NEA on ESSA

Thursday evening NEA Government Relations Director Mary Kusler and Director of Education Policy and Practice Donna Harris-Aikensspoke on a brief conference call about NEA and the New ESSA. This will be as disjointed as my notes, and there aren't many surprises here, though a few pieces of clarifying information (I may have missed a crossed T or dotted I thanks to my phone connection.)

Richard Allen Smith opened by observing that "we can see the finish line" for ending NCLB. Then he handed the conference off to Kusler.

Kusler used the word "historic" roughly six billion times, noting among other things that this was the first education conference committee meeting since about 2008, with a full conference committee meeting further still in the past.

Who was naughty

She also noted that it was bipartisan and bicameral about a thousand times (my notes are sloppy). She did note that the bill came out of committee with just one nay vote, and that nay-voter was Rand Paul.

The language NEA keeps using to praise the bill which Kusler echoed is that every child will have access to quality education regardless of their zip code. She thinks ESSA will do that. She's apparently kind of an optomist.

Kusler noted that NEA had "three buckets" that marked their goals:

1) reduce testing and divorce it from high stakes
2) maximize multiple measures, noting that everyone loved the disagregated data of NCLB, but we should also be noting if all subgroups are getting art class and guidance counselors, and not just test scores.
3) when educators have a voice, students do better. Looking out for the profession. That kind of thing.

What next?

Senate vote next week. It will pass overwhelmingly. Rumors are that the Pres could be signing this by the end of next week. We are on the cusp of changing the federal government's role and insuring quality education etc etc every child.

Dropping her rose colored glasses for more accurate ones, Kusler noted that the President signing this bill is not the end but merely the beginning. Implementation will be key. I will give my Senator a crisp twenty dollar bill if he can work in a provision that we don't have to hear the word "implementation" in the ed world for the next ten years.

The I Word

Harris-Aikensspoke will be the NEA implementation czar. She says there's a lot of opportunity built into this bill, pushing down responsibility so that state and local education folks have to decide what assessment should look like. She notes that there are pieces that guarantee educator (by which she means more than teachers) voice will be critical.

Note too that early education and community schools play an important role in there somewhere.

NEA will be developing a suite of materials for parents and teachers will be able to use, and teachers will help make them, and I resisted the urge to ask if they would be a crappy as the junk NEA banged out in support of Common Core.

Questions? 

Actually, most folks resisted the urge to ask questions. I don't know. It's always hard to ask questions when you can't read or see the room, but fortunately, Leonie Haimson was there, and she asked:

What about special ed and ELL?

The answer was illuminating to me. The old rule is that only 1% of Students with disabilities could be proficient. The new rule is that only 1% of SWD can take an alternative assessment [Correction-- h/t to Leonie Haimson. 1% of all students, 10% of IEP students]. NEA does not love that, but they feel that language in ESSA clarifies that IDEA trumps ESEA and the the IEP team has the final word on what assessment a student should take.

Waivers can be granted on state and federal level. I suspect this will all end up in a court somewhere, but NEA seems to think IDEA has gotten the upper hand.

What about social impact bonds?

Leonie asked this too. The answer is A) NEA thinks these sucks and B) that old NEA favorite, you should have seen it before we got involved. Apparently SIB references were spread like crabgrass through the bill, and now are weeeded back to only two references in some specific locations. So, bad, but could have been worse?

And that was it. Quick and over in about 30 minutes, slightly illuminating. Particularly the Rand Paul part.

Naughty Union Spending

Campbell Brown's pet PR project went after some union blood this weekend with revelations about AFT, NEA and UFT spending. 

The lead is that between 2011 and 2014, the unions spent $5.7 on travel and hotel expenses. That's a lot of money.

Now, when we start breaking it down, there are some line items that seem a bit of a stretch in the outrage department. For instance, the AFT spent $6,700 at Walt Disney World, which is one day's admission for about 65 adults (who don't plan to eat during that day).

But the list also includes cruise tickets, international air travel, and fancy shmancy hotels. The 74 admits that the spending amounts to a small sliver of the total disbursements by the union, and that some of the travel and expense is an outgrowth of international union connections and even some humanitarian work.

The narrative here is a predictable one for the74-- those dollars are dues dollars and union members don't want their money spent on all this foolishness. Writer Naomi Nix has a nifty quote from Jade Thompson, an anti-"mandatory"-dues activist about how much the $800 of dues would mean to a working family. "It's our money," says Thompson, who probably meant to say, "It's our money that we only received in the first place because a union helped us negotiate a fair contract." And we should go back to the sliver. The article, for instance, marks NEA as spending $2.2 million over four years on "luxury travel and hotels." At three million members, that comes to about 18 cents a year in dues money.

