California Democratic Party “Rejects” Corporate Reform Agenda

Democrats in the California state legislature approved Resolution 13-04.47 last week—also known as “SUPPORTING CALIFORNIA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND DISPELLING THE CORPORATE “REFORM” AGENDA.” The resolution, sponsored (and probably written) by the California Teachers Association (CTA), California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and the California Faculty Association (CFA), the three largest unions representing teachers and university professors in the state, specifically criticizes two corporate reform organizations—Democrats for Education Reform (DfER) and Students First (Michelle’s Rhee’s organization)—because they

“see public schools as potential profit centers and children as measureable commodities . . . [support dismantling] free public education . . . and replace it with company run charter schools, non-credentialed teachers and unproven untested so called ‘reforms.”

However, the resolution makes no concrete commitment to do anything to actually curtail the growing power of billionaire philanthropists, investors and hedge fund managers, let alone increase funding for public education, protect teachers’ job security and academic freedom, or even improve learning outcomes for students. It merely “reaffirms” the Democratic Party’s

“commitment to free accessible public schools for all which offer a fair, substantive opportunity to learn with educators who have the right to be represented by their union, bargain collectively and have a voice in the policies which affect their schools, classrooms and their students.”

This resolution might be encouraging if it had any teeth, or even any credibility. However, the Democratic party (and the teachers unions) have continually watched idly (and in many cases encouraged) all the things they criticize in the resolution, including the growth of private, for-profit charter schools and online, digital and distance learning schemes; the erosion of teacher’s collective bargaining rights and the deterioration of student learning opportunities. Even the criticism that the reformists are reducing children to mere commodities rings hollow when virtually every politician, regardless of party (as well as most teacher and student advocates), has been calling for more STEM graduates, and for all students to graduate career- or college-ready—which is to say all students have a price on their heads and a value to employers. Never mind that there is currently a glut of STEM graduates and thousands of jobless science PhDs, while pretty much the only people getting jobs at all are those willing to accept low wage work in the service sector. Children are a commodity, and the less employers have to pay to educate them now, the more they save on their taxes and the less they’ll have to pay to employ them later.

The implication that the “reformists” are solely responsible for dismantling public education is also an obfuscation of the facts. California, which ranked 46^th in per pupil spending in 2010-2011, spent $2,856 less per student than the rest of the U.S. and would have had to increase education spending by $17.3 billion to reach parity with the rest of the country (less than the $20 billion the state had slashed from its education budget between 2008 and 2011). California also fell to 50^th in ratio of students per teacher and per librarian and 49^th in ratio of students per counselor.

During the past decade the gap in per pupil spending between California and the rest of the nation grew each year, yet most of this was the result of cuts to state funding (often bipartisan), not because of policies of the reformists.  This has been exacerbated by California’s increasing reliance on state taxes, rather than local property taxes—a consequence of Proposition 13, which passed in 1978, decades before Students First or DfER were even gleams in the reformists’ eyes. Prop 13 allowed businesses and wealthy homeowners to keep their property tax rates at 1978 levels, thus reducing revenues available for schools and shifting more of the burden onto the state. Prior to Prop 13, California’s schools received 53.7% of their funding from local property taxes and only 35.3% from the state. By 2010-1, they received only 29.8% from local taxes and 56.8% from the state. (Data from the California Budget Project)

If the Democrats truly cared about providing quality “free accessible public schools for all,” they could dramatically increase revenues by raising taxes on the wealthy and their businesses, increasing royalties on oil extraction (California is currently the 3^rd largest onshore producer of oil in the U.S., yet it is the only oil producer with no severance tax and has a far lower overall tax rate for its oil producers than either Texas or Alaska), taxing marijuana sales and abolishing the death penalty and Three Strikes law. Democrats currently hold a super majority in both houses of the state legislature, giving them the power to raise taxes and override the governor’s veto, the first time they have had this power in 120 years. Instead, they gave us Prop 30, which imposes an infinitesimal tax increase on the wealthy and increases the regressive sales tax (which disproportionately affects lower income people), but barely holds education funding steady, thus maintaining California’s status at the bottom in per pupil spending (and restoring none of the $20 billion the schools lost over the past few years).

