Data Driven Nonsense from Harvard and the Gates Foundation

A new Gates-funded Harvard study has found that Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) teachers vary substantially in quality (more than in other districts) and that it disproportionately places inexperienced teachers in lower performing classrooms (as in other districts). The study, Human Capital Diagnostic, was done by the Strategic Data Project (SDP), which is connected with Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research.

The biggest problem with this study is that it is a bunch of nonsense.

Let’s start with the authors’ most profound claim: The best teachers in LAUSD provide the equivalent of eight additional months of instruction during the school year compared with the district’s worst teachers. Since their research was based entirely on student scores on the California Standards Tests (CSTs), a high-stakes exam used to rank schools, and the top teachers in the study were the ones with the largest student gains on these tests, what they are really saying is that the best teachers provided the equivalent of eight additional months of test prep.

Big wow!

The authors state that there is “no specific cut-off for determining whether an effect size is large or small,” but they assert that a standard deviation of 0.2 is considered large in education research. The study found that the difference between a 25^th and a 75^th percentile teacher is one-quarter of a standard deviation (0.25). This would be significant if it was based on a meaningful measurement of teacher effectiveness. Unfortunately, all it really says it that some teachers are better than others at squeezing out student gains on an otherwise lousy exam. It does not tell us whether their students are becoming self-motivated, independent learners or competent critical thinkers and problem-solvers. Furthermore, the study provided no explanation for how it determined that 0.25 standard deviations was equivalent to eight months of instruction.

The authors also claim that Teach for America (TFA) and Career Ladder teachers have higher effects on their students than other novice teachers by 0.05 and 0.03 standard deviations and they even attributed a gain of one to two months in additional learning to these relatively small standard deviations. They make similar claims for National Board Certified teachers, whose students test gains were 0.03-0.07 standard deviations higher than those of other teachers. Yet, if a standard deviation of 0.2 is considered large in education, then a standard deviation of 0.03-0.07 ought to be considered small or even insignificant.

While the standard deviation may be insignificant, the fact that this was being researched in the first place is not. TFA provided 13% of new hires to the district over the past six years (according to the study’s authors) and it would be of great interest to the district’s administrators to show that the investment was worthwhile. So let’s assume for the sake of argument that the difference between TFA recruits and other novice teachers was significant. What would this mean? TFA teachers may in fact be more willing than other novice teachers to work long, unpaid overtime hours and substitute quality student-centered instruction for “drill and kill” style teaching, both of which could produce higher test scores without improving the quality of student learning.

Perhaps a bigger problem with this study (like all studies and reforms based on student test data) is that numbers are not the only relevant type of data in education and sometimes not even the best. Ester Quintaro, writing for the Shanker Blog, talks about the “streetlight effect,” from the parable of the drunk who searches for his lost wallet under the streetlight, not because he lost it there, but because the light is better there and it would be easier to find it if it happened to be there. Student test data is easy to access now that it is required of every district in the U.S. under No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—it is under the streetlight.  Yet, at best it is only a proxy or very rough estimate of teacher quality since it only considers a small part of what teachers are expected to do.

Quintara also correctly points out that NCLB has helped to institutionalize what counts as data. “Scientifically-based research” is now limited to standardized test scores, which, as it turns out, are not particularly scientific. Case studies, ethnographies, teacher observations and portfolios, and other qualitative data are considered unacceptable.

One promising finding from the study was that teacher performance after two years was found to be a good predictor of future effectiveness. In other words, the current system of giving tenure to teachers after two years of good evaluations makes sense. Teachers are not getting worse after two years. Novice teachers are not better than veterans and should not have the right to bump them during layoffs and LAUSD is not top heavy with a bunch of cranky veterans who can no longer teach.

New Orlean Teachers Union Rising From the Dead?

Zombie Teachers Union? (Nanning Teachers College, Guangxi, image by Rex Pe, Flickr)

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans became the poster child for what Naomi Kline dubbed “Disaster Capitalism.” Businesses came ostensibly to “help” residents recover, but in actuality were there primarily to help themselves to billions of dollars in disaster relief funds.

While Katrina did not do significant damage to the school system, the general chaos and misery that followed provided excellent cover for public education profiteers, who convinced the city to turn over most of the school district to private charter school operators and fire all 7,500 of its teachers, driving a hefty spike into the heart of the union. Since Katrina, the feds have pumped $3 billion into New Orleans schools (Labor Notes reports), providing considerable opportunities for private business to turn a profit. The charter schools have received millions more from private donors like Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey.