But my absolute favorite nominee for Journalistic Insightfulness would be this part of Nix's article:

“They might have very good explanations for this. They might not,” Stanford University politics professor Terry Moe said of the spending on hotels and travel.

Well, you know. I think that just about covers it.

Moe also claims that "if you listen to them." the unions claim they are spending it all on collective bargaining. I don't know. I've been listening to them a long time, and I never got that impression. Moe claims that union spending on politics is like some kind of secret. I'm pretty sure he's wrong.

Look, I'm the last person to defend union spending patterns. As a local president, I went to region meetings that came complete with meals. I've sat through the arguments about whether to spend local dues money on things like retirement dinners and social gatherings. And I've been the teacher grumbling over state-level union people who wear suits that are nicer than anything I'll ever wear ever. There are some items in this article that do make me cringe.

I wish the unions operated on a shoestring and everyone traveled coach and stayed in a yurt. But I also understand that teachers give up time and effort to serve, and if the only time they can meet is during mealtime, then they should eat. I understand that maintaining a stable of experts who can be sent out to any local in need costs money, bot for maintaining and sending. I understand that if I want someone to go represent me in the big leagues, it helps if they look as if they belong in the big leagues. I understand all that, and I'll still vote for Bernie and not Hillary, because I want to believe in a world where it doesn't cost money to play in the big leagues. Of course, I also want to believe in a world in which you don't really need a union because the People In Charge already listen to employees and make sure those employees are treated well. 

 This is a yurt







I wish my union didn't spend big bucks on fancy hotels, especially because when they do, it makes it possible for outfits like the74 to do union hit pieces that throw around big numbers to make the union look bad. But this article was a fishing expedition, looking for a way to slam unions and support the narrative that unions need to be stripped of their ability to collect dues and gain members.

 

LIly Tries To Muster the Troops

This week NEA President Lily Eskelsen-Garcia kicked off the union's work as a campaigning arm of the Clinton campaign by doing some damage control and trying to get the troops in line.

I knew we were in trouble when I saw this tweet:

It’s clear: Educators are on the same page when it comes to what our students need from the next president. http://t.co/fJilsIlz5d

— Lily Eskelsen García (@Lily_NEA) October 16, 2015

Is it? Is it clear that educators are on the same page about the next President? Exactly which page is that, I wonder?

The link in Eskelsen-Garcia's tweet takes us to this piece at her blog. "What's At Stake" presumably lays out what the union's campaign push will be.

The piece opens with a classic call to get in line. Lily has traveled the country, read the interwebs, and listened to the many points of view that teachers have been "not shy" about sharing. And "there will always be room for debate when it comes to the next candidate to support," which is good to hear, because there certainly wasn't any room to debate about the last candidate NEA leaders chose to support. But LEG is sure one thing is "abundantly clear"-- "Educators are on the same page when it comes to what our students need from the next president."

So what do we all agree on?

Well, one guy said teachers need a punch in the face and another guy wants us to all pack heat in school. We certainly don't want those guys! This is not so much "on the same page" as 'not reading from the Big Book of Crazy,' but okay.

Instead, we must keep the focus on ensuring that every student has an equal opportunity to get an excellent education, regardless of their family’s income or ZIP code. That means smaller, less-crowded classrooms that allow for more one-on-one attention and up-to-date equipment, science labs and textbooks.

I can't tell you how discouraging it is to see the language of reformsters coming out of the mouth of my union president. That zip code line is straight out of the charter operators playbook, and I'm really tired of "opportunity" and "access" and "chance in hell" to get a good education. Can we be for providing every student an excellent education?  And can't we have a better list of specifics than that paltry batch.

To succeed as a nation, we must make college more affordable by fighting tuition increases, lowering student loan interest rates and increasing Pell Grants.

This has emerged as the Clintonian-Democrat education dodge-- a platform point that, paired with universal pre-K, makes a safe, progressive-ish place to stand on education without actually addressing any of the huge issues facing K-12 schools these days.

Also, LEG asserts that teachers must be listened to. And before the hollering about irony starts, she spends a few paragraphs asserting that the association totally spent months and months "engaging" membership about the Presidential nomination. Town meetings. Distributing political information. A website!

I am heartened that NEA’s members and its leaders have engaged in this conversation, and I agree with so many of you that there is too much at stake to remain on the sidelines.

Sigh. So when the NEA leadership rammed that endorsement through over the collective howls of many members, they were just following the will of teachers everywhere. Remember when twitter and the internet were just blowing up with people saying, "President Garcia-- we just can't wait! Endorse Hillary now! We want to get off the sidelines." You probably remember that as vividly as all that outreach NEA did to membership about who they wanted to get behind in the race. I think it was just after that weekend when the dancing unicorns beat Elvis on Prancing with the Stars.


