Give the People What They Want—Educational Snake Oil and Teachers to Burn!

Burn, Teacher, Burn! (Image from Flickr, cdrummks)

A recent poll by the Los Angeles Times and University of Southern California has found that a majority of California voters want teacher evaluations made public and student test scores used in their reviews.

So what?

Does the public necessarily get or even deserve what it demands? Do we make employee evaluations public for nurses, doctors, firefighters, police, receptionists, retailers, insurance sales reps?

Teachers are already one of the most scrutinized, regulated and manipulated professions out there (most regulated, according to Assailed Teacher). They get reprimanded and sometimes even fired for “transgressions” in their private lives, like having political bumper stickers on their cars or posting  work-related gripes on their private Facebook pages, which is not much different than in the old days when they got fired if they got pregnant. Teachers have been reprimanded for expressing controversial comments or sharing controversial content with students despite their supposed academic freedom.

Unlike the above examples, teachers have very little control over student test scores, which are correlated far more with students’ socioeconomic background than with the quality of their teachers. Evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores is like evaluating doctors on their patients’ blood pressure and blood sugar. In both cases, lower income people are much more likely to have undesirable results and the professionals who work with them are much less likely to be able to help them.

Another relevant question is what would the public do with this information? Demand the mass firing of all teachers at low income schools because their test scores were too low?

This would conflict with another recent public demand—supported by an ACLU lawsuit and court mandate in Los Angeles—that teachers at low income schools be exempt from layoffs.

If we did fire all teachers at low income schools or anywhere that test scores did not make the required arbitrary improvements, would the public then demand higher wages and an influx of funding for teacher training programs in order to recruit and retain “good” teachers, or would they accept the inevitable mushrooming of class sizes to 40 or 50 students?

Of course rather than demanding that “bad” teachers be fired, parents could use the data to pull their kids from schools with too many “bad” teachers, just as they might use similar data to avoid “bad” doctors. However, they can already pull their kids from “bad” schools and they already know which schools these are: the low income ones that tend to have the lowest test scores. Linking teacher evaluations to these test scores and publishing teacher evaluations does nothing to make this any easier or more effective.

The hysteria over “bad” teachers has the same source as the hysteria over “bad” schools:  fear mongering promulgated by the test publishers, educational management organizations, tutoring industry and other businesses that hope to capitalize on testing, accountability and the resulting punishments. The teacher witch hunt is further exploited by politicians and the wealthy who hope to distract the public from the major cause of the achievement gap—poverty and the growing wealth gap—problems the OWS movement is now shoving in their faces more effectively than the teachers unions ever did.

It is worth considering that simply dumping what you don’t like (e.g., “bad” teachers or traditional public schools) does not necessarily get you what you really want and can result in something much worse. Consider the Egyptians who dumped their dictator and got a military junta that has been slaughtering them in the streets for the past week. What are we getting when we dump the “bad” teachers and schools: elitist charter schools that loot school districts of scare resources while squeezing out minority, special education and low income students, and a growing achievement gap.

It is important to have an accurate understanding of what the problem actually is and a valid critique of its causes before an effective solution can be proposed. Since the data overwhelmingly shows that poverty is the biggest influence on the achievement gap, low test scores and low graduation rates, simply firing teachers and giving away the public schools to private educational management organizations cannot end the achievement gap, get all students to graduate on time or attain the status of Finnish and South Korean schools.

Tying teacher evaluations to student test scores will result in declining numbers of teachers, exacerbating the problems of overcrowding and student access to quality teachers. Many good teachers will lose their jobs simply because they were working with low income students. Others will refuse to work in low income schools because it could jeopardize their careers.

Making teacher evaluations available to the public serves no public good and could result in great harm, not only to teachers, but students, as well. Too many bad evaluations at one school could result in a mass exodus of those families with the time, resources and knowledge of the system to get their kids into other schools. This would result in some schools becoming even more segregated, even more concentrated with poor, immigrant and low-achieving students.

On a more sinister note, if the public is not satisfied with schools’ response to bad evaluations, witch hunts and vigilantism against teachers could result.