The union fought back in the courts and, after seven years, won a small victory this June when a judge ruled that the firings were illegal. This provided little relief for the teachers, however, as very few will get their old jobs back (though some will receive small settlement payments). It also leaves the city’s schools in the hands of private charter school operators

Nevertheless, United Teachers New Orleans (UTNO) has been trying to rebuild its membership and regain a foothold in the city. The union currently has around 1,000 members (about one quarter of the city’s teachers), though it has no contracts at any New Orleans schools (according to Labor Notes). Their efforts are further hampered by the fact that, under Louisiana state law, they are not guaranteed the right to collectively bargain.

UTNO organizers face other challenges as well, such as recent state legislation that weakened tenure protections, thus making it easier to get rid of experienced veteran teachers who are often the most vocal union advocates.

Ironically, (but not surprisingly), New Orleans schools are performing poorly, despite the large influx of funds. None of the Recovery District’s 15 “direct-run” schools, and only 21% of its charter schools, received passing grades in state evaluations. Governor Bobby Jindal essentially blamed the teachers for these terrible scores and used the scores to garner support for the legislation, which requires that 50% of teachers’ evaluations be based on student test scores. Thus, if scores remain low (which they likely will, since they are influenced primarily by students’ socioeconomic status), teachers will be unlikely to earn tenure and will face the constant threat of dismissal, especially if they are seen as union supporters or troublemakers.

To make matters worse, in order to earn tenure, teachers will have to receive five “highly effective” ratings within six years, and veteran teachers can lose tenure after a single “ineffective” rating. Keep in mind that few districts evaluate their teachers every year, or require “highly effective” ratings (“satisfactory” or “effective” are generally considered adequate). In addition to making tenure virtually impossible, the frequency of evaluations, itself, is an unreasonable burden on teachers and their students. Each evaluation cycle, teachers must attend meetings with evaluators, complete extra paper work and jump through other hoops that take away time from their students and their teaching responsibilities.

Within the six district-run schools, UTNO has close to 80% membership. Labor Notes writes that in these schools, much of the old contract is still enforced. It is a different story in the charter schools, where union membership is negligible. Under an agreement with the Recovery District, however, UTNO is permitted access to the schools and is entitled to dues check-off for any teachers who sign up.

The challenge is getting these teachers to sign up. Many are young Teach For America (TFA) graduates hired on short-term contracts who do not see union membership as being in their interests. Others have been told outright to avoid the union, as it is dominated by the same veteran teachers who caused the problems plaguing the school district (that TFA grads were supposedly there to fix).

There is a lot of fear and ignorance of unions that UTNO must counter. More importantly, they need to convince teachers, including TFA teachers and those at private charter schools, that union membership is in their interests and will benefit them, both in the short- and long-term. This means improving things like job security, pay and benefits, working conditions and class sizes.

UTNO has not been able to do this. It has launched an admirable community outreach campaign and engaged in numerous solidarity actions with other unions and community-based organizations. It has helped fight school closings and takeovers. Yet its members acknowledge that they’re not in a position to win much right now. Indeed, as long as its members can have tenure stripped away for low student test scores, they are at risk of losing the small foothold they still have within the district.

Rocketship’s National Plan to Jettison Teachers

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is not true.

This common sense adage ought to prevent intelligent people from falling for costly scams. Yet otherwise smart people continue to get suckered at an alarming rate. This is particularly true in politics and education “reform,” where people seem to prefer the fantasy of a quick, magic bullet “fix” to social problems, than having to do a little research or critical analysis to determine if the proposal has any merit.

Consider John Danner, former school teacher and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who claims to have found the solution to the academic achievement gap with his Rocketship charter schools. Rocketship’s students, who are predominately poor and Latino, have recently outscored the county and state averages on standardized exams, making Danner and Rocketship extremely popular within the Ed Deform movement as it has seemingly overcome the intractable negative effects of poverty on educational outcomes.

Danner now wants to take his Silicon Valley model on the road and expand it to 50 cities by 2020. Cities across the U.S. on jumping on the bandwagon, begging Rocketship to set up shop in their districts, while the Obama administration has put up $2 million to facilitate its spread. Milwaukee has approved the opening of Rocketship schools, as have New Orleans, Nashville and Indianapolis. It also has approval to open another 20 schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.

For the Kids or the Bosses?