I agree that we—educators and our unions—have been ignored by political leaders. I agree that corporate education reformers have become the insiders and the outcome has been disastrous decisions by Republicans and Democrats alike. But I disagree that the answer to changing this is to step back and silence ourselves,

And yet, by throwing ourselves in on Clinton's side, extracting nothing valuable in return, that is exactly what we've done. The first Democratic debate was pretty clear-- education is off the table as a campaign issue. Clinton isn't going to address anything of substance because she doesn't have to (and doesn't want to), and the rest of the candidates won't because they no longer have nothing to gain. Yeah, it might be nice if somebody addressed the state of public education because it's important and addressing it is the right thing to do, but I'm a big boy and I know what to expect from my Presidential candidates.

LEG now enters the Stumping for Clinton portion of the homily. Put on your hip boots.

Each candidate who participated in our process supports strong public schools. But there is no question that Hillary Clinton’s proven track record on standing up for students, coupled with her depth of knowledge on the issues important to educators, make her the best choice for president.

No, sorry, wrong. There are questions. Many questions. Huge questions. Like, will she drop her love of charters and privatization? Will she take a stand when it comes to using bad standardized tests to evaluate teachers and schools? Will she tell her long-time friends and corporate backers who have a great interest in dismantling public education so they can sell off the parts-- will she tell those folks to go take a hike? And will we stop talking about Clinton's "proven track record of standing up for students" like it's a real thing and not a fiction spun out of fairy dust and unicorn poop?

But LEG says Clinton has stood out on issues from pre-K to affordable college, and she then moves into discussing some specific examples of exactly what Clinton has done and-- ha! Sorry, no. She doesn't. Instead, we get some specific Clinton work on other issues, like working on universal health care, a couple of working class person act, and the DREAM act.

But Clinton has promised she will treat teachers like they are important and listen to them and-- can it be-- yes!! There's the table!! That wonderful table!! And next to it-- there's a seat!! For us!!!

“I know how important it is for you to be the voices of education. I believe it is absolutely imperative for you to be at the table when decisions are made, at the local, state, or national level. And that’s what I promise to you. You will always have a place at the table.”

Oh, a place. Uh-oh. The servants have a place at the table. They just don't get to sit down a speak.

Look, here's my biggest problem with all this, and as much as I hate using war images, I'm going to do it here because it makes my point. It's January, 1942. Europe is in flames, and the ruins of Pearl Harbor are still smoldering. And a guy who wants to be President stands up and says, "I know you have concerns, and I want you to know that I am deeply committed to keeping the coffee fields of Brazil safe."

Pre-K and affordable college are lovely safe issues, just edgy enough to separate the D's from the R's, but still pleasantly platitudinous. But next year, I will be voting for a Presidential candidate who recognizes that public education is under attack, that a foundational institution of this country is in crisis-- not because of foreign attack or self-destructive dysfunction, but because of a concerted, deliberate attempt to tear it down and replace it with a system that is more concerned about Return on Investment than in making sure that every American child gets a good education-- and gets it without leaving her own neighborhood.

Cheery warm thoughts might have been enough in other times, but we are in a heap of trouble right now, and I don't need a president-- not of my nation and not of my union-- who thinks we should all pick up a fiddle while our home burns. I'm afraid that John Kuhn called it with his tweet:

Prediction: Someone from one party or the other is going to be elected President, and that person will be bad for public education.

— John Kuhn (@johnkuhntx) October 14, 2015

LEG's piece ends with a link to offer feedback or thoughts-- I suggest we all use it.

Hillary's NEA Audition [updated]

Yesterday Hillary Clinton met with NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia to take her shot at winning the recommendation of the nation's biggest union. This is a challenging moment for the union because, frankly, their last recommendation turned out to be a giant eight-year suckfest for education.

I'm a registered Democrat, and I vote in every election. Like most of my generation, I vote for candidates and not parties. And while the GOP has been more consistent in its general assault on public ed, the Democratic Party harbors some of the worst opponents of public education and the teachers who work in it (looking at you, Andy Cuomo). It has been particularly striking how much the Obama administration's education policies have been simply an extension of the Bush administration's policies. It is no surprise that Jeb Bush has been a big fan of Arne Duncan, or that Duncan turned to Bush 3.0 for education policy advice.

I would say that the jury is still out on Hillary, but honestly, I'd be lying. Hillary is pretty clearly tied to the same charter-loving, reform-pushing, corporate-driven, test-and-punishing reformsters as our last two Presidents. CAP, one of the fiercest reformster-driven advocacy groups in DC, was simply a holding pen for Clinton campaign leaders like John Podesta; they are close to Hillary and they have never, ever, been a friend to public education or public school teachers. DFER, a group that absolutely loathes teachers and the teachers union, is delighted that Hillary is running.