Slaves’ Foot Prints and Workers’ Boot Prints

The New York Times recently published an article with the provocative title, Slavery Becomes a Personal Question Online.

The piece is about a new website called www.slaveryfootprint.org, created by Fair Trade Fund, a nonprofit group that was funded by the State Department. The website shows how many common consumer items depend on slave labor during some part of the supply chain. The goal of the nonprofit is to educate and agitate consumers to do something about it, like demanding that companies carefully audit supply chains to ensure, that no “slave labor” was used to manufacture its products.

According to the State Department, there are 27 million slaves globally. Slavery Footprint defines slavery as being “forced to work without pay, being economically exploited and being unable to walk away.”

Of course it is probably a shock to most Americans that there are 27 million slaves worldwide, or that their soccer balls, cosmetics, chocolate, clothing and produce may have been produced in part by coerced and unpaid labor. It is certainly a terrible fact.

However, the 27 million doesn’t even come close to reality. It does not include the 2.3 million people behind bars in the U.S. (25% of all the incarcerated people on the planet) who are forced to work for little or no pay. Prisoners do not have a choice. They are required to work. They do not get collective bargaining. They have no right to organize unions. When they are paid at all, it is less than a dollar per hour, even though UNICOR, the federal prison industry, brought in half a billion dollars in sales in 2001.  In 1865, the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution abolished chattel slavery and indentured servitude, but left intact coerced prison labor.

Even if the website is successful in mobilizing the public to demand audits and “slavery-free” products, they will fail to end slavery. Companies that rely on cheap labor will find ways to hide their practices from consumers, while continuing to exploit desperate, gullible, impoverished people seeking any promise of a better life. As long as poverty wages prevail in impoverished countries, people will do whatever they can to feed their families. If a job shark offers a seemingly good nanny, agricultural or restaurant job in another country, there will be takers. If that shark turns out to be a slave trader or pimp, there will continue to be slaves.

In other words, the “slavery” that our society and liberal do-gooders see as a freakish abomination, is actually just one of the slithery tentacles of capitalism, a banal and expected consequence of the lust for profits. Once wages and working conditions have been reduced as much as possible, the only way to increase profits further is to not pay workers at all. And when the only jobs available to a community are those with insufficient wages to keep a family alive, people will take risks, including accepting sketchy job offerings that may turn out to be slavery.

This brings up another form of slavery that the most Americans refuse to acknowledge: Wage Slavery, the type of employment that the majority of Americans have. It is called wage slavery because of the parallels to other types of slavery. If we look at the slaveryfootprint.org’s definition of slavery—being forced to work without pay, being economically exploited and being unable to walk away—it is clear that anyone who is an employee or works for a wage is in fact a slave.

First, we are all exploited economically. The definition of exploitation is to not be paid the full value of one’s labor, which is exactly how capitalists are able to make their profits. If eight hours of labor result in $200 worth of product, the capitalist pays the worker $80 and pockets the rest. This is exploitation.

But what about the coercion, aren’t we all free to leave and seek other employment?

Of course we do have this freedom, in theory. It is the reality that is the problem. A person with a family, or a mortgage, or medical bills, may in fact have no choice at all, but to trudge on with whatever employment seems to be secure for the moment, rather than risk becoming homeless or losing one’s children to the state. In the current economy, with the average unemployed worker taking up to a year or longer to find work, few people can afford to leave a lousy job on speculation that they will get a better one any time soon.

There are other conditions of work that make the typical wage earner seem like a slave. The artisans and guildsmen of the past owned their own shops. They controlled the tools and machines of their trades. They set their own hours, prices, and working conditions. Wage earners today, in contrast, must obey the rules of their companies and their bosses. Most have very little flexibility or say in their hours or working conditions. One loses his or her right to privacy and freedom of expression in the workplace. Bosses are permitted to monitor your internet usage and, in some cases, your private life.

