Lies and Damned Lies: U.S. Test Scores Actually Near the Top

For years, free market education reformers have claimed that the U.S. public education system is broken—some have even called it a threat to our national security (Reagan’s Nation at Risk report, 1983). They have used this “crisis” to justify everything from No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top to attacks on teachers’ seniority, tenure and due process rights. It has led to a decade of accountability and testing mania that has eaten up instructional time and replaced activities that foster creativity and critical thinking with rote memorization. It has taken away billions of dollars that could have been used for teacher training, recruitment and remuneration, and transferred it into the pockets of test and textbook publishers, private charter school operators, and online curriculum producers.

The claims that America’s schools are failing are grossly exaggerated, if not utterly false. For example, the number of students attempting and passing SAT and AP exams has been growing every year and in every ethnic and social group (see here and here). Furthermore, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, for the first time in history, more than 30% of Americans aged 25 or older—56 million people—have bachelor's degrees, while only 5% did 70 years ago—something that would be impossible if K-12 education was not successfully preparing its graduates for college. According to Good Education, more than one-third of these degrees are now in STEM fields. The data also indicates that gender and ethnic disparities are closing, with 30% of women now holding degrees (compared to 31% of men), while the percentage of Hispanic degree holders increased 80% over the past decade, with over 14% now holding degrees.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Free market reformers love testing because it seems objective and scientific (plus they can massage the statistics to suit their needs). Most people lack the time and expertise to disaggregate the numbers, examine the methodology, and identify biases and experimental errors that can skew the data and influence the validity of their conclusions. Consequently, the media typically report test results without such analyses, proliferating misconceptions and inaccuracies like the notion that U.S. students’ test scores are substantially lower than those in other wealthy nations (as measured by the PISA test).

However, as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) correctly points out in a new report (that you can read here), lower income students in every country perform more poorly on the tests than affluent students. However, because economic inequality is greater in the U.S. than in virtually every other country with which we are compared, our national average appears comparatively low. To make matters worse, there was a sampling error in the most recent PISA test, resulting in an over-representation of students from the most disadvantaged U.S. schools, thus further depressing the average U.S. scores.

When EPI re-estimated PISA scores, adjusting for the disproportionate number of economically disadvantaged students in the U.S., it found that average U.S. scores in reading and math were substantially higher than the official numbers. Using EPI’s corrected numbers, the U.S. moves to sixth in reading (up from the officially reported 14^th) and 13^th in math (up from the officially reported 25^th) compared with other OECD countries.

Although U.S. students still performed worse than those in the top three countries (Canada, Finland and Korea), the difference was markedly narrowed when adjusted for socioeconomic differences. Perhaps more significantly, economically disadvantaged students in the U.S. performed better than their social class peers in most other countries, including in these three top scoring countries.

Thus, while U.S. educational outcomes appear worse than those of its trading partners (due mostly to its greater levels of social inequity), it is actually doing a better job than its trading partners at boosting the test scores of its poorest students. Furthermore, the performance of the poorest U.S. students has been improving over time, while the performance of poor students in other similar countries has been on the decline, suggesting that U.S. schools are doing a better job addressing the needs of their economically disadvantaged students.

Today in Labor History—January 26

January 26, 1886 – In Decazeville, France, miners attacked the home of their sub-manager at Watrin Mines, after he slashed their wages by 10%. He died when he jumped from his window. (From the Daily Bleed)

January 26, 1897 - The Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America received a charter from the American Federation of Labor to organize "every wage earner from the man who takes the bullock at the house until it goes into the hands of the consumer." The union merged with the Retail Clerks International Union in 1979 to form the United Food and Commercial Workers. (From Workday Minnesota)

Free Speech Costs Money--Dole Corporate Person (Image from Flickr by takomabibelot)

January 26, 1907 – Over 100 years before the OWS movement, anti-corporate personhood activists won a small and short-lived victory when Congress blocked corporations from contributing to election campaigns for national office. (From the Daily Bleed)

January 26, 1937 – A two-day sit down strike occurred at a Brooklyn power plant leading to a large scale organizing drive in New York subways. (From TWU)

January 26, 1983 – The National Commission on Excellence in Education, using bad statistics, called U.S. education mediocre. The commission recommended greater emphasis on English, math, social studies, and computer science; longer school days; abolition of seniority and merit pay for teachers. (From the Daily Bleed)

January 26, 1991 – 200,000 marched against the Gulf War in New York City, 200,000 marched in San Francisco and 200,000 in Bonn, Germany. (From the Daily Bleed)

The Right to an Education or The Obligation to Be Sorted for Capital

The Left is fond of extolling the virtues of a free public education system, particularly the delusion that it increases social mobility and promotes liberty. Aside from the fact that few people move up in social class, regardless of their success in school, the system is not truly free. It is a taxpayer subsidy to business that ensures there are sufficiently educated workers to do the jobs employers want done and to consume the products and services they are selling.