They could also reverse Prop 13 and dramatically raise the portion of education funding coming from local property taxes, thus reducing schools’ current dependence on the whims of state legislators and greed of the state’s business owners. Instead, they have made another nonbinding resolution and even this only proposes closing one of the initiative’s loopholes. If the lawmakers were to convert their Prop 13 resolution into law (something they so far have not attempted), property taxes on businesses would be reassessed “regularly” instead of being locked into their 1978 values. While this would certainly increase revenues, it still allows millionaires to maintain artificially low tax rates on their multiple multi-million dollar homes.

The notion that Democrats are opposed to privatization and the influence of millionaires is also patently false. Governor Jerry Brown, arguably the head Democrat in the state, created two of his own charter schools in Oakland when he was mayor there and used his powers as mayor to divert city staff members to charter school duty. Both charters were heavily funded by wealthy donors. Furthermore, Prop 30, which was pushed by Brown, initially permitted the funneling of tax dollars away from the free public K-12 system and into the pockets of private charter schools. He also proposed killing California’s transitional kindergarten program, which helps low income children catch up to their affluent peers by the time the reach kindergarten.

The resolution is nothing more than window dressing, an attempt by the unions to make their buddies in the Democratic Party appear to be pro-union, pro-teacher, and pro-education. The unions need this window dressing because they have done virtually nothing to resist the reform agenda. For example, when New York, Illinois and Los Angeles imposed Value Added Measures as part of their teacher evaluation plans, the unions whined and complained, but eventually rolled over and accepted it without a real fight. They argued that they couldn’t strike because it had been imposed by state law, in Illinois and New York, or by court order, in Los Angeles. 

This is ridiculous and pathetic on several levels. First, when the state or courts dictate how teachers are evaluated—something that has historically been negotiated between the teachers’ unions and their school districts—they are shredding teachers’ collective bargaining rights. The unions have accepted this attack on collective bargaining in the name of democracy (or, more precisely, in order to not offend their patrons in the Democratic Party). Second, workers have a long history of striking despite injunctions, vigilantes, police violence and even armed suppression by the military or national guards, risking beatings, imprisonment, deportation and death. Indeed, most strikes were illegal during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The 1936-7 Flint Sit-Down Strike was declared illegal. Sympathy strikes and General Strikes were made illegal in 1947 by the Taft-Hartley Act. The 1981 PATCO strike was declared illegal by President Reagan, resulting in the mass firing of air traffic controllers. Many of the strikes and protests in support of the 8-hour work day were declared illegal. Many of the Civil Rights, women’s rights, gay rights and anti-war marches were declared illegal.

Ultimately, if teachers and other workers want to retain their right to collective bargaining, let alone improve their working and living conditions, they need to be willing to engage in strikes and other forms of collective action, even if it sometimes involves civil disobedience. The same is true for changing the tax structure, increasing education funding, and keeping public education under the control of local communities rather than corporate boardrooms.

California Flunks Rhee’s Reform Ratings—Badge of Honor?

Image adapted from Flickr image by Calsidyrose

Michelle Rhee’s Students First advocacy group issued its ratings of state reform efforts last week. California was ranked 41^st nationally, with an overall score of F, according to the Los Angeles Times.  According to Students First, California has been asleep at the wheel with respect to the “reforms,” failing to limit teacher tenure and require student test scores to evaluate teachers.

Richard Zeiger, Deputy Supt. at the California Department of Education called the F grade a "badge of honor."

While it may be refreshing to hear a high ranking education official disparage Rhee’s astroturf school privatization organization, the fact that California ranked so high on her list should still be an embarrassment. Consider that there are 9 other states that ranked lower than California which, according to the backward logic of Rhee, means there are 9 that have done a better job than California at resisting free market reforms. Furthermore, the only high mark California did receive was for being the birthplace of “parent trigger” laws, which are essentially a Trojan horse for corporate education profiteers and for-profit charter school operators to grab taxpayer dollars—hardly a mark of honor.

No states received an A from Rhee’s organization. The two top states were Louisiana and Florida, which each earned a B-. Louisiana has been one the quickest to give away its public schools to non-unionized private charter school operators, particularly in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In New Orleans, over 70% of students now go to charter schools. Florida bases 50% of teacher evaluations on student test scores even though those scores are highly variable from year to year and completely unreliable for all but those at the extremes.

Even though Massachusetts has among the highest levels of student achievement, the state only received a D+ because it did not do enough to crush teachers unions and give away control of its schools to education profiteers. Montana received an F for strongly supporting local control of its schools.