Certainly we are not forced to work without pay, one might argue. If we are lucky, we might even earn enough to live a pleasant middle class lifestyle. However, by this logic, prisoners are not forced to work without pay, even if their wages happen to be 40 cents per hour, or less than the typical wages in Haiti. So if we consider prison labor to be slavery, which it certainly is, then why not also include other wage labor in which workers are paid only a fraction of a percent of what their bosses make?

This is not to belittle or ignore other forms of slavery, but only to point out that the types of slavery bemoaned by Slaveryfootprint.org can never be abolished so long as other forms of exploitation continue. People need to have good opportunities to provide for their families locally or they will continue to take dangerous risks that could result in their unpaid servitude. And as long as pay and working conditions are deplorable in one country, employers will continue to transfer operations to those countries, driving down wages and working conditions here.

So if we really care about ending slavery, then we must not only acknowledge the relationship between wage slavery at home and human trafficking abroad, but organize with each other and workers internationally to improve pay and working conditions for everyone. Furthermore, by recognizing that we are in fact wage slaves, we can start to change organized labor’s emphasis on more jobs (and hence more wage slavery) to one of worker control and ownership of the workplace.

Obama’s Thugs Are Coming For Your Child

13 year-old Vito LaPinta was interrogated at his school in Tacoma, Washington, this week by Secret Service agents who were concerned that he might be a threat to President Obama’s safety. The interrogation occurred without the knowledge or consent of his mother, who was outraged by the incident.

According to Democracy Now, the questioning occurred after he wrote a Facebook message expressing his concern that terrorists might target Obama because of the assassination of Bin Laden. KFSN-TV, in Fresno, quoted the boy: "I was saying how Osama is dead and for Obama to be careful because there might be suicide bombers."

KFSN reported that Tacoma schools called Vito's mom but didn't wait for her to arrive because they felt that she didn't take the phone call seriously. The mother, Timi Robertson, denies the school’s allegations and claims she rushed to school as quickly as she could.

It sounds to me like the school didn’t take their responsibility to protect their students very seriously. If they did, they should have made more of an effort to delay the interrogation until his mother arrived and to protect the boy from unreasonable police harassment. More significantly, it sounds like the Obama administration is even more paranoid than even the Bush administration. Certainly, he should take threats seriously and investigate them. But the boy’s FB posting sounded more like an expression of concern for the president and an acknowledgement of what everyone else in the country has presumed: that the assassination of Bin Laden might inspire retaliatory acts. And even if he actually had made a threat, he is only 13. How likely would he be to carry it out at all, let alone do so before his mother arrived?

Meanwhile, Obama has become the most secretive president ever, according to a recent expose in the New Yorker. He has gone after whistleblower Thomas Drake, who faces 35 years in prison for espionage after leaking information to the press about the NSA’s overspending and failure to secure its spy data. According to the article, Obama has used the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute people in five alleged cases of national security leaks, which is more in all previous administrations combined.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a conservative analyst and supporter of greater government secrecy, said that “Obama has presided over the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history—even more so than Nixon."

What Does the Prosecution of Drake Have to Do With the Interrogation of a Child?

It’s all part of the move toward increasing government secrecy, paranoia and suppression of civil liberties and freedom. The New Yorker article quoted Yale University Constitutional Law Professor Jack Balkin, who said the increase in leak prosecutions is part of a “bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national surveillance state.” This includes the creation of a huge new security bureaucracy that employs over 2.5 million people with confidential security clearances; reinterpretation of the law (e.g., redefining torture to legitimize water boarding); corporate partnerships with the government that have vastly increased the lobbying power of the counterterrorism industry; and huge amounts of tax dollars being redirected to electronic surveillance (e.g., blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

Thus, poor little Vito LaPinta, who only wanted to protect the president, got caught up in the dragnet that was set by Bush in the wake of September 11 ostensibly to catch bad guys, but which has primarily been used to curtail free speech and privacy. And contrary to claims that he supports transparency, Obama has not only accepted the Bush doctrine, but has taken it to new lows.