In “Science and Education in Capitalism,” Ruthless Criticism points out that education serves as a sorting mechanism for capital, funneling future workers into the hierarchy of jobs. School does not simply deliver knowledge, training and skills to students, but does so per unit time. During exams, students demonstrate how many questions they can correctly answer within a given amount of time. Consequently, it is not their knowledge we are assessing, but their efficiency compared with their peers, exactly what employers are looking for.

Grades do not tell us how much a student knows or how well they can solve problems. They simply tell us how a student has performed in relationship to his or her peers and give an indication of how that student will be sorted in the future. The better the grades, the more advanced classes that student can take, the better college he or she can attend, the more impressive his or her resume, and the better the chances of a higher paying job.

Most jobs do not require brilliant workers. Thus, the state does not need to invest much into public education—just enough to ensure there are sufficient workers with the minimum skills necessary for the job (a few highly trained people to be managers, supervisors and bosses, and lots of average people with minimal training to do the rest of the work). Of course there is also a need for scientists, but from the perspective of the employing class this is solely to create new and better products that can be sold and patented, innovations that give them an edge over competitors. Scientists working to improve public health, in contrast, are a burden as they contribute to regulation and legislation that impairs profit-making.

The rationality of keeping education costs low has been amply demonstrated over the last four years, as states have slashed education budgets without harming the profitability of business. In fact, corporate America has made record profits in that same time period despite the divestment from public education, while a surplus of highly trained workers and scientists remain jobless or accept low paying jobs that have nothing to do with their training.

The needs of capital also determine what content is taught. An understanding of American history sufficient to celebrate the 4^th of July with pride serves the interests of capital by ensuring there will be a supply of cannon fodder for its wars, whereas knowledge of Haymarket, Homestead, the IWW and Ludlow might lead one to rebel against capital. Hence, the former takes up a great deal of the history curriculum, while the latter, if it is taught at all, takes up no more than a few lines in the text book.

School also prepares students for the world of work by simulating (and legitimizing) the competition that occurs in the real world, only in school the competition is for grades rather than money. However, the competition in school is no more “fair” than that of the world of employment. One’s relationship to the labor market not only determines his wealth and social status, it also determines his children’s status in school. Affluence is a great predictor of graduation rates, test scores and overall school success.

The public education system of the 20^th century—the remnants of which limp along today—is inefficient in its service to capital. Since knowledge for knowledge’s sake does not increase profits, universities can do away with many of the luxuries that have allowed professors to do basic research in the past. Increasing the competition for grants (while increasing corporate sponsorship of research) increases the likelihood that research will have a potential for profitability. Distance learning, blended learning and outsourcing of teaching at the K-12 and college levels allows schools to teach the basic skills students need to compete in the job market at a much lower cost (and greater profit to the businesses that supplies these services). Doing away with tenure and seniority increases administrators’ control over staffing decisions and reduces payroll expenses by making it easier to lay off higher paid veterans. Internships and service learning may provide youth with marketable job skills, but they also provide employers with cheap or free labor that is easier to exploit than older workers.

Gates Buying Candidates for Teachers Unions

United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) just had one of its most contested elections ever for its decision-making body, the House of Representatives. 396 candidates fought for 209 positions, with 100 seats taken by rookie representatives, according to the LA Times. Many of these new delegates were sponsored by outside groups, like Educators 4 Excellence and Teach Plus. Another sponsoring organization, Teachers for a New Unionism, is headed by Mike Stryer, former activist with NewTLA, a conservative opposition movement that formed within UTLA a few years ago.

Each of these groups receives funding from free market education reform nonprofits, including the Gates Foundation and each wants to make the union focus more on the “interests of students” (weakening teachers’ job protections and working conditions). They have also been strong backers of Value Added evaluations and abolishing or weakening seniority.

On the one hand, serious union activists and teachers should be concerned that corporate money is being used to undermine their organizing efforts. On the other hand, this really isn’t anything new. Employers routinely interfere in organizing efforts, harass organizers, punish or fire employees who engage in union activities, and bombard them with misinformation about unions. The bosses just hadn’t been so effective at fielding their own candidates in union elections.