New Astroturf Group Calls Tenure, Seniority Unconstitutional

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

A right-wing astroturf group, Students Matter, has escalated the war on California’s teachers with a lawsuit seeking to overturn five state laws related to teacher tenure, seniority and the dismissal process.

The law suit, which was filed on May 14 in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of eight students, argued that "A handful of outdated laws passed by the California Legislature are preventing school administrators from maintaining or improving the quality of our public educational system," the Los Angeles Times wrote this week.

The suit is full of logical inconsistencies. For example, it argues that teachers can earn tenure too easily (in two years), well before their actual skill in the classroom can be determined. If successful, this would make it much harder for teachers to earn tenure and the right not to be fired without cause. Yet at the same time the suit aims to abolish seniority rules that protect experienced veteran teachers (i.e., those who have demonstrated skill in the classroom) during layoffs. This would make it much easier to fire veteran teachers with a proven track record, exactly the teachers districts should want to protect assuming they were really interested in providing the best teachers possible for students.

The suit cynically claims to be fighting for the rights of low income students under the equal protection provisions of the California Constitution. It argues that the current law protects ineffective teachers and “creates arbitrary and unjustifiable inequality among students,” according to Thoughts on Public Education. In short, the suit is saying that tenure, seniority and due process violate the state’s constitution, a claim that would be laughable if there wasn’t a powerful national movement behind it.

While it is true that low income schools tend to have higher percentages of younger teachers, it is not because of seniority, tenure and due process. Rather, these are the toughest schools to teach at and require teachers to work much harder than at more affluent schools, but for the same pay. In districts like LAUSD, where student test score data are used to evaluate teachers and where teachers’ Value Added (VAM) scores are publicly posted, there is a significant disincentive to teach at these schools.

One should also question why we have an Apartheid system in which some schools are filled predominantly with low-income students, while others within the same district (and sometimes only a few miles away) are predominantly affluent. Likewise, California continues to have among the lowest per pupil rates of K-12 funding in the nation. These are the real stories of educational inequality and they have nothing at all to do with the teachers or their job protections.

In reality, abolishing tenure, seniority and due process rights has nothing to do with protecting children or making their schools better. It is really about three things: union-busting, increasing administrators’ power, and cutting salary costs so they can be reallocated to other things, like administrators’ salaries or irrational and unproven reform efforts.

The lawsuit would provide administrators with much greater flexibility in getting rid of higher paid veteran teachers, as wells as union activists and vocal advocates for student and teacher rights. By stacking schools with rookies and novices who must keep their mouths shut and suck up to their bosses longer in order to avoid being laid off, administrators can more easily push through “reforms” like increased class sizes and teacher evaluations based on student test scores and student surveys that are detrimental (see here, here and here) to both students and teachers.

This suit could have monumentally negative consequences for students and schools. Making it easier to get rid of experienced teachers could result in a large influx of novices who not only lack the experience to teach well, but who also have a much higher attrition rate than veteran teachers, thus increasing the turnover of teaching staffs. It could also accelerate the exodus of experienced teachers from teaching to other professions. And while it could save schools money by allowing them to replace relatively expensive veterans with much cheaper rookies, it would hurt K-12 education in the long run through its tacit acceptance of educational defunding by the state.

Students Matter, which is a relative newcomer to the teacher bashing game, was founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch and, not surprisingly, has received much of its funding from Ed Deform Czar Eli Broad. Its advisory committee includes Students First, Michelle Rhee’s fake student advocacy group; teacher-bashing former state senator Gloria Romeo; and the Parent Trigger charter school front group, Parent Revolution.

The Thoughts on Public Education (Toped) blog says that California’s dismissal law can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per teacher to fire a teacher for unsatisfactory performance, thus compelling districts to find workarounds, like shunting teachers from school to school [or filing trumped up disciplinary charges against the teacher].

This really misses the point. If a teacher is truly doing a bad job of teaching, but really wants to continue teaching, he should be provided professional development, mentoring and other support at the district’s expense. This would be far cheaper than going through the 10-step dismissal process and all the accompanying legal costs.

It also glosses over the important question of what really constitutes bad teaching and how is this being assessed? In my 15 years of teaching I have seen very few truly rotten teachers and only a handful of mediocre ones. This may be coincidental; however, I think the whole bad teacher hysteria is really a red herring, something intended to rally the public to support union-busting in the guise of children’s innocence and safety.