In the NEA's press release, Garcia says that she and Clinton had "a frank and robust conversation about what is a stake in this coming election." That's followed by a few words from Clinton, none of which are terribly convincing.

Some of it is a plate or verbal twinkies, a pretty puff of empty ear calories.

What we can do together to deal with the issues we know are at the real core of making it possible to look at every little boy and girl and say "yes, you will have the best chances we can give you."

So, we will do stuff for children, and it will be stuff that is good. Glad we clarified that. This clearly sets Clinton apart from all other candidates. But what about education?

Are tests important? Yes. Do we need accountability? Yes. 

Are tests important? Really? Which tests? A first grade teacher's weekly spelling test? The useless abomination that is the PARCC?


And we need accountability? To whom? For what? Is she saying that the public should get to know what's going on in their local schools, or is she saying that the burden of proof is on schools to prove to the government that they don't suck?

And then there's this baloney:

So many of our poorer schools have cut off all the extracurricular activities. We’ve taken away band, in so many places we’ve taken away a lot of the sports. We’ve taken away arts classes. We’ve taken away school productions.

Okay, I don't want to minimize what's here. The loss of extra-curriculars, music, sports, the arts-- these are all bad things. But if you're looking at our nation's poorest, most underserved schools, and this is what you see, I am concerned. Perhaps we could also talk about physical plants-- buildings that are crumbling and un-maintained. Perhaps we could talk about support for simple things like, say, textbooks. Or enough teachers to reduce crowded class sizes. We might even talk about the systematic silencing of poor, black voices in places like Newark and Philadelphia, where the non-wealthy non-white community members are being deprived of the fundamental democratic process that is supposed to be basic to our country.

This is just a weird thing to focus on, out of all the issues that face high-poverty schools and communities.

[Update: In Washington Post's coverage of the interview, the stress was on Clinton's promise to listen. Which, I suppose, is better than a statement that she will absolutely ignore teachers. But talk is cheap, and listening is even cheaper.

“She basically said ‘What kind of fool would be making public policy without listening to the people who live in those communities, the people who know the names of the kids’?” Garcia said. “I loved that.”

Well, I love that, too. But the answer to her question is "Everybody in the current administration and all her good friends at CAP." And no, you don't get any credit for Listening To Teachers when the only ones you listen to are ones that are carefully vetted and selected. And you don't get credit for listening to teachers if you then ignore everything they say.

Every major policy decision about education in the last decade has been made without any serious significant input from actual teachers. Clinton's promise to "listen" does not move me.]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hillary Clinton is a better option than Scott Walker. And having just your legs chopped off is a better option than having both your arms and legs chopped off. I'm sick to death of the Democrats arguing, well, yeah, we suck, and we're going to punch you in the face, but that guy over there is going to kick you in the junk, so choose us. And frankly, at this point, when it comes to education I don't see a lot of real policy airspace between Clinton 2.0 and Bush 3.0.

I'm happy see Clinton court the NEA vote, but I remain unconvinced, and an endorsement from my union leaders will not sway my vote in the slightest. They're political animals, and they will make a political choice. But I'm a teacher, and I am so deeply and profoundly tired of voting for people who don't respect me, or my work, or the institution that is both the foundation of this country and the object of my life's work. I'll vote for Sanders or Nader before I throw my vote away on one more politician who's just going to kick me in the face.

Living in Dialogue, Teacher Voices, and The NEA 360 Report

At his blog Living in Dialogue, Anthony Cody has published an important series of articles about the creation of NEA's 360 report. Taken together, the articles create a picture of the contentious and fraught (depending on your perspective) process involved in creating the report. They are also a primer in how an attempt to include teacher voices can turn into something else entirely (Cody's leading metaphor of auto-tuning is exceptionally apt).

The report was managed by VIVA, and was intended to be a response to this question:

A wide body of research suggests that instructional quality has an important impact on student learning and development, but is not the only major factor. Are we including appropriate measures and indicators in today’s student accountability systems? How should responsibility for students’ education be assigned and measured at all levels of the education system? How should teachers be supported to provide the best possible education in every classroom? Who should be responsible for providing the resources to create a safe and equitable learning environment for all students?

VIVA collected responses from 953 members, and the selected (through a "proprietary algorithm") seventeen leaderly teachers who were given the job of turning those responses into a report. What Cody presents on the blog is a series of reflections by several of those seventeen teachers.

