The New Network for Public Education

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 A new anti-reform education reform movement is taking shape: The Network for Public Education. 

Led by Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody, Leonie Haimson and other lefty ed reformers, the NPE is calling for an end to privatization schemes; increased funding; assessments that are used to inform instruction, not to penalize schools, students and teachers, among other reforms; community control; teacher autonomy; and a host of other reforms..

As far as reformist movements go, the NPE’s initial platform seems like a reasonable start. However, when examined more closely, it’s hard to tell what the NPE is actually demanding or how it intends to achieve its goals. For example, what do they mean by “democratic control?” One parent, one vote? One teacher, one vote? School Site Councils, (which are essentially advisory and subservient to school boards)? The abolition of school boards (representative democracy) to be replaced by some sort of direct democracy? Workers councils led by employee delegates who are recallable at any time by their colleagues?

Currently, most public schools already have some sort of democratic control (e.g., school site councils, PTAs and elected school boards), but these are heavily influenced by moneyed interests and politics and provide the actual stakeholders (e.g., parents, teachers, students) only nominal influence over decisions that affect students’ learning conditions and teachers’ working conditions.

Similarly, what do they mean by providing resources “that students need” or “equitable funding?” Bringing the poorest schools on par with the wealthiest schools is a pretty mild demand, considering that even the best-funded schools do not have sufficient resources. Creating equity from peanuts just means that all schools receive a paltry share of the peanuts.

Perhaps it would help to set some benchmark goals, like one nurse for every 250 students; class sizes that never exceed 25:1 in the secondary grades and never exceed 15:1 in the elementary grades; free preschool for all, and generous, ample funding, rather than “equity” from the pittances we currently receive. Likewise, how about mandatory wages and benefits that are not only adequate for supporting school employees in the communities where they work, but that are actually generous and allow a degree of luxury and security?

The NPE argues that there should be more emphasis on early childhood education because the achievement gap begins before kindergarten and early childhood education can help mitigate this. However, preschool and Head Start, alone, cannot erase the pre-K achievement gap, because this gap is a direct product of poverty. Will the NPE also fight for programs and initiatives that close the wealth gap and reduce poverty, since this is the number one cause of low student achievement and will continue to hinder children’s academic success, regardless what happens in the classroom?
 
NPE calls for the evaluation of teachers by professionals, not by unreliable test scores, yet they say nothing about who these professional should be. As long as evaluators continue to be site administrators there will be an inherent bias that can lead to good teachers being disciplined or fired and incompetent or corrupt teachers being promoted. These professionals should be highly trained, objective outsiders (ideally teachers, themselves), who evaluate teachers blindly. Furthermore, the evaluations should be used to support professional growth, not to punish teachers for petty infractions or to fire them for being union organizers, student advocates or higher paid veterans.

Lastly, while NPE opposes profiteering off of public education, they have not yet indicated whether they expect this to wither away through voting and protesting, or if they recognize it as an inevitable product of education’s role in capitalism. All the other problems they criticize stem from this relationship. Even without the transfer of tax dollars from public school budgets to private charter schools, tech companies and test and textbook publishers, there will continue to be an incentive by the state to spend as a little as possible on education and keep its employees under tight control (e.g., accountability schemes, limitations on unions and strikes).

Ultimately, even with a more coherent and specific plan, NPE, like all other liberal/reformist initiatives, will at best only be able to reduce the problems they identify with public education, since all of these problems have capitalism, itself, at their root. For example, when teaching is no longer tied to wages, the problem of administrators firing teachers (or giving them bad evaluations) for being union organizers, student advocates or higher paid veterans would cease to exist. There would no longer be a need for high stakes tests, since there would no longer be a motivation for sorting students by ability in order to track them into wage work versus management. Schools could be funded rationally, based on their actual needs, rather than being held hostage to a system designed to make the wealthy even wealthier by reducing social spending to the bare bones. Perhaps most importantly, in addition to practical skills (e.g., critical thinking, reading, writing, math) teachers could start teach what students themselves want to learn, fostering creativity, curiosity and an intrinsic love of learning.

W[h]ither the Labor Movement?

I recently came across an interesting blog piece by Stewart Acuff called The Future of the American Labor Movement. One thing I liked about his piece is that he correctly identified several important areas the labor movement has ignored over the years. However, like many on the left, he completely misunderstands the relationship between labor and capital and this leads him to the erroneous belief that the interests of workers can be saved entirely through political action, while ignoring labor’s most effective weapon, the strike.