What really makes the Rocketship model popular among the Ed Deformers is not its seeming success at educating lower income students. This is certainly a great selling point and way to increase public support and startup donations. However, what the Ed Deform movement is really after is the billions of taxpayer dollars that are still nominally under public control. Charter schools are, of course, one of their favorite tools to accomplish this. And a charter school that can quickly wean itself from philanthropic donations and become self-sufficient or start turning a profit is like gold to these vultures.

Here is where Rocketship has done some magic. Like other charter schools, Rocketship receives public funds, but is liberated from many of the limitations of traditional public schools, like having to hire unionized teachers and paying union wages. However, Rocketship doesn’t just slash wages—it slashes jobs, replacing teachers with computers and low-paid clerks and volunteers. Superintendent Maria De La Vega, of East Palo Alto's Ravenswood City School District, who opposed Rocketship moving into her district, was quoted in Palo Alto Online calling the Rocketship model ". . . a business design, not an educational program design that is constructed to promote literacy and academics. . ."

According to the Washington Post, students spend 2 hours per day in front of computers, cutting labor costs by 25%, allowing the schools to “extend the school day to eight hours [and] pay higher salaries to its nonunion teachers.” The computer labs are monitored by volunteers who have “experience with children,” according to Education Next, but no teaching credential (nor even bachelor’s degree) is required.

It should be emphasized that the “higher salary” does not translate into a higher hourly rate. Rather, teachers work longer hours (about 25% more to accommodate the longer school day) at a slightly higher yearly salary (10% more, according to the Post) that does not fully compensate them for the longer work day.

Additionally, 75% of its teachers come from Teach for America (TFA), which places teachers in the classroom after only 5 weeks of training. TFA teachers have a higher attrition rate than certificated teachers (69% quit within their first two years, while 88% leave within three years). Theoretically, this should result in a higher turnover rate, though the Post says that Rockeship’s rate of 25% is in line with the national average for low income schools (though not necessarily for low income schools in Silicon Valley). Even if their turnover rate is typical, their tendency to hire predominantly inexperienced TFA teachers still allows them to trim labor costs, since the pay scale is based on years of experience and they keep replacing low wage TFA teachers with other inexperienced teachers.

Even though Rocketship is considered a “nonprofit” charter school, it still helps facilitate the transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to private businesses. The emphasis on computer technology, for example, is a cash cow for tech giants that not only get to sell more hardware to the schools, but also software and service contracts, which can lock the schools into long term financial commitments. The replacement of unionized, credentialed teachers with poorly trained, nonunionized TFA novices and volunteer monitors contributes to the deskilling of the teaching profession, which undermines union strength and drives down wages (see here and here), not only for teachers, but others in the region. Danner, who is not a teacher or a principal at any of his schools, still skims off $150,000 per year in salary, according to the Post.

Higher Test Scores—The Jury is Still Out.

Rocketship currently has only 5 schools up and running, two of which recently completed their first years and lack test score data. Thus, all the excitement over their ability to close the achievement gap is based on very limited data, with only nominal reproducibility. And even one of their “successful” schools had a recent decline in test scores.

It is also questionable whether Rocketship’s study body accurately represents the full range of lower income students. Unlike traditional public schools, which are required to accept all students and cannot kick them out unless they have committed serious infractions, charter schools can exclude students for things like insufficient parental involvement. Indeed, Rocketship requires parents to attend monthly meetings and volunteer 30 hours each year. Even if these requirements were not strictly enforced after the fact, they would still likely cause some lower income families to avoid enrolling in the first place, thus skewing the demographics and test data.

Furthermore, like many other charter schools, Rocketship enrolls fewer students with learning disabilities, which also skews their data. According to the Post, only 6% of Rocketship’s students have learning disabilities—roughly half the rate of the traditional public schools in the area.

High Tech Vs. Health, Thinking and Independence

Considering that Rocketship is currently only in the K-5 business, its heavy reliance on computers should give pause. The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that young children spend no more than 2 hours in front any type of screen or monitor, including television, videos and computers, as it promotes obesity, sleep and behavior problems, and can even impair academic performance. More screen time also means less active, creative play and learning, and less time to develop healthy social relationships with other children and adults.

Even if Rocketship did limit screen time to 2 hours per day, its students are still returning home after school and most likely spending more time in front of the television and computer. However, Danner has predicted that his students could spend up to 50% of their school days in front of computers as he develops better software.

