2012 Medley #18

Accountability, Teaching as a Career,
Won't Back Down, Education Politics in Indiana.

[UPDATE:] ACCOUNTABILITY

Contextual Accountability

John Kuhn, Superintendent of Perrin-Whitt CISD in Perrin Texas, has written a great article defining where we are in public education in the US. Quietly, while running a small school system in Texas, this man has become a leader in the quest for fair, community-based, adequately supported public schools.

I don’t write to argue that improvement in the education of American minority students isn’t necessary. The reformers are right at the beginning of the conversation—there’s an emergency in our urban schools. But they are consistently wrong about their monolithic, ideology-driven cause, and about how to fix it. They are also wrong to pretend that there isn’t a whole family of non-school emergencies in our urban areas, and to play-act that schools should somehow be immune from the general devastation around them. If an earthquake hits, should the school building’s pictures not move? If a wave of poverty, drugs, and obliterated families inundates a neighborhood, should the school float above the fray?

TEACHING AS A CAREER

Does It Pay to Become a Teacher?

When I started teaching in 1976, educators had high job satisfaction. The act of teaching...of working with children, learning with them, and guiding them...was a fulfilling career that overshadowed the low pay (when I started teaching my own children qualified for the federal lunch program because of my low income) and difficult working conditions. Now, however, with the bipartisan war against public schools and the push for privatization led by presidents of both parties, teacher morale is the lowest it's been since A Nation at Risk.

What's going to happen to public education when the teaching profession is completely demoralized? What's going to happen to our neediest students when the supply of teachers is cut off because the profession has been degraded and debased to the point where no one in their right mind would choose it as a life's calling? What's going to happen when only the moneyed classes can afford to educate their children?

Our nation's future depends on an educated population. Where will the next generation of teachers come from if the work is unfulfilling, low paying, and micro-managed even more than it currently is?

The average primary-school teacher in the United States earns about 67 percent of the salary of a average college-educated worker in the United States. The comparable figure is 82 percent across the overall O.E.C.D. For teachers in lower secondary school (roughly the years Americans would call middle school), the ratio in the United States is 69 percent, compared to 85 percent across the O.E.C.D. The average upper secondary teacher earns 72 percent of the salary for the average college-educated worker in the United States, compared to 90 percent for the overall O.E.C.D.

American teachers, by the way, spend a lot more time teaching than do their counterparts in most other developed countries

...Given the opportunity costs of becoming a teacher instead of using your college degree to enter another, more remunerative field, are the psychic rewards of teaching great enough to convince America’s best and brightest to become educators?

WON'T BACK DOWN

“Won’t Back Down”: Why do teachers’ unions hate America?

Here's a review of Won't Back Down which says that, aside from being an obvious propaganda film for the school privatizers and union busters, it's not a very good movie either. 

...the movie is unbelievable crap and the whole project was financed by conservative Christian billionaire Phil Anschutz, also the moneybags behind the documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” which handled a similar agenda in subtler fashion.

...Most people still understand, I believe, that teachers work extremely hard for little pay and low social status in a thankless, no-win situation. But this is one of those areas where conservatives have been extremely successful in dividing the working class, which is precisely the agenda in “Won’t Back Down.”

"Won't Back Down" Film Pushes ALEC Parent Trigger Proposal

Who made Won't Back Down?

Well-funded advocates of privatizing the nation's education system are employing a new strategy this fall to enlist support for the cause. The emotionally engaging Hollywood film "Won't Back Down" -- set for release September 28 -- portrays so-called "Parent Trigger" laws as an effective mechanism for transforming underperforming public schools. But the film's distortion of the facts prompts a closer examination of its funders and backers and a closer look at those promoting Parent Trigger as a cure for what ails the American education system.

"EDUCATING MAGGIE" | The Real Parents #WontBackDown Against #ALEC |
A group called, New Yorkers for Great Public Schools has started a movement to educate the actors in Won't Back Down.




EDUCATION POLITICS IN INDIANA

Indiana education: Tony Bennett wants to see accountability measures extended to Indiana school districts

Republican Tony Bennett, Indiana's Superintendent of Public Destruction Instruction claims that local control is not as good as state takeover of public schools.

Accountability measures for schools — including state takeover for those that consistently fail — have worked so well that lawmakers should consider extending them to school districts, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett said Tuesday.

Democratic candidate Glenda Ritz responds to Bennett's State of Education

Glenda Ritz is running against Tony Bennett and his school-privatization backers (aka, the Walton Family, Michael Bloomberg, etc) for Superintendent of Public Instruction in Indiana. This is a nice little piece in which Ritz outlines her plans should she (by some miracle) defeat the moneybags bankrolling Bennett. However, I would have liked to hear her argue against specifics...like, are the schools which the state took over really doing better than they did before? Are they working with the same students or did the low performing students get "relocated" in a trail of tears so common when corporate charters take over so-called failing public schools?

The state of education in Indiana is headed in the wrong direction when it comes to assuring that quality teachers are in every classroom. Dr. Bennett is asking the State Board of Education to lower standards for teachers. Under his new proposal, teachers will no longer be required to have a degree in education to teach, but instead would be given licenses if they can simply pass a test by the Pearson Company. The profession of teaching is continually refining and expanding the ways in which teachers can better reach students with rigorous content. This is not the time to take a step back. This is the time to make sure teachers have the proper educational background, internships, and student teaching experiences that will make them highly qualified in the classroom.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

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Choosing an Education President

Politicians running for president nearly always claim that their education platform is based on concern and care for the children of America. They claim, using the language of their choice, that they want to be the "Education President" (See George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush) and speak about "education for a global economy."

President Obama and Governor Romney are no exception. What are their platforms for education and what can we expect to see in a second Obama administration or a Romney administration?

Obama's (Democratic) platform promises more of the same as the last 4 years.

The Democratic Party understands the importance of turning around struggling public schools. We will continue to strengthen all our schools and work to expand public school options for low-income youth, including magnet schools, charter schools, teacher-led schools, and career academies.

...includes raising standards for the programs that prepare our teachers, recognizing and rewarding good teaching...We also believe in carefully crafted evaluation systems that give struggling teachers a chance to succeed

During the Obama administration "turning around struggling public schools" has meant firing staffs, and/or selling off public educational institutions to private companies and expanding charter schools. "Carefully crafted evaluation systems" means evaluating teachers based on test scores. Neither of those "reforms" has a research base indicating success. Charters perform no better, on average, than public schools and VAM evaluation processes have been found to be invalid.

The Republican platform upon which Romney is running promises,

School choice – whether through charter schools, open enrollment requests, college lab schools, virtual schools, career and technical education programs, vouchers, or tax credits – is important for all children...

...We support legislation that will correct the current law provision which defines a “Highly Qualified Teacher” merely by his or her credentials, not results in the classroom. We urge school districts to make use of teaching talent in business, STEM fields, and in the military, especially among our returning veterans. Rigid tenure systems based on the “last in, first out” policy should be replaced with a merit-based approach...

Again, like the Democrats, we see turn-arounds leading to charters, and student test scores being used to evaluate teachers (merit pay). The Republicans add vouchers, and specifically denounce teachers unions.

Neither party has an interest in saving public education...both are intent on selling public education to the highest bidder through corporate charters and/or vouchers. Chris Hedges believes that it's system-wide, not just education.

We will all swallow our cup of corporate poison. We can take it from nurse Romney, who will tell us not to whine and play the victim, or we can take it from nurse Obama, who will assure us that this hurts him even more than it hurts us, but one way or another the corporate hemlock will be shoved down our throats. The choice before us is how it will be administered. Corporate power, no matter who is running the ward after January 2013, is poised to carry out U.S. history’s most savage assault against the poor and the working class, not to mention the Earth’s ecosystem. And no one in power, no matter what the bedside manner, has any intention or ability to stop it.

NEA President, Dennis Van Roekel is currently traveling the campaign trail with Arne Duncan, the Obama's "reformer" Secretary of Education. Duncan's Race to the Top is nothing more than a plan to charterize public schools and de-professionalize public school teachers.

The Democrats will continue to throw money into the Race to the Top, while the Republicans will let public education starve. In either case, the privatization will continue. Van Roekel, the president of America's largest teachers union, is following one of the prime destroyers of public education in order to get more money for corporate charters and privatization.

You might choose another reason to vote for Obama or Romney, but either way the privatization of public education (and the rest of the country's public institutions as well) will likely continue. The country will be led by the same people who gave us the second highest level of child poverty in the advanced world (nearly 25% of our children), the housing crash and the ever-increasing income gap between rich and poor.

Who owns public institutions such as public schools? In the past public education belonged to its communities, municipalities and states. Now it's the Koch brothers, the Walton Family Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and an ever increasing number of "edupreneurs" like K-12 Online Learning and Pearson.

We're letting it get away...and it will, if we don't stop it. Tell the next president that the attack on public education must stop. Tell him that we need to fix our public schools, not sell them. We can

allocate more resources for public schools — to improve technology, to expand professional-development opportunities for teachers, to buy classroom supplies, up-to-date textbooks and all the other materials that come with a good education. Perhaps one of the best ways to improve public education would be to loosen the strictures that tie student and school evaluations to test preparation and instead to allow teachers to instruct students in the sort of project-based units supported by educational research and the sort of critical-thinking skills that cannot be measured by filling in bubbles — the sort of academic freedom that is praised in charter schools but restricted in traditional public schools.

We can give our children the kind of schools they deserve.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

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Truth Doesn't Need Your Approval

John Calvin denounced Nicolaus Copernicus for saying that the Earth moved around the Sun. Calvin claimed that it was the Sun which moved.

We know now that the Earth, along with the other planets, asteroids, comets and other rocks and ice balls of various and sundry sizes (including the dwarf planet Pluto) do, indeed, orbit the Sun. The fact that early church leaders didn't believe it, didn't make it untrue. The Earth was steadily and quietly orbiting around the Sun all during the arguments in the 16th century (and earlier).

Anti-science/anti-intellectual arguments are still with us today...more than a third of all American don't "believe in" evolution (some recent surveys have claimed that the number of those not believing in evolution is higher...approaching half of all Americans, but those numbers may be skewed). Almost a fifth of all Americans deny that the world's climate is changing.

There is a large anti-science feeling in the US...a feeling that science is not reliable - probably due to the fact that as the findings change, so does science. The average person might see that as meaning that science is unreliable...as opposed to self-correcting.

This isn't new to the United States. Anti-intellectualism has been here for a long time. Isaac Asimov wrote

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

Asimov's position on this was obvious. Just because a free society allows people to have false ideas doesn't mean that we should, as a society, accept those false ideas as valid.

Sometimes the anti-science attitude comes from the government and the business community. Take one of the main conflict areas in the recent Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike -- Value Added Measures (VAM) as part of a teachers evaluation process.

Illinois state law requires that at least 30% of a teacher's evaluation must be determined by student progress -- clearly referring to standardized tests. Illinois is not the only state with that requirement, though. Dozens of states (including my home, Indiana) have jumped on the "use standardized tests to evaluate teachers" bandwagon. To be fair...many only did so in order to qualify for federal money from the Administration's Race to the Top program.

The CTU claimed, however, that those sorts of evaluations weren't valid.

Valerie Strauss agreed.

The [New York] Times can say that using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers is a sensible policy and Obama can say it and Education Secretary Arne Duncan can say it and Emanuel can say it and so can Bill Gates (who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop it) and governors and mayor[s] from both parties, and heck, anybody can go ahead and shout it out as loud as they can.

It doesn’t make it true.

No amount of support for VAM based teacher evaluations changes the fact that researchers have found the method to be unreliable.

A group of Chicago area researchers objected when Mayor Emanuel came out with his plan to evaluate teachers using the method, and they urged restraint and caution. In Misconceptions and Realities about Teacher and Principal Evaluation the Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education (CReATE) wrote

Assessments designed to evaluate student learning are not necessarily valid for measuring teacher effectiveness or student learning growth. Using them to measure the latter is akin to using a meter stick to weigh a person: you might be able to develop a formula that links height and weight, but there will be plenty of error in your calculations.

A similar objection was written by researchers in Georgia. The Georgia Researchers, Educators and Advocates for Teacher Evaluation Reform said

No evidence exists that evaluation systems that incorporate student test scores produce gains in student achievement...Testing companies themselves advise against the use of their instruments to evaluate educators...Assessments designed to evaluate student learning are not necessarily valid for measuring teacher effectiveness or student learning growth...

These researchers are joined by the National Research Council. Strauss notes in her article,

The National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academies, which include the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, issued a major report last year on this issue that said:

The standardized test scores that have been trumpeted to show improvement in the schools provide limited information about the causes of improvements or variability in student performance.This would be true, presumably, for any school system that use standardized tests as a measure of achievement.

In other words, using students' standardized test scores to evaluate a teachers effectiveness in the classroom is bad science. The real research shows that those methods are incorrect usages of standardized tests and they are unfair to students and teachers, and anyone else involved, including parents, communities and local governments. Just because you want something to work a certain way doesn't mean it does. Good science suggests that we not use these methods for teacher evaluation until they have been shown to be reliable and valid.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson said "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

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Thoughts About the Chicago Teachers Strike - Part 7

The strike is suspended. A couple of comments...

Day 7 Strike suspended. Big victory for teachers

CTU's House of Delegates voted to "suspend" the strike and ask teachers to return to class tomorrow.

“Everybody is going back to school,” said Jay Rehak, a delegate from Whitney Young High School. Delegate Mike Bochner said “an overwhelming majority” of delegates voted to suspend the strike. “I’m really excited, I’m really relieved,” said Bochner, a teacher at Cesar Chavez elementary.

Thank You Chicago Teachers

A huge THANK YOU is due to the teachers of Chicago, who are going back to work tomorrow, after making the most important statement in defense of public education in this country in the last ten years...a cross section of progressives are willing to admit that Democratic Party education policies, as well as Republican ones, are disastrous, and that you cannot improve schools unless teachers are treated with respect and brought into the center of every discussion which shapes education policy.

(btw, the youtube link at the end of this article doesn't work)

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

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