Acuff points out that the 1935 Wagner Act, which was revised and reborn as the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), does not cover large percentages of workers (e.g., public sector workers, agricultural workers and domestic workers). These latter two groups comprise many of the lowest wage and most abused workers in the nation. For those who are covered by NLRA, the law significantly limits their freedom to form unions, bargain collectively and strike. He argues that the labor movement needs to fight NLRA-type protections for all workers and start to vigorously organize the millions of non-unionized workers in the country, while also fighting for legislative changes that would improve workers’ living standards, including a higher minimum (living) wage and single payer health plan.

Unfortunately, Acuff misunderstands the relationship between labor and capital, claiming that the lack of “real and full freedom to form unions and bargain collectively is the core of our economic crisis.” The economic crisis is, in reality, a crisis of capital—the temporary failure to acquire as much profit as desired in the usual way. To be sure, times are tougher now for the rest of us, but the economic relations are essentially the same as they have always been. The employing class owns the means of production and thus controls the conditions of work, while the workers are dependent on the employers for a job and wages. This allows employers to pay workers less than the value of their labor and pocket the difference as profits (i.e., exploitation). When times are tough for capitalists, they slash wages and jobs and demand more from those who remain, thus ensuring continued profits over and beyond what they need to live far more lavishly than their employees.

Unions and collective bargaining merely allow workers to negotiate their working conditions and compensation with their bosses, but never to actually challenge their subservient relationship, let alone demand full autonomy, power or control over the means of production. Thus, unions and collective bargaining help perpetuate the continued profit-making by the capitalist class by insuring that workers stay on the job to be exploited (i.e., paid less than the value of their labor).

Furthermore, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, in and of itself, does little for workers if they cannot mount an effective strike. During collective bargaining, each side makes proposals, argues its case and they either come to an agreement or not. The boss can always say “no” and the workers have little recourse when this happens except to appeal to his compassion or threaten to harm him. Although there are a number of tactics that have been used by workers over the years, the strike (and its variants) is the most effective means to extract concessions from bosses, as it hurts their bottom line. The longer workers remain off the job, the longer they lose profits.

While union membership has been on the decline (partly as a result of downsizing, union busting and outsourcing), unions have also become increasingly reluctant to engage in strikes and other job actions. Acuff laments how “35 years of assaults on workers and unions have led to 35 years of stagnant wages,” yet the unions have done little to resist this. Indeed, by increasingly choosing political action over direct action, the unions have been complicit in this.

Like many on the Left, including the leaders of the unions, Acuff has misconstrued the problem as a political problem: “What does the absence of organizing and collective bargaining rights say about freedom and democracy in the United States?” In actuality it says very little about freedom and a lot about the relationship of democracy to capitalism.  We do, in fact, have the right to form unions, strike and bargain collectively, but the state has imposed numerous restrictions and limitations and it has done so legally and democratically and for the benefit of the bosses. What most on the Left fail to recognize is that despite its definition (rule by the people), democracy is not the same thing as People Power and does not serve the economic interests of the masses.

Though Acuff sounds like a critic of mainstream unionism, his critique suffers from many of the same faulty premises. While it is true that governments can take away collective bargaining rights (as they recently did in Wisconsin), organizing is something that people can and sometimes must do, regardless of rights and laws. Likewise, before we had a legal right to strike, workers still struck and risked jail, beatings, deportations and murder. Unfortunately, the major unions have accepted the rules and laws imposed on them by capital (i.e., they obediently follow the dictates of NLRA and Taft-Hartley) and even undermine wildcat initiatives by their members, thus squelching rank and file autonomy and passion. In Wisconsin, when workers started talking about a General Strike (which is illegal under the Taft Hartley Act), the major unions sent their members home from the state house occupation, arguing that the most strategy was to vote the crooks out of office.

It is true that wages have been stagnant or declining over the past 40 years and that working conditions have deteriorated (e.g., longer hours, speedups, increased workloads). It is also true that the wealth gap has grown rapidly in that period and living conditions for most of us have declined as a result. In response, the unions have done virtually nothing to fight to reverse these trends. Rather, they have almost universally negotiated contracts that merely slowed down the process. Ultimately, if unions want to increase their membership and status among workers, they will have to demonstrate that they have the power to make aggressive demands on the bosses and win them through strikes. Until then, unions will seem like a burden to many workers that simply take a cut of their already meager wages in exchange for more status quo.