On a final note, it is important to consider how a school is being judged as successful. Rocketship, like all schools nowadays, is being deemed a success by its test scores. In order to boost its state test scores, it compels its students to take numerous internal exams throughout the year to prepare them for the official exams and to provide the staff with data. Thus, Rocketeers (as Danner likes to call his students) are losing meaningful instructional time with well-trained teachers to test prep and practice tests, in addition to the time lost in front of computer screens.

Illiterate Braggart to Take Over 15 Detroit Public Schools

Yes, I realize this is a rather bombastic headline, but it was hard to resist. Consider the following public statement by John Covington, Chancellor of the Education Achievement Authority, the agency that will be taking over 15 low performing Detroit Public Schools. In response to the agency’s plan to lengthen the school year he was quoted in the Detroit News saying:

"I don't know if people understand the magnitude of what just happened. . . This 210 days for students, it puts us at the highest in the nation, only second to Massachusetts."

Disregarding his inarticulate sentence structure and poor math skills, the fact remains that six DPS high schools and nine elementary-middle schools will be taken over by the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), created by Gov. Rick Snyder improve the state's failing schools.

The EAA was given the authority to lengthen the school year for students at its schools, from the current 170 days to 210 starting next fall. Students will have 52- to 54-day quarters and shorter breaks for the holidays.

The new rules will affect approximately 12,000 students at schools chosen because of their high percentages of at-risk children.

Covington reassured angry parents that they will be allowed to keep their kids at the affected schools or transfer to another DPS school, while students from other district schools will be permitted to enroll in the EAA schools. However, parents are unlikely to transfer their kids to a school branded as low performing unless they are already at a low performing school and want the extra days of taxpayer subsidized babysitting.

On the other hand, parents of children at the affected schools might have the right to transfer their children, but lack the means. For one, they will be expected to fill out additional paper work and jump through extra hoops, something that lower income parents are often unable to do because of their busy work schedules, difficulties communicating in English or because they lack the experience to navigate the bureaucracy confidently and effectively. Furthermore, their children could get placed at a school that is inconveniently located, preventing them from getting their children to and from school.

The Beatings Will Continue Until You Master the Content

In addition to taking away much of their vacation time and increasing the number of hours they are in the classroom, the EAA will no longer place students in classrooms with their peers. Instead, students will be placed in classrooms based on their instructional level. Thus, a child who is reading at the second grade level would be in a classroom with other students at this reading level, regardless of their age. 

The Teacher Beatings Will Continue, Too

It seems like the entire staffs at the affected schools will be fired, as Covington plans to hire roughly 600 new teachers, including 200 from Teach for America (TFA), a move that ought to make everyone suspicious of the true motives of this “reform.” If the goal is to help struggling students, then the solutions should be to hire experienced teachers with demonstrated skill and staying power. TFA teachers have virtually no training, poorer outcomes with their students, and a notoriously high attrition rates.

The plan to take over these schools and hire new teachers seems to actually be about union busting. TFA teachers, being young and inexperienced, tend to be more malleable and compliant than experienced unionized teachers, making them very appealing to administrators who want to push through unpopular reforms and squeeze more work from their employees. However, the new plan does not guarantee that EAA teachers will be covered by the collective bargaining agreement between DPS and the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT), even though the schools were covered by the contract prior to the takeover.

Carnegie, Steel and the Busting of Teacher Unions (Part I)

Note: A shorter version of this article was published today in Labor Notes.
 
Education bloggers have done a good job of covering how wealthy philanthropists like Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton family (see here, here, here and here) have sought to privatize and corporatize public education (see here, here, here and here). Their objectives, however, are not limited solely to increasing capital’s access to this huge and relatively untapped market, though this is certainly a major goal (See No Capitalist Left Behind). They also want to crush teachers unions because they reduce profits by defending wages and benefits and by resisting privatization schemes. Additionally, Republicans and Tea Party activists want to eliminate unions because of their financial support for Democratic candidates.

Education Reform: A Union Busting Trojan Horse

While attempts to crush the unions legislatively (e.g., Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan) have had only limited success, they have been much more effective at weakening the teachers unions discreetly through education reform. Reforms that limit tenure, due process or seniority protections also squelch dissent, union participation and even student advocacy by making it easier to fire teachers for any reason, regardless of their skill in the classroom. Charter schools weaken union power because they are exempt from districts’ closed shop policies and are almost always nonunion. 