Start with this article by Cody:

The Auto-Tuning of Teacher Voices: VIVA and the NEA 360 Report on Educational Accountability

And then move on through the full package:

It’s Time to Speak Out: Comparing Reports, by Petra Schmid-Riggins
Using Our Teacher Voices: the Fight to Be Heard, by Amanda Koonlaba
Teachers Speak Out, Then Get Schooled, by Rachel Rich.
Let All Teachers’ Voices Be Heard, by Nancy Kunsman.
We Must Create Avenues for Authentic Teacher Voices to be Heard, by Enid Hutchinson.
The Process and the Report: What Went Wrong, by Joy Peters.

There are several different viewpoints represented here, but a picture of the events that led to a softening, editing, edge-smoothing, teacher-shushing rewrite of the report do slowly emerge. It is riveting reading, though for anyone who has ever tried to produce a report with a committee and for management that has something in particular in mind, much will ring true and familiar.

The package of essays is a bit frustrating in its lack, with one exception, of hard specifics. What exactly was edited out and what exactly was it turned into? That part is not as clear as it might be. But the essays are united in their very personal voices; these six individuals will tell you exactly what it felt like to them to be involved, and I found that helpful. Any attempt to create some sort of objective history would have left me searching for and wondering about personal perspectives.

Ultimately how it all happened is more important than what exactly resulted, because the 360 Report that ultimately resulted and which-- well, tell the truth. You hadn't heard of it. You didn't know there was such a thing. If you go search the NEA website, you can dig up some references to NEA 360 Accountability in the 2014-2016 strategic plan. It appears under "Strategic Goal #1:Strong Affiliates for Great Public Schools—Building affiliate capacity to elevate the voices of education professionals is critical to the advancement of public education in America." In the pages used to explain this bureaucratic mush, NEA360 appears as a thing to be integrated into "existing and future affiliate programs." I was going to dig further, but the NEA strategic plan is one of those documents that actually radiates little particles of sleep-inducing numbness, beamed out by string after string of words put together in bland parades of meaningless generality. So, for now, I'll go no further. I quit while I could still feel my face.

But the NEA360 report itself can be read here. It is built around six recommendations:

1) Implement multi-pronged solutions to the multiple factors that impact student learning, enabling legislators, educators, parents, and students to each clearly understand their particular role and responsibility in every student’s learning process.
2) Widen curriculum to promote all areas of human growth such as curiosity, creativity, collaboration
and other life-long skills.
3) Create equity of educational opportunity for all students through appropriate funding, geographical representation in developing standards (and their accompanying assessments), and raising the pedagogical qualifications of teachers.
4) Empower educators to be decision makers in matters related to curriculum, professional development, and school/district policy.
5) Create a new restructured evaluation system of collaboration where teachers have equal voice of their annual professional growth.
6) Honor the commitment for all students to receive Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE), recognizing that the diversity of student needs requires diverse programs to accomplish this goal.

nmahavkjhwljkayqwu-----

Sorry. My face went numb all the way down to my hands.

Look, if any of the 953 respondents said anything close to any of those items, I will eat my hat, deep-fried and stapled to an armadillo. The subheadings (38 in all) are much better, and actually include some useful such as banning the use of standardized tests from teacher evaluation. But there is an awful lot of horse-by-committee hump and spit here. The articles at Living in Dialogue help me understand why.

The articles give a picture of how the impulse to include teacher voices, even when well-meant and sincere (which, okay, maybe VIVA deserves that much credit, or maybe not) can go astray and take us to a place where those voices are just as hard to hear as ever. It's not cheery reading, but while you've got a few extra minutes, it's worthwhile reading. 

Teacher Union Alternatives?

One of the hallmarks of reformsterism continues to be a concerted effort to crush teacher unions. The bottom line is pretty simple-- privatizers and profiteers want to be able to hire and fire at will, and they want to be able to pay teachers whatever they feel like paying them. You make profit by controlling revenue and expense, and since education revenues are fairly static and beyond the easy control of reformster ed CEOs, the CEOs need to be able to control costs, and the number one cost in a school is personnel. Reformsters also want to be able to work their teachers with no constraints; nobody should be telling them that teachers won't be working twelve hour days, seven days a week.

So reformsters really want unions to go away.

In the New Orleans Advocate, we find Alexandria Neason pushing one form of anti-union baloney. Her article reports on a "trend" of NOLA teachers seeking out non-union alternatives, looking for other groups that "amplify teachers voices." And, holy smokes, what a list. America Achieves, Teach Plus, Educators 4 Excellence, Leading Educators -- a dozen Super Bowls couldn't use this much astroturf. I am not sure why Neason did not list the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a great alternative to the teachers' unions.