None of this should be a surprise. Obama’s refusal to prosecute Bush, and his assertion that we should move forward rather than back, should have made people suspicious that he was planning more of the same and was protecting himself, as well as Bush. The question is, will anyone stand up to this madness (aside from the rare whistleblowers like Drake and Bradley Manning)? Will teachers and administrators do what’s right by their children or be complicit in such absurd and unnecessary intimidation?

Drug Testing Teachers & the Poor for Fun & Profit in Florida

Latest in Ed Deform, More Tea Party Lunacy, or Just Gold Old Capitalism at its Finest? 

Image by Francis Storr

Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott has signed an executive order requiring drug tests for all state workers and welfare recipients. According to the OB Rag, Scott plans to test at least 100,000 workers on the state payroll at least four times a year, as well as 58,000 welfare recipients, who would have to pay for their own drug screening. Rita Solnit, of Parents Across America, says that the drug testing will also apply to teachers.

This is not really news, as it has been reported extensively over the past few weeks, particularly by Chris Guerrieri, at Education Matters. Yet Scott’s hubris and his success up until now are so astounding I couldn’t resist writing about it. In order to become governor, Scott had to do more than just ride the wave of anti-Obama hatred that got so many Tea Party candidates elected. He also had to successfully whitewash a sordid past that included his forced resignation as CEO of the massive healthcare company Columbia/HCA over illegal business dealings and Medicare theft. The Miami Herald reported that the company ultimately admitted to fourteen felonies and had to pay a record $1.7 billion in fines for Medicare fraud, while Scott, himself, was found to have taken part in illegal business dealings.

This history of corrupt medical business dealings set the stage for Scott’s current foray into the anti-drug side of healthcare. In 2001, Scott founded an urgent care clinic called Solantic, which offers drug and alcohol screening tests. During Scott’s election, he disclosed that he had holdings in Solantic worth $62 million. The company was transferred to his wife’s name when he was elected governor and he assured the public that Florida would not do business with the company, thus implying that there would be no conflict of interest. Yet the Palm Beach Post News reported that Solantic had received $110,657 from the state in 2010 and $20,061 so far in 2011, mostly in Medicaid payments. According to the St. Petersburg Times, Scott is expected to force millions of Medicaid patients into managed care organizations, which could funnel millions of dollars more into his family’s business.

According to Education Matters, the ACLU of Florida is calling Scott’s move an attempt to resurrect a policy that a federal judge found unconstitutional back in 2004. Clearly there is no public benefit to drug testing workers who have no direct responsibility for public safety, while it is a huge waste of taxpayer dollars to screen everyone, especially welfare recipients, who have no responsibility whatsoever for public safety. Imposing anti-drug morality on teachers and welfare recipients is the epitome of Nanny State invasion of privacy. Interestingly, the ACLU has come out on the side of state workers but, according to the OB Rag, has not provided much support for the rights of welfare recipients to keep their urine private.

All this comes on the heels of so many other attacks on students, teachers and working people it makes the head spin. (See Solnit’s article here for more).

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

• Teachers in Florida will now have 50% of their evaluations based on student test scores, which will force many of the best teachers to transfer out of low performing and low income schools and/or to focus even more heavily on test prep, at the expense of critical thinking, inquiry-based teaching and the promotion of student curiosity and love of learning. 
• Teachers and judges will be compensated through merit pay schemes, yet there has been no money allocated to pay for it. Thus, those teachers and judges deemed “excellent” will possibly see their wages remain constant, while everyone else will either be fired or get pay cuts. This too will exacerbate teaching to the test and flight from low income schools, while it will encourage judges to ram through cases quickly, without regard for justice or fairness.
• All new teachers will be on one-year contracts, with no job security, while existing teachers must choose between keeping their existing contracts, with the possibility of never seeing another raise, or joining the newbies with yearly contracts that may or may not be renewed. Of course, this is not a real choice. Anyone who has been in a district for more than a few years will have higher pay than the newbies, so giving up their existing contract will likely result in either not getting hired again, or having to accept entrance level wages.
• Seniority rights for teachers will be eliminated.
• Private charter schools will be expanded.
• Support for the developmentally disabled will be slashed.