However, education reform has also been undermining union strength in a much more subtle way by deskilling teachers. This has received scant coverage, probably because it is Trojan horse that does not directly attack unions, but weakens them from the inside out.

Andrew Carnegie—The Original Ed Deformer

History shows how deskilling workers weakens their unions. Prior to the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, the steelworkers were highly skilled, with very specialized training (much like teachers and nurses today). When the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW) made a demand and backed it with the threat of a strike, Homestead’s chairman, Henry Clay Frick, and its owner, Andrew Carnegie, had little choice but to concede, since they could not lock out the workers and replace them with strikebreakers who lacked this training. AAISW virtually ran the mill, using this power to control the speed of production and the safety of the plant, in addition to more traditional wage and benefits demands.

In 1889, Carnegie attempted to crush the union by imposing a wage cut of 25% and abolishing collective bargaining. The workers fought off strikebreakers and Pinkertons (private police hired to protect the scabs), while sympathetic strikes broke out at other Carnegie mills, forcing Carnegie to back down, accept collective bargaining, and sign a three-year contract. (From Strike! by Jeremy Brecher, South End Press, Boston, 1972).

Pinkertons Surrender to Authorities

The workers won an important battle, but the war was not over. In January, 1892, Carnegie tried another large wage cut. Frick imposed speedups and hired 300 Pinkertons. On July 2, Frick laid off the entire Homestead workforce, effectively ending collective bargaining. The workers organized themselves and essentially took over the town’s political authority and ran its infrastructure. 10,000 strikers temporarily held off the Pinkertons and scabs with sticks and a few guns. However, 40 strikers were shot and nine killed, while 120 Pinkertons were shot and seven killed. Meanwhile, Carnegie continued to bring in scabs, this time under the protection of militias, and those who didn't quit to join the strikers were able to keep production going. (From Brecher, op. cit.)

The strike lasted four months, until winter cold and hunger set in. Many workers’ families were literally starving. Furthermore, they were now up against Pinkertons and government militias. Perhaps most significant, though, was the fact that in a few short years, Carnegie had been able automate much of production, allowing untrained and semi-skilled scabs to do the work that had previously only been possible by highly skilled laborers. (From Brecher, op. cit.) If the strikers had continued to hold out, they likely would have been permanently replaced. Indeed, many of the strike’s leaders were blacklisted, which would have been much more difficult if the mills still required highly skilled workers. According to Brecher, mechanization at the Carnegie mills led to a 25% overall decline in employees, with a doubling of productivity for steelworkers and a tripling of productivity for the furnace workers.

Andrew Carnegie, The Original Ed Deformer

The lesson Carnegie taught capitalists then and education reformers today (Scott Walker, notwithstanding) was that instead of going immediately for overt and confrontational tactics like slashing wages or collective bargaining, they could weaken workers’ power by attacking their working conditions and making them superfluous through automation. Speeding up production, for example, leads to higher profits without increasing wages, yet it is still a de facto wage cut. It also forces workers to toil harder and faster, increasing their exhaustion and decreasing their time and energy for organizing or commiserating with their peers.

Through mechanization, the bosses not only decrease the cost of production by decreasing the number of employees; worker skill and expertise become less important and workers become interchangeable, thus making it easier to replace them with scabs should they decide to strike. Furthermore, workers are much less likely to go on strike in the first place over an attack on their working conditions if they believe their job security and take home pay will be unaffected.

Carnegie Today: The Deskilling of Teachers

While the Right has not yet succeeded in destroying the public sector unions, it has undermined worker solidarity by convincing nonunionized and private sector workers that public sector workers are somehow responsible for their problems. One reason for the success of this corporate legend is that it exploits differences in social status between these groups of workers. Public sector workers, like teachers, nurses and social workers, are often portrayed as thinkers or caregivers, rather than as workers proper, as if their labor was easier, less dangerous, done entirely out of love, and therefore not worthy of generous compensation or job protections.  More significantly, public sector unions, like the AAISW, tend to represent highly skilled workers such as nurses, teachers, fire fighters, police and social workers, whose jobs require specialized college and/or professional training. As a result, they cannot be easily replaced by unemployed and underemployed workers who lack this training. Thus, if the unions did stand up to the politicians, they would not be able to simply fire them all and find competent replacements to keep the system functioning. This is one reason why the public sector unions are still relatively strong.

However, with the deskilling of teaching, this is rapidly changing. 