We Don’t Need Celebrity Teachers

In a recent posting on Good Education, Jose Vilson lamented how there aren’t any celebrity K-12 teachers who can “speak to the collective conscience of the educational experience,” as if this was somehow a prerequisite for teachers to gain the autonomy, status and respect they deserve.

This is a completely absurd notion with some pretty unfortunate implications. Anthony Bourdain, Wolfgang Puck and Jamie Oliver may have increased the number of people wanting to cook good food at home, but they have done nothing to elevate the status or wages of the hash slingers and burger flippers who do the majority of restaurant cooking. If anything, the glorification of celebrity chefs contributes to the misperception that good restaurants are the product of a single talented artisan, obscuring the contributions of the prep cooks, servers, buyers and dishwashers. Teaching, like cooking, is a social endeavor. Individual teacher skill depends on interactions with colleagues, families, mentors, while the quality of a school improve more when there is collaboration and support between teachers than on the existence of one or two excellent teachers working in isolation.

In order to gain celebrity K-12 teacher status, one must go so far over and beyond the basic responsibilities (and sanity) required for the job that it makes the rest of us look like shirkers in comparison. Consider Jaime Escalante (from Stand and Deliver fame), who worked late into the evenings and on weekends and summers (usually without compensation), who gave himself a coronary as a result of all the extra stress and toil. Is this the bar we want the public to expect from the rest of us? And even with all his crazy extra work, Escalante’s successes have been greatly exaggerated. His story was, like those of most folk heroes, a hagiographic blend of legend, myth, and cover up.

I do empathize with Vilson’s sentiments. It is unpleasant to work so hard at something, to put one’s heart and soul into it, and be rewarded by politicians, pundits and so-called reformists with accusations of being lazy, greedy or inadequate. Our status, compensation and autonomy do seem to be declining, but that is only because they actually are declining—a direct result of repeated attacks by the capitalist class, which correctly recognized that they could get exactly what they needed from public education (compliant, passive employees) at a fraction of the cost by slashing funding, thus reducing the amount of tax dollars sucked from their thin wallets to pay for educating other people’s children. They realized that the more they deskilled the teaching profession (e.g., increased testing, online education, scripted curriculum), the weaker our position would be in demanding decent wages and benefits. They understood that the more they attacked, the more defensive we would become and the less able we would be to advocate for things like academic freedom and autonomy, smaller class sizes, or curricula that challenges existing socioeconomic relations.

If teachers want greater respect, status, autonomy and remuneration, they will get it by demanding it as a class, not by relying on a few martyrs who are willing to sacrifice their personal lives and work 80-hour weeks in order to be noticed. They can do this by collectively refusing to work until politicians back off with all their anti-teacher, anti-child “reforms;” until they fund education sufficiently to so that ample numbers of nurses, counselors, librarians and teachers can be hired and paid generously; and until they give the teachers the authority to make the important decisions and run the school themselves.

Testing Causes Failure

The high stakes tests required by No Child Left Behind are designed to increase the number of failing schools (see here and here), thus forcing them to adopt free market reforms like reconstitution, charter school conversion, or hiring private tutors and curriculum consultants. However, as Valerie Strauss points out in a recent piece in her Answer Sheet blog, the increasing emphasis on high stakes tests and the pressure to improve scores may also be increasing student anxiety and their ability to perform well on the exams.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 Test anxiety is considered a psychological condition that goes well beyond the typical nervousness that most people experience before a test. Sufferers experience anxiety so intense that it impairs their ability to recall basic facts, comprehend test questions, and perform to their potential. Thus, the test results that are being used to punish schools and districts and that are driving much of the reform movement are likely skewed, making student achievement and school quality appear much worse than they are.

Straus points out that it is difficult to know exactly how pervasive the problem is, but the American Test Anxiety Association believes as many as 20% of students suffer from substantial test anxiety, while  an additional 18% may experience some degree of test anxiety. The problem may be becoming more prevalent because of the intense emphasis schools and districts are placing on state and federal exams. Competition for slots in high status universities may also be contributing the problem by increasing the pressure to do well on SATs, Advanced Placement and even course unit exams.