At the same time, UTLA veterans and other union bureaucrats and dinosaurs should consider why so many young teachers are either disillusioned with their unions or allying themselves with corporate Ed Deformers. A union that effectively fights for the interests of all their members should have no problem winning younger teachers over to their side or convincing them of the naiveté and self-destructiveness of these corporate alliances. It is true that UTLA must counter an effective anti-union propaganda machine. However, UTLA, like most other teachers unions, has contributed to its own negative image by making so many compromises with the enemy while doing little to support young teachers, who are often the first to go during layoffs.

Court Overturn’s LAUSD’s Seniority Exemption

United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) has won a small victory in its fight to preserve seniority rights at Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD), according to the 4LAKids Blog.

In February, 2010, in Reed vs. California, lawyers argued that low performing, low income schools were unfairly impacted by layoffs since they tend to have higher percentages of younger teachers who lack seniority and that this violated students’ constitutional right to educational equity. Judges ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, paving the way for LAUSD to exempt 45 schools from seniority rules, even though this violated state law and teachers’ contracts.

UTLA sued to overturn the ruling and the California 2nd District Court of Appeal has now invalidated LAUSD's exemption. In the 2 to 1 decision, the justices said that UTLA has the right to a trial where they can argue the merits of their case. The ACLU, which supported the Reed lawsuit, is planning on appealing the case to the state supreme court. Until the Supreme Court takes action on the case, the 2^nd District Court’s ruling will stand.  

The recent ruling did not address the ACLU’s or Reed’s argument that seniority violated students’ constitutional rights, focusing instead on the fact that the Reed ruling violated existing state law on seniority rights during layoffs.

The argument that students’ constitutional rights are violated by seniority is absurd on several levels. First, the reason those schools are low performing is because they have high percentages of lower income students. Their teachers are not the cause of their poverty or their low test scores and even the best teachers cannot make every poor student successful in school. Educational equity is impossible without economic equity and if the ACLU and parent backers of the Reed lawsuit really care about educational equity for poor children, they should be looking for strategies that reduce economic inequity, not attacking teachers’ unions and labor protections for working people.

Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that the best teachers should be able to help some lower income students succeed academically and that they would be more effective than the worst teachers. However, there is no reason to assume that younger, less experienced teachers are necessarily more effective than their more senior colleagues. On the contrary, experienced teachers ought to be more effective, on average. Thus, protecting their jobs during layoffs is in children’s interests.

While it is true that lower income schools have larger numbers of inexperienced teachers, it is not necessarily true that protecting their jobs is the best way to maintain continuity for their students. Obviously, high teacher turnover is disruptive to academic programs and can be stressful for children. However, younger teachers have a much higher attrition rate than experienced teachers, even when layoffs aren’t occurring. Thus, lower income schools suffer higher turnover rates and personnel disruptions than affluent schools, regardless of seniority rules. The solution to this problem is not to undermine teachers’ binding contracts or to do away with seniority protections, but to provide more support for beginning teachers, so they are better able to cope with the challenges and frustrations of the teaching profession.

Abolishing or curtailing seniority does nothing to change the teacher demographics at low performing schools, especially if the protected novice teachers still leave the profession within 3-5 years. Rather, reformers ought to look at why these schools tend to have such high levels of novice teachers and seek remedies to these problems. Many experienced teachers, for example, have worked in such schools, but got burned out from all the extra demands placed on them by administrators and politicians to fix problems that were out of their control. Others saw the writing on the wall and decided to transfer to more affluent schools before their evaluations, tenure or pay started to be negatively affected by low student test scores. Some simply got emotionally drained from years of working with so many students who were hungry, sick, depressed or lacking in the prerequisite skills necessary for the classes they were in.

The Apartheid-like nature of most urban school districts ensures that there will be affluent schools with a majority of students who do well on standardized exams and who are socially and academically ready for the classes in which they are placed and others within the same district with a majority of lower income students, with lower graduation rates and test scores. This, along with inadequate funding and the persistence of the wealth gap are the real educational equity issues.

Lower Wages, Less Experience—Charter Schools' Recipe for Success

By now most of the public ought to be aware that charter schools receive public money, like traditional public schools, but are freed from many of the rules that traditional schools must follow, including the hiring of unionized teachers and paying union wages. Many charter schools also ignore seniority and hire predominantly young, malleable and lower waged novices. These are just some of the labor cost cutting strategies that allow for-profit charters to turn a profit.