Teach For America (TFA), for example, places recent college graduates with virtually no education training, student teaching experience or pedagogical coursework directly into the classroom. Billionaires like Broad have been big financial backers of TFA, but they have also supported the irrational and discredited notion that we must do away with seniority to protect the eager young teachers who are all presumed to be better than their senior colleagues, despite their lack of experience. 

Even the ACLU has jumped on this bandwagon, successfully suing LAUSD to undermine contractually protected seniority rights at low income schools by exempting their novice teachers from layoffs, ostensibly to protect their students from losing their teachers each year. However, this plan will likely backfire due to the high attrition rates of inexperienced teachers (50% of ALL teachers quit within their first five years), a problem that is exacerbated at low income schools where they are expected to make their students transcend the myriad lifetime disadvantages of growing up in poverty. Indeed, attrition at low income schools is 50% higher than at more affluent schools.

Educators are being deskilled in more subtle ways, too, particularly through increasingly rigid and punitive accountability and testing schemes that pressure schools and teachers to teach to the test and engage in “drill and kill” activities at the expense of inquiry-based learning, critical thinking, reading for depth and curiosity. Many districts, as a direct result of NCLB mandates and punishments, have forced teachers to be in lockstep with their curricula or have imposed scripted reading. Common Core Standards are taking away the independence of local school districts and states to determine their own content standards and relinquishing this responsibility more and more to the textbook publishers. Value-added and merit pay schemes use compensation and tenure as carrots and sticks to push teachers ever deeper into the mindset that test scores trump all else. When job security and income are dependent on student test scores, it stands to reason that many will sacrifice good pedagogy for increased test practice, rote memorization and “drill and kill.”

The threat of NCLB punishments has led many schools to implement scripted test preparation that not only undermines teacher creativity and innovative curriculum, but that also drives a stake into children’s curiosity and excitement about learning. Rather than engaging in interesting class discussions, reading enjoyable age-appropriate texts, or doing exciting lab activities, many teachers are finding themselves compelled to participate in school-wide vocabulary activities written by an administrator and broadcast of the schools’ PA or video system. Teachers are also finding more and more of their instructional time being replaced by standardized exams (as many as several weeks each school year), further deskilling the profession, as exam proctoring entails little more than passing out answer sheets, test booklets and reading scripted instructions from a handbook.

A similar dynamic is taking place at the university level, where it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain a tenure track position. More and more schools are now hiring professors as temporary, part-time lecturers, with few benefits, low pay, no job security and little influence over their curriculum. Without tenure or a commitment by the university to support them, they must spend so much time writing grants to pay their own salaries or fighting to defend their positions that they have little time for original research or designing innovative curriculum. In some cases, professors are being replaced by taped lectures purchased through subscriptions. Others are taking jobs facilitating online courses which inherently limit the creativity and quality of the teaching. Online science classes, for example, have very inadequate options for experimentation, and thus become more like Facebook discussions of textbook passages than opportunities to learn and do real science.

Attacks on Teachers Unions Are Attacks On Children

Education reform is not only harming students directly by killing their enthusiasm and curiosity, turning schools into testing mills, and transferring resources from the classroom to the pockets of corporate education profiteers, but also by deskilling their teachers and driving many out of the profession. The more we turn schools into mills and teachers into factory workers, the more we also destroy their love and passion for teaching and hence their desire to be in education in the first place.

Stay tuned for Carnegie, Steel and the Busting of Teacher Unions  (Part II), in which I discuss the lessons for teachers and unions and ways to fight this madness.

Lies of Our Times—LA Mayor Says Firing Teachers Improves Student Learning

In an Op Ed in the Los Angeles Times today, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said that “the crisis in Los Angeles public schools — where only about half of the students graduate from high school and fewer than 30% of those who do are college-ready — can't be solved until we make excellent teaching a top priority.” His solution is to do away with seniority, weaken tenure protections, and tie teacher evaluations to student test scores.

The first problem with Villaraigosa’s assessment is that there is no crisis. A crisis is a discreet event, whereas low graduation rates are the historical norm, a constant since the earliest days of the American education system. In the 19^th century, only 2% of U.S. children graduated from high school, according to Education Week. While graduation rates steadily rose in the early to middle 20^th century, they remained low for minority and especially lower income students. In the 1950s and 60s, for example, high school dropout rates for Latin Americans were a whopping 75%, according to Time. Considering that the graduation rate for Latinos in LAUSD in 2008 was around 30%, one could argue that considerable progress has been made (see UCLA IDEA). The U.S. high school graduation rate peaked at 77% in 1969, with nearly one in four children not graduating from high school—clearly, many children were being left behind, even during this “golden age” of public education.