Indeed, Toped notes that while the suit claims 8 students suffered because of ineffective teachers, it did not cite any evidence of any specific teachers having a negative impact on the plaintiffs. Rather, if focused on research by the National Council On Teacher Quality and Eric Hanushek. The latter concluded that by dismissing the weakest 6-10% of teachers, students’ academic success and earnings as adults would increase.

“Weakest,” however, does not necessarily mean bad, inadequate or worthy of throwing into the unemployment line. As in any profession there is a spectrum of different skill levels and this is not necessarily detrimental. For example, I may not be able to see the same physician who treats the 49ers, but that doesn’t mean my orthopedist is doing a bad job or should be banned from practicing.

Furthermore, there is no accurate method for determining who the weakest 10% of teachers are. Even if there was such a method, we could find that 100% of teachers were effective, but there would still be a bottom 10% who would be fired just to fill Hanushek’s quota and mollify the Ed Deform wolves.

Michelle Rhee: Dragon Capitalist

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Michelle Rhee’s Students First project collaborated with Michigan Republicans to draft four anti-teacher education bills, including the implementation of a merit pay scheme and the gutting of teacher’s collective bargaining rights. The bills make it easier to fire teachers, dramatically reducing their ability to advocate for their students or themselves. The bills also make it easier to slash their pensions, benefits and pay and easier to bust their unions. This, in turn, makes it easier to fund subsidies and tax cuts for the wealthy and while contributing to increased profits by stimulating a general downward spiral in wages.

The following is from the Rhee First website:

“Education blogger At the Chalk Face has obtained an internal briefing document from Michelle Rhee’s Students First, and makes clear just how extensively Students First collaborated with Michigan Republicans on four education bills targeting teachers, including one limiting collective bargaining. The 30-page PDF is available here.”

Rhee: Save Great Teachers And Sack the Rest

The Sacking of Public Education

As reported previously, admitted serial child abuser and mass teacher-job killer Michelle Rhee has moved operations to Sacramento, California, to be near her hubby, accused serial pedophile (and Mayor of Sacramento) Kevin Johnson. On Wednesday, Rhee’s new organization, Students First, launched its first big campaign: “Save Great Teachers,” which sounds wonderful, like save the whales. Who isn’t for great teachers? The problem is that the actual goal of Save Great Teachers is to get rid of everyone else by ending seniority.

Like most of those who support the destruction of seniority, Rhee apes back many of the same false justifications, like seniority-based layoffs hurt disadvantaged students most (see here). It is true that high poverty schools tend to have less experienced teachers and it would seem that a seniority-based system would therefore harm these schools more than others. This was the rationale for the ACLU-backed lawsuit in Los Angeles that has shielded 40 odd low-performing schools from all layoffs in LAUSD’s coming orgy of pink slips. However, layoffs never happen purely by seniority. A young teacher in a high demand position (e.g., special ed or science) is likely to keep his or her job, while a senior teacher in a lower demand job (e.g., social studies or English) may end up getting a pink slip. According to Students First, Facts Later, from the Shanker Blog, the two best layoff analyses available indicate that seniority-based layoffs are spread relatively evenly between higher and lower poverty schools (see here and here).

One of the main reasons why advocates support an end to seniority has nothing at all to do with students’ wellbeing. It has to do with the claim that it would save districts money (senior teachers earn higher salaries than novice teachers). However, this claim assumes that large numbers of senior teachers would be fired under a merit-based system, which is absurd if it was truly based on teacher skill. Like most other professions, teachers improve with experience. Therefore, under a merit-based system, the longer one has been in the profession, the better they should be at their jobs. While there are many excellent novice teachers, few if any have reached their peak within their first few years. It is true, some may already be better than some veterans, but chances are this is a small percentage.

There is another important issue here that never seems to be part of the discourse: If we value teachers and want the best for our children, then we should be supporting them throughout their careers with the material security that comes from the seniority system. Keep them in the classrooms. Likewise, everyone deserves material security. Until we are ready to abolish wage slavery and capitalism itself, we should be fighting to secure material wellbeing for all workers. Considering that poverty is the most significant influence on academic achievement, this should also help improve test scores and graduation rates, and close the achievement gap, too.