A new study by Bruce Baker, at School Finance 101, does an in-depth comparison of wages and years of experience at several Texas and New Jersey charter and traditional public schools, focusing on the Gulen schools, which rely heavily on teachers from Turkey who are here on work visas.

When pressed, Gulen leaders have said that there simply aren’t enough qualified local teachers to fill the slots.

In the past, there truly was a teacher shortage in the U.S. However, with all the state budget cuts and resulting teacher layoffs, there is actually a glut of teachers, (but a shortage of student services, as class sizes mushroom, course offerings are cut, and librarians, counselors and nurses are sacked). What Baker proposes with Gulen is that it is their extremely low wages that prevents them from finding sufficient local teachers.

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.

California Judge Rules in Favor of Seniority

The current wave of Ed Deform is breathtaking for the diversity and quantity of ill-conceived and destructive demands being made by its proponents. Despite the fact that these reforms contribute to the demoralization of teachers and potential flight from the profession at a time of teacher shortages, while also deteriorating safety and learning conditions for students, it seems like legislators and the courts are perfectly content to support and promote the madness.

However, in a breath of fresh air, administrative law judges recently ruled that San Francisco Unified and Sacramento City Unified did not have the authority to ignore state seniority laws in their attempts to keep veteran teachers at low-performing schools. While state law allows for few exceptions to seniority-based layoffs, administrative law judges recently ruled that San Francisco Unified had not made a compelling case for ignoring seniority, while Sacramento City had done so only partially, according to Thoughts on Public Education, (TOPED).

Unfortunately for veteran Sacramento teachers, the rulings of administrative law judges are not binding and the Sac City school board voted unanimously to ignore the judge and exempt all teachers at all seven of the district’s “Priority Schools.” The consequence will be that many inexperienced teachers will have jobs next year, while many experienced veterans will not. The SFUSD board decided not to contest Administrative Law Judge Melissa Crowell’s decision,   according to TOPED.

Fensterwald wrote that state law emphatically requires teacher layoffs to be based on seniority, but allows for two exceptions. The first is pretty obvious: a newer teacher with specific expertise cannot be bumped by a more senior colleague who lacks that expertise. For example, a 5-year veteran English teacher cannot replace a physics teacher with only 2 years of experience (unless that English teacher also has a physic credential).

The other exception, which allows districts to ignore seniority in order to protect students’ right to equal educational opportunity, is more open to interpretation and abuse. Districts like LAUSD have successfully argued (with the aid of the ACLU) that seniority causes low performing, low income schools to lose a disproportionate percentage of their teachers during layoffs.

There are numerous problems with this argument that have unfortunately been ignored or discounted by judges. First, layoffs hurt students at all schools, regardless of students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and their schools’ test scores. This is because layoffs lead to increases in class sizes and teacher workloads district-wide. This in turn decreases their ability to assign and grade meaningful assignments, monitor student safety, facilitate extracurricular activities and provide one-on-one attention. It also leads to declining course offerings.

It is also important to understand why low performing schools tend to have higher percentages of novice teachers in the first place and to critique the fairness of this for lower income students. The fact is that lower performing schools typically have a disproportionate percentage of lower income students. They also are among the most difficult schools to work in because of higher rates of absences and discipline problems and, more significantly, the burdensome punishments imposed by NCLB as a result of their lower test scores. In short, teachers at lower income schools are expected to work a lot harder and longer for the same pay as their colleagues at more affluent schools.

If we want to talk about equal educational opportunity and bias within the educational system, we need to end the Apartheid-like system that allows some schools to have as many as 80-90% of their students on free or reduced-cost lunch, while others in the same city or district may have fewer than 5%. Likewise, as long as we continue to allow a significantly more challenging workload for teachers at certain schools, those schools will continue to see an exodus of their more experienced teachers and a higher percentage of novice teachers.

Layoffs should also be recognized as an artifact of the class war being waged by the rich against the rest of us, in which the wealthy contribute less and less in taxes and rob the state of revenue for education. In other words, if the rich were paying more in taxes—possibly only what they were paying prior to the Reagan era—there would be no need for layoffs.

However, this dynamic hurts students’ educational opportunities in far deeper ways than increased class sizes and losses of popular teachers. The declining tax base also results in shrinking public health, nutritional and other services that benefit low income families, thus exacerbating many of the effects of poverty like higher rates of learning disabilities, cognitive impairment and absenteeism.