Crisis or not, a 50% graduation rate is troubling and we ought to be able to do better. However, the problem has nothing to do with an epidemic of bad teachers, as Villaraigosa would have us believe. The vast majority of teachers are perfectly good at their jobs. Yet, if we assume that there are large numbers of bad teachers and equal numbers of great teachers waiting to take their places, how would this transformation help a child who comes to school so hungry, sick, in pain or stressed out by the financial insecurity at home that she cannot concentrate or study?

Overwhelmingly, the most significant cause of low graduation rates, test scores and college readiness is student poverty. Poverty contributes to a host of physical and cognitive problems that can diminish academic achievement. Poor children are more likely to suffer low birth weights and malnutrition, which can lead to learning disabilities. Iron-deficiency anemia, which impairs cognitive ability, is twice as common among poor children. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 10% of poor students have dangerous levels of lead in their blood, which can lead to decreased intelligence. Lack of healthcare causes poor children to be absent as much as 40% more often than middle class kids, according to education researcher Richard Rothstein. In a study of Baltimore school children, high school drop-outs averaged 27.6 absences per year, while graduates averaged only 11.8. Poor children move more due to financial insecurity. According to the Educational Testing Service, 41% of students who changed schools frequently were below grade level in reading and 33% were below grade level in math, compared to 26% and 17%, respectively, for those who remained at the same schools.

Lower income families also suffer more stress and higher rates of stress-related illness as a result. They are more likely to worry about financial insecurity, but they are also more likely to have jobs and social circumstances in which they have very little personal control, one of the most stressful situations one can experience. Bosses, for example, have the most control over their personal and workplace circumstances. They make the workplace rules and no one is going to berate them if they come in late or take a day off. Middle managers, of course, have much less personal control on the job, while clerical and custodial workers have very little control and they often must answer to numerous managers and bosses. Furthermore, the lower one’s income, the less control they have over their ability to enjoy rest and relaxation, or to obtain medical care, nutrition, or extracurricular activities for their children. This chronic stress leads to the overproduction of cortisol, which increases the chances of having heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and cancer. It also impairs memory and learning, which can have a significant impact on poor children’s ability to benefit from excellent teachers.

Additionally, class can have an enormous impact on how we raise our children and influence school readiness. Hart and Risely found dramatic class differences in the number and complexity of words spoken to young children. By the time they have reached kindergarten, children from families on welfare may have heard 32 million fewer words than children from professional families. As a result, a class-based achievement gap is already firmly in place before children have even started school. Burkam and Lee examined average cognitive scores of children entering kindergarten and found that kids in the highest income group scored 60% higher than those in the lowest income group. Hart and Risely found similar class-based differences in language development and IQ among children as young as three.

If the goal is to improve educational outcomes, then the most expedient solution is to end poverty. This means that job security and wages need to improve for the vast majority of Americans, including teachers. Not only do teachers have children who suffer when they are laid off, furloughed or racked with work-related stress, but wages in related fields and neighboring regions tend to influence each other. Thus, if teachers are making a decent, secure living, it drives up wages and benefits for other members of the community, helping their children, too.

Villaraigosa, in contrast, wants to decrease job security for teachers by eliminating tenure and seniority-based layoffs, ostensibly to make room for the army of excellent teachers waiting in line for their jobs. The problem is that there is no line of excellent teachers in waiting. Rather, there is a shortage of well-trained teachers and, with the barrage of teaching bashing occurring today, it is becoming harder to attract good people to the profession. There is, however, an army of unemployed people desperate for work of any kind, including a lot of recent college graduates who might be enticed to go into teaching through Teach for America (TFA). These would not necessarily be excellent teachers, however, as they would be inexperienced and poorly trained, and they might not stay long enough to become good teachers, since half of the TFA teachers quit within three years. But they would start at entry level wages, possibly replacing excellent veteran teachers who lost their jobs due to the abolition of tenure and seniority, thus saving districts considerable personnel costs, but at what cost to students? Abolishing tenure and seniority does not improve the quality of teachers. It merely makes it easier to get rid of teachers for any reason, like replacing higher paid veteran teachers with lower paid novices, or getting rid of vocal advocates for kids who are sometimes perceived as trouble makers, even when fighting for the needs and interests of their students.