But it's an alternative that doesn't provide much of anything that a union does

The new organizations like America Achieves differ in their specific goals and structure, but they all seek to amplify teachers’ voice in policy debates, and they rarely, if ever, concern themselves with protecting one of unions’ main reasons for being: teacher tenure.

"Seek to amplify teachers' voices in policy debates." Seriously? I would love to see a specific example of that, but one is not forthcoming, so I'm going to assume that these groups are doing what astroturf groups have always done-- pursue their reformster-driven agendas while searching for teachers they can use as PR cover.

But what about the union function of bargaining contracts or providing resources and support for teachers under fire?

America Achieves, where Eckhardt is now the head of the teacher fellowship program, focuses less on advocating for specific positions and more on helping teachers learn how to advocate for themselves.

So, sure. When it's time to get a new salary set or it's time to defend your career against a biased or incompetent administrator, just march into district offices and take care of that yourself. America Achieves also rounds up teachers to provide fun audiences for things like NBC's Education Nation Reformster Infomercials, and they provided the teacher props for the Arne Duncan Meets With Live Teachers photo op of 2010. They also help teachers write op-eds and other great reformster PR. And when it comes to putting teachers in these settings, Eckhardt gets in a zinger:


But the group didn’t tell the teachers what to say — something Eckhardt said would never have happened with a union.

And, well, damn, he's not entirely wrong. In the name of unity, teachers unions can be absolutely terrible about allowing a diverse group of voices to speak. NY has its infamous loyalty oath. And nobody rises to positions of national leadership without proving to people in power that you're the Right Kind of Person.

I've been a local union leader in a tough contract year followed by a tough strike year. I know just how invaluable the resources and experts from the state level can be. I also know it would be foolish to assume that local, state and national union interests are always 100% aligned.

But Eckhardt's statement is disingenuous. Of course his group didn't tell teachers what to say-- they just made sure to select teachers who would only be inclined to say The Right Thing in the first place. I think some people imagine that politics works by giving somebody a pile of money and saying, "Okay, now you should pretend to be opposed to mugwump regulation." But it's much simpler to find someone who is actually opposed to mugwump regulation and use your money to give him a platform. Astroturf groups don't need to indoctrinate people-- just recruit the right people to start with.

Jim Testerman of NEA argues that NEA is a member-driven group where members set the policy. I wish that were more true of the national unions, but it's not. Consider last summer when both AFT and NEA members forced anti-Duncan resolutions on their leaders, who have since made sure that those resolutions had absolutely no affect on what NEA and AFT have actually done. Rank and file members have little hope of using their national or state unions as methods of amplifying their voices.

Of course, that's only part of the point. If you are a teacher who wants your voice to be heard in national policy debates, get a blog. If you are a teacher who wants a decent contract, protection on the job and some heavy guns to back you when trouble comes your way, join a union. It's as simple as that. Saying these groups are a substitute for a union is like saying a bicycle is a substitute for steak.

The astroturf threat is just the more modern approach to eroding unions. Indiana has just unveiled a pretty standard approach. Governor Mike Pence just unveiled "Freedom To Teach," and if that sounds kind of like "Right To Work," that's because they're the same idea.

Freedom To Teach will earmark a bunch of money for any school that wants to chuck out its old teacher pay method and replace it with a system that will pay all the teachers in the school way more. Ha! Just kidding, although Pence tries to sell the program with that page straight from the reformster handbook:

“Everyone knows that good teachers make a difference, we have to get even more good teachers in front of more classrooms,” Pence says. “You get more good teachers by paying good teachers more.”

The key to making this kind of merit pay work is that you only pay "good teachers" well. And since you are deciding what qualifies someone as a good teacher, you never have to find yourself employing more good teachers than you can afford. The rest will leave quickly, but so what? Your program allows you to recruit saying, "Come here! We pay a top salary of $125K!" Just make sure you don't include the ad copy that says, "You'll probably never see that money, and you'll start at poverty wages, but come be our fresh meat anyway."

Indiana House Democratic leader Scott Pelath explains his take on the program:

“‘Freedom to teach’ — those are just words,” Pelath said. “Those are words that were dreamed up in some think tank with pollsters sitting by their sides. That’s not about freedom to teach, it’s about deconstructing and deregulating schools to the point where they don’t matter anymore, and that’s what the goal is.”

And to pursue that goal, reformsters need to break the unions.

Look, I'm not a knee-jerk union booster. On the state and national level, unions are their own second-worst enemies. They supported Common Core when it should have been obvious that it was the tip of a reformy spear aimed straight at teachers' heads. They make terrible deals for "a seat at the table" and try to justify them with, "It could have been worse." They try to oppose testing and stick by CCSS, which is like saying, "Okay, I accept that the earth is part of a solar system revolving around the sun, but I still believe it's a flat disc on a turtle's back." Unions have been failing miserably to draw new, young members, and they are entirely too quick to squelch dissent in the ranks.