Strauss’ article provides some useful tips from Annie Murphy Paul, some of which I have been using with my students to varying degrees of success. Paul’s first suggestion is to “Unload on paper.” I call it a brain dump. The way it works is that we review together before the test, and then I have students clear everything from their desks, give them scratch paper and have them dump as much onto their scratch paper as they can remember from review, lectures, and homework before beginning the test. I even refrain from passing out the tests for five minutes to give them time and encouragement to do this rather than succumbing to the temptation to rush into the test to “get it over with.”

The rationale for this strategy is that when students feel nervous, their thinking becomes muddled and their ability to recall is hindered. Anxieties can use up some of the working memory. By doing a “brain dump” prior to even seeing the test, the stakes are lowered and the memories are fresher. It is kind of like being given permission to use a cheat sheet or having open notes, either of which can serve as a “crutch” that relaxes students by giving them the sense they have extra support, thus relieving some of the anxiety.

Paul also points to some research that showed positive effects from asking students to write about their anxieties prior to a test. While seemingly counterintuitive (i.e., this might heighten the cycle of negative thinking), studies show that it actually improved test scores. One explanation is that it helps to affirm and legitimize students’ feelings, which is an important step toward overcoming negative thinking.

She also suggests that test anxiety may be especially bad among girls and minority students because of “stereotype threat,” the fear that poor test performance will confirm negative stereotypes about their gender or race. Writing about such feelings prior to taking the test may help affirm this kind of thinking, too, and Paul points to a study that supports this hypothesis.

Paul’s final suggestion is to lead students in relaxation exercises prior to exams, like a guided meditation that focuses on breathing and body awareness. This is another technique that I have been using for years, with varying degrees of success. Of course it is important to have a plan for how to deal with the occasional goof-offs who don’t take it seriously and disrupt the process for the others, but, for the most part my students do take it seriously.

I regularly debrief with my students after exams and find that the majority like the relaxation exercises and believe they help. However, there are some who continue to do poorly on exams, despite the relaxation exercises and brain dumps. I suspect that some of this stems from intense pressure by parents to perform well or from growing up around anxious parents. Therefore, like many aspects of school success, test anxiety may be influenced more by outside of school factors than by anything under the control of teachers.

So, aside from the three strategies proposed by Paul, if we really care about students’ health and emotional wellbeing (not to mention their academic success), we need to address these outside of school influences. One of the most expedient solutions is to end the obsession with accountability and testing. Since NCLB has done nothing to improve schools, and has almost certainly worsened them by taking so much class time away from actual learning and by replacing thinking and creativity with rote memorization and bubble-in testing, let’s simply do away with it. By abolishing all high stakes exams we will lose nothing in terms of school quality, but we will reduce some of the stressors contributing to student anxiety (not to mention teacher anxiety) and allow schools to restore much of the science, arts and physical education that were cut to make room for more test preparation.

Another solution is to change the way students apply for and are accepted to colleges. Ideally, every student who wants to go to college should be able to go, even if this means providing the remedial courses necessary for potential students who are not yet academically ready and vastly increasing taxes (on the wealthy) to pay for all the extra professors and classrooms. Doing this would significantly reduce the anxiety that many students feel as a result of the competition for scarce university slots. It would also increase the number of people with college degrees and their economic opportunities.

Of course the biggest influence on student anxiety may be their anxious parents. Children pick up a lot from their families, particularly behaviors, social attitudes and coping mechanisms (or lack thereof). Yet a lot adult anxieties stem from their own material insecurity (e.g., how are we going to pay the mortgage with this pay cut?) or from the burden of having too many personal, social and work-related responsibilities (e.g., how am I going to get the kids to school on time and not be late for work myself?) An increase in such anxieties is an expected consequence of the rapidly increasing worker productivity that has occurred over the last three decades, which has made the bosses richer by squeezing more work and greater profits out of their employees per hour worked, causing both a decline in living standards and a rise in work-related demands and stress.  

This source of anxiety seems more intractable since a lasting solution requires the abolition of wage labor and capitalism. However, short of this, gains could be made through collective actions by workers to raise wages and improve working conditions. Rather than simply giving the bosses the profits from our increased productivity, we could demand shorter workdays or work weeks at the same or higher pay. The Wobblies (IWW) use to call for a four hour work day and a four day work week. This might seem like a fantasy in today’s economic and political climate, but it is worth working toward as it would reduce (or end) unemployment, provide us with more time to spend with friends, family and to pursue our personal interests, while reducing anxiety and stress, thus improving overall health and wellbeing,.