. Brown to slash teachers’ pensions. They willingly participated in the corporate sellouts known at Race to the Top RttT, Common Core Standards (CCS) and NCLB.

The Times’ article framed the situation as turf war between various factions in the Democratic Party. And to some extent they were right. However, what is most unpalatable about DfER to Democratic Party hacks is not its disingenuous adoption of the name “Democrat,” but its presumptuous challenge to the teachers unions’ status as the preeminent non-corporate donors to Democratic Party candidates.

However, from the perspective of teachers, students and those who care about the quality of education in California, DfER’s party affiliations are irrelevant. DfER, like many of its allies on both sides of the aisle, still wants greater privatization and weaker unions and job protections, and it wants these things not because they will help children (they won’t), but because they will help business.

Obama Chooses Charter School Shill as His California Spokeswoman

According to the Times, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) is irate over Obama’s decision to choose a Parent Revolution executive as his spokeswoman in California and has even threatened to back out of his reelection campaign if he doesn’t fire her.

The Times portrayed the CFT’s response as petty Party politics, suggesting that the CFT was simply refusing to work with someone it didn’t like. Gloria Romero went even further, calling it “threatening” and “bullying,” thus lending credence to the argument that it is a turf war between Democratic Party factions.

Yet one must remember that Parent Revolution’s main purpose is to rally parents to demand that their neighborhood schools be turned over to Educational Management Organizations (EMOs) and private charter school operators, thus abolishing existing teacher contracts and union protections and reducing parental and community control by allowing management decisions to be made behind closed doors by EMO board members.

Hence, Obama’s California spokeswoman is not just a shill for the charter school and privatization movements, but further evidence of his general hostility toward teachers’ unions and K-12 education. Considering his extortionist Race to the Top competitive grants program, and his support for increasing privatization through charter schools and Common Core Standards, teachers should NOT be supporting his campaign, regardless of his choice for California spokesperson. Obama, in practice, as well as intent, has been as antagonistic toward public education and teachers as the Bush Administration.

This brings us back to the question of Party factionalism versus Party loyalty to Capital. If Obama, DfER and so many other prominent Democrats are supporting vouchers, charter schools, CCS, RttT, evaluation reform, and other questionable, unproven, yet highly profitable changes to public education, it would seem reasonable to presume that they are in it for the money, just like their Republican counterparts. That is to say, they support these “reforms” because they are good for business.

The only significant difference between overtly anti-union Democrats like Gloria Romero and ostensibly pro-union Democrats like Jerry Brown is their rhetoric and their funding streams. Romero’s group, DfER, takes in much of its funding from anti-teacher philanthropies, while Brown takes in much of his funding from the teachers’ unions. In the end, they both are bad for teachers and for students.