But there is no way to stand up and be represented in the room with the people with the power in school districts without some sort of union.

The most effective way for management to get rid of a union has always been clear-- treat your employees well and build trust that you will watch out for their interests as carefully as you watch out for your own. Even if you have a union, the relationship does not have to be adversarial. I've known managers in industry who had excellent relationships with their unions because they were honest, transparent and fair, and in those businesses, the union became an effective way to help run the company better.

But if you have decided, as many reformsters have, that the interests of your employees, your teachers, is in direct opposition to your own interests, if you have decided that every win for them is a loss for you, then you are going to find yourself facing a hostile union or something like it. You have created a rocky path for yourself, and all the astroturf in the world will not smooth it out (not even if you fertilize it with bullshit). You cannot create better schools by crushing the teachers that work in them. It's a cliche, but it's the truth-- our working conditions are student learning conditions.

What Should Arne Do?

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has taken plenty of grief.

He has been criticized by folks on the right who believe he is, at the very least, a hood ornament on the Great Studebaker of Federal Intrusion into education. He has been criticized by folks on the left for being the faceplate on the great machine that is dismantling the US public school system.

Arne is easy to pick apart (I should know-- I've done it here, here, here and here, to give just a few examples), and he invites it with such fumbling footinmouthery like his classic slam on white suburban moms. He buddied up with reformsters like John White and Kevin Huffman, cheered for the winners of the Vergara anti-tenure lawsuit, and called Hurrican Katrina a great step forward for New Orleans.

And so the pile gets bigger and bigger. The NEA called for his resignation. The AFT voted that he be sent to his room to think about what he's done. Conservative CCSS boosters blame his intervention for damaging the Common Core brand. A soon-to-be-published Vanderbilt Law Review article asserts that the signature NCLB waiver program is illegal. NEA president-elect Lily E. Garcia characterized him as well-meaning, sincere, and dead wrong about just about everything. And that's about the nicest thing anyone has had to say about him in a while. 

We've hammered Duncan for what he's gotten wrong. But as teachers, we know that you don't foster improvement by focusing on the negatives. Can we come up with some suggestions for what Duncan should do? Let me give it a shot with the following suggestions.

Meditate in Pursuit of Personal Integration

I'm not kidding. There has to be a serious discontinuity somewhere inside Duncan's head, because one of his defining characteristics as Secretary of Education is that the words that come out of his mouth and the policies that come out of his office don't match.

It has been that way since Day One. Take this quote from his confirmation hearing:

I think the more our schools become community centers, the more they become centers of community and family life, the better our children can do.

There is more in a similar vein. And an admirable vein it is, too, but Duncan's office has been a huge booster of the charter school movement, including the kind of charter-on-steroid action we're seeing places like New Orleans and Newark, the kind of chartery "save kids from their zip code" systems that actively oppose neighborhood and community schools.

Duncan's entire tenure has been more of the same. He uses rhetoric about how teachers deserve more respect and better pay, but he also applauds the death of tenure in California and suggests that educational mediocrity is enabled by the rampant lying of educators. He speaks about the importance of listening to teachers, but he rarely encounters a teacher who hasn't been vetted and screened. Then we have his recent discovery that tests are being over-emphasized in schools across America, a shocking development that he deplores without any recognition that such test reverence is a direct result of his own policies.

When I look at the huge Antarctic-sized gulf between Duncan's words and his actions, I can only conclude one of the following is true

         1) He is dissembling in the political style

         2) He doesn't understand the effects of administration policies

         3) He has in his head a powerful barrier against cognitive dissonance

         4) He is privately wracked with existential angst

         5) He is full of bovine-issued fertilizer

I'll admit that some of these are more likely than others. But whatever the case, Duncan needs to align his words and his policies, because either his policies are a betrayal of his principles, or his words are lies. Either way, he needs to check himself. As a nation, we need to have an honest conversation about the policies the government is actually pursuing, not a pleasing word-massage that has no connection to reality. The honest conversation might not be fun or pleasant, but we still need to have it.

Do the Right Thing

The best positive steps for Duncan to take would be to actually reverse the destructive policies that he has been pursuing. I know high government officials rarely write their own speeches, so let me offer a rough draft that Duncan can feel free to use:

Four years ago, with the best of intentions, we embarked on an attempt to rescue American education from the flawed policies of No Child Left Behind and renew our commitment to our children's education. In pursuing those worthy goals, we made mistakes. I stand before you today to announce that we are prepared to admit those errors and correct our course.

