Bill Gates Still Thinks Students are Widgets

Bill Gates, sharing the byline with his wife, Melinda, is still talking about students as if they were widgets and schools as if they were for profit companies (and we know they all would be if it were up to him).

In most workplaces, there is an implicit bargain: Employees get the support they need to excel at their jobs, and employers build a system to evaluate their performance. The evaluations yield information that employees use to improve—and that employers use to hold employees accountable for results.

It's all teacher evaluations and "employee accountability" for them. And what better way to hold teachers accountable than by using scores on student tests. Reduce each student to a number and hold the teacher accountable for that number.

Anthony Cody responded with an excellent post on Living in Dialogue.

...The answer, according to Mr. Gates, is that we must get rid of bad teachers. He said, during his appearance on Oprah last year, that if we got rid of all the bad teachers, "our schools would shoot from the bottom of these rankings to the top."

In order to be able to fire all these bad teachers, we need to be able to measure their performance. The measurements he wants to use are the data from our students' test scores, which tell us how much "value" we have added to them. These students are our raw material, and just like any manufacturing process, we ought to be paid and evaluated according to how much value we have added to the product as it passed through our hands. His foundation created the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, which has come up with something they call "multiple measures" of good teaching, but unfortunately it appears all these measures lead back to test score data.

There's more data that the billionaires need to look at however.

...the United States...ranks next to Greece, Turkey, Mexico and Chile in terms of the percentage of children in poverty...Many teachers see poverty up close, although our students do their best to hide it. Like wounded birds, they do not want others to see their weakness. They tease one another about buying clothes at Salvation Army, or living in a cardboard box. Those of us who have worked in schools with children in poverty are very familiar with this data.

Are our billionaire education reformers interested in any of this information?

We can choose tax structures that underfund our schools, we can believe that we are collectively "broke" while some people stack up the billions, and still need tax breaks. But the data is in. We have become a banana republic, with a widening gulf between rich and poor. And the schools alone will not fix this. Sending more children to college will not fix this. Only social policies that aim to reverse the concentration of wealth will make a real difference.

Gates, while encouraging us to rely on test scores to evaluate teachers, seems to ignore the test results that don't fit his biases. An analysis of the PISA tests results provides data which makes it less comfortable to be incredibly wealthy. From the 2009 PISA test results:

• In schools where less than 10 percent of students get free or reduced lunch, the reading score is 551. That would place those U.S. students at No. 2 on the international ranking for reading, just behind Shanghai, China which topped the ranking with a score of 556.
• Of all the nations participating in the PISA assessment, the U.S. has, by far, the largest number of students living in poverty–21.7%. The next closest nations in terms of poverty levels are the United Kingdom and New Zealand have poverty rates that are 75% of ours.
• U.S. students in schools with 10% or less poverty are number one country in the world.
• U.S. students in schools with 10-24.9% poverty are third behind Korea, and Finland.
• U.S. students in schools with 25-50% poverty are tenth in the world.

U.S. schools with low poverty are among the best in the world as rated by the PISA tests. It's not bad teachers, unless, by some coincidence all the nation's bad teachers are concentrated in schools with high poverty.

Perhaps it's poverty itself that's the problem. Maybe David Berliner was right when, in Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success, he wrote,

...six OSFs [out of school factors] common among the poor that significantly affect the health and learning opportunities of children, and accordingly limit what schools can accomplish on their own: (1) low birth-weight and non-genetic prenatal influences on children; (2) inadequate medical, dental, and vision care, often a result of inadequate or no medical insurance; (3) food insecurity; (4) environmental pollutants; (5) family relations and family stress; and (6) neighborhood characteristics. These OSFs are related to a host of poverty-induced physical, sociological, and psychological problems that children often bring to school, ranging from neurological damage and attention disorders to excessive absenteeism, linguistic underdevelopment, and oppositional behavior.

Also discussed is a seventh OSF, extended learning opportunities, such as pre- school, after school, and summer school programs that can help to mitigate some of the harm caused by the first six factors.

Because America’s schools are so highly segregated by income, race, and ethnicity, problems related to poverty occur simultaneously, with greater frequency, and act cumulatively in schools serving disadvantaged communities. These schools therefore face significantly greater challenges than schools serving wealthier children, and their limited resources are often overwhelmed. Efforts to improve educational outcomes in these schools, attempting to drive change through test-based accountability, are thus unlikely to succeed unless accompanied by policies to address the OSFs that negatively affect large numbers of our nations’ students. Poverty limits student potential; inputs to schools affect outputs from them.

Poverty is the data that billionaires and politicians won't see. To them it's just a distraction from the "it's bad teachers" mantra that they have been chanting since No Child Left Behind was passed. They claim it's "an excuse" and that teachers are not willing to be accountable.

Teachers are willing to be accountable, but other stakeholders need to be accountable, too -- politicians and the state and federal legislatures they populate, parents, school boards, businesses, and students themselves.

Stephen Krashen put it well...

Research tells that there is no correlation between improved test scores and subsequent economic progress, that high unemployment in an area results in decreased school performance of children, even those whose parents are still employed, and it also tells us what we already should know: High poverty means poor diets, inadequate health care, and little access to books and all of these conditions are related to school performance.

The best teaching in the world will have little impact when there is high poverty, when children are under-nourished, in poor health, and have little or nothing to read.

Only One Party In Education Policy

So...why is Dennis Van Roekel, President of the National Education Association, asking me to join Educators for Obama?

If you click on the link above you'll be taken to the web site for the NEA Fund for Children and Public Education. There you'll find the plug, "Pledge to be an Educator for Obama" followed by this amazing comment:

President Obama has earned NEA's recommendation because of his unwavering support for education and students. Now more than ever, we need to elect a President who shares our vision for a stronger America. Do your part and pledge to be an educator for Obama today!

I was against the NEA endorsement of Obama when it was first mentioned at the NEA-RA last July. The Obama administration has done nothing to support public education and public school educators in the United States.

Using his Secretary of Education, President Obama has continued the attack on public schools which began with No Child Left Behind. Arne Duncan's plan for America's public schools, Race to the Top, is nothing short of disaster for our children and our public schools.

Anthony Cody writing in Living In Dialogue last March reminded us of the disconnect between President Obama's words and his administration's actions. He quotes the President,

...one thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching to the test. Because then you're not learning about the world; you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math. All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test. And that's not going to make education interesting to you. And young people do well in stuff that they're interested in. They're not going to do as well if it's boring."

Then he asked,

Is President Obama aware:

• that Race to the Top requires states to tie teacher pay and evaluations to student test scores? If ever there was a recipe for teaching to the test, this is it!
• that his Secretary of Education is proposing to evaluate teacher preparation programs by tracking the test scores of the teachers they produce?
• that his administration's plan for the new version of No Child Left Behind continues to place tremendous pressure on schools attended by the poorest students, ensuring that there will still be extremely high stakes attached to these tests? This creates the most invidious inequity of all -- where students most in need of the sort of wholistic, project-based curriculum the President rightly says is the cure to boredom remain stuck in schools forced to focus on test scores.
• that his Department of Education is proposing greatly expanding both the number of subjects tested, and the frequency of tests, to enable us to measure the "value" each teacher adds to their students?

Writing in the Answer Sheet, Monty Niell critiqued the waivers the Obama administration is offering to states to relieve the pressure of No Child Left Behind.

If they accept the deal, states will lock in ever more counter-productive educational practices based on the misuse of test scores, including linking teacher evaluation to student scores. Those policies could be hard to dislodge should Congress decide not to endorse Duncan’s “Blueprint” when it eventually does reauthorize the federal law. States that refuse to sign on to Duncan’s reform program, however, will be denied waivers, Duncan said, and will then continue to be subject to the continue the NCLB charade of seeking “100% proficiency” of students in reading and math by 2014. Neither choice will help children or schools.

Will the Republicans do anything different? Will a Republican administration be better for public education? Not likely. But the fact remains that Dennis Van Roekel and the NEA are wrong. President Obama is no friend of public education.

My choice for president in the 2012 election will be made based on non-education issues. The current crop of candidates, President Obama and the Republicans who are running, are pushing the privatization of public education with charters (the Republicans include voucher plans as well), the deprofessionalization of teachers, and the corporatization of America's education system.

When it comes to education policy we don't have a two party system. The Corporate Party is in control.

Who Will Staff Tomorrow's Schools? Part 2

Read Part 1 HERE.

Recently our local newspaper ran two related articles about the future of education in Indiana and by extension, the United States.

Students hesitant to pursue teaching: Economy, politics linked to fewer education majors
Published: October 23, 2011 3:00 a.m.

Schools of Education in Indiana's colleges and universities are seeing a drop in enrollment. Fewer jobs, more academic restrictions and a growing unpopularity has taken its toll on the teaching profession.

Professor Michael Slavkin, director of teacher education at Manchester College:

...the Daniels administration, along with Superintendent of Education Tony Bennett, have been outwardly aggressive in their disdain for teachers. The discourse became particularly caustic during the recent legislative session, he said, when lawmakers passed legislation limiting collective bargaining rights, linking teacher pay to test scores and other measures.

“Obviously, the current political environment around education probably makes (the field) less appealing,” Slavkin said. “I think this is the most important job we have to offer college students. I think it’s the most valuable. And yet, I think I would probably second-guess right now if my children were to come to me and say they wanted to be teachers. It’s been a hard couple of years in Indiana for educators.”

A shrinking job market, poor advancement, dependence on student test scores for evaluations, lowered status, lack of professional decision making opportunities, and lack of public support are all making the prospect of a career in education less appealing. The best and the brightest will, for the most part, look elsewhere for career opportunities. The teachers who remain will be overburdened with large class sizes, and hard-to-teach students. The constant attack on public education, public school teachers and their unions, has had a self-fulfilling effect on the profession.

In an editorial, Endangered Profession (October 25, 2011), the Journal Gazette editorialist wrote,

Double-digit enrollment decreases in education schools at area colleges and universities ought to be an early warning that something’s amiss in Indiana’s efforts to overhaul its schools. When students choose not to pursue teaching careers because of discouraging job prospects or unfavorable attitudes toward the profession, the very quality of education is at risk.

We're gutting the teaching profession in a false reform and our children and grandchildren will suffer because of it. Punitive attacks on teachers and public schools has made the educator's job more difficult and less attractive.

Already nearly 50% of educators leave the profession in their first five years. With fewer people going into teaching, and a high attrition rate, our public schools are looking at a bleak future.

Cutting Libraries

-- Eleanor Crumblehulme, library assistant, University of British Columbia