We believed in the promise of charter schools, but we have seen that, unregulated and unmonitored, charters have become a means of bilking taxpayers and destroying communities. We will require all states to return to tight caps on charter creation until we can develop policies that will allow charters to be developed responsibly, and not as get rich quick schemes for educational amateurs.

We believed that the development of national standards would bring consistency to our schools and economies of scale to the educational marketplace, which would in turn make our nation's school system more efficient and economical. We can now see that no such thing occured. One size does not fit all, and the profit motive has no place in the classroom. As of today, we are withdrawing our support for any sort of national standards movement that does not come from the nation's schools themselves.

We believed in the value of testing as a way of measuring educational progress. We have come to understand that tests provide a poor measure of the rich educational experiences we desire for all our children, and that our demand that tests be central to all aspects of education has simply warped and twisted the fabric of American schools. As of today, we will remove all federal standardized testing requirements, and we will ensure that such tests will never be used to evaluate students, teachers or schools ever again.

We recognize at last that the problems of poverty-strained schools cannot be solved by tests, attempts to shuffle teachers around, additional bureaucracy, and an infusion of untrained teacher temps. The solution for these schools is to work for long-term solutions to the problems of poverty, and, in the short term, blunt those effects by making sure that economic and educational resources are directed to those schools that cannot secure such resources on their own.

Finally, we pledge to take a step back and to trust the people of states and local school districts to make wise and well-informed decisions about their own education. We will listen to teachers and local officials.In the coming year, we will not issue a single educational edict from DC except to implement the changes that I have just described. And we will not take a single meeting with corporate executives from any education-based businesses. If they want your business, if they want to exert influence over you, they must come to you-- not to us. We are here to help you. We are going to stop telling you what to do.

See how easy that is? Duncan could be a hero tomorrow. If he needs a quiet place to think it over and get in touch with his better side, I have a spare bedroom and I live right next to a river. He's welcome any time, and I promise not to say a single mean thing to him while he's here.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Lily E. Garcia Will Break My Heart

It is clear that my relationship with the new NEA president will be fraught with ups and downs.

I have expressed my willingness to be courted. And she has definitely had her moments.

Back on August 11, Valerie Strauss unveiled an interview with LEG that had many folks cheering. Plainspoken and direct, LEG, provided a brace of great quotes:

Arne Duncan is a very nice man. I actually believe he is a very honest man. And that cannot excuse the fact that he is wrong wrong wrong on just about every thing that he believes is reform.

And I believe will go down to my last breath telling people that the most corrupting influence in public influence today is a high-stakes consequence for not hitting the cut score on a standardized test.

Stop doing stupid.

Her call for what is somewhere between civil disobedience and passive-aggressive insubordination.
“The revolution I want is ‘proceed until apprehended.’”In other words, ignore directives to engage in educational malpractice, and follow your best professional judgment until someone pins you down and forces you.

That is dead on. Yes, you have to weigh taking a stand against keeping your job in some settings. But there are also teachers out there following bad instructions because they are afraid that an administrator might speak to them sternly or give them a dirty look. It is way past time for teachers to stop being good little soldiers.

So, with the WaPo interview, LEG had me feeling all the feelings. Yes, her love for CCSS remained undimmed, but, you know, no relationship is perfect. And yes, the word on the street is that LEG talks a better game than she delivers, but that still makes her a step up from DVR, who was 0/2 on the talking/delivering business.

And then came this NEA press release in response to the PDK/Gallup poll that further chronicled the not-love directed at the Core.

It’s no surprise that many aren’t behind the Common Core as they are victims of targeted misinformation campaigns. Some on the far right have turned high standards for all students into a political football.

Dammit, Lily. I thought I could believe in you.

It's one thing to take the position that the Core are swell and lovely. You're wrong, but I get it (but you're wrong).

But it's quite another thing to stick with that old baloney about how people who don't love the Core are either 1) tragically misinformed or 2) tin hat Tea Party tools. Mistaking the CCSS for sound educational policy can be chalked up to a very different point of view (although, you are wrong). But mistaking the opposition to CCSS as a combination of ignorance and political wingnuttery is just delusional.

I know that you have to hold the NEA line, and that "proceed until apprehended" can be used in a classroom, but never an NEA boardroom. But even the backers of the CCSS have figured out they can't simply write off opposition as the result of ignorance and political buffonery. I don't think it's too much to expect the leader of my national union to have figured out the same thing.

This is going to be a long, tumultuous courtship as it is. Let's not make things worse by writing off critics from within the union itself. My heart just can't take it.

Picking Your Fights

"It's easy for the AFT to tell teachers not to shop at Staples. It would take guts to tell teachers, 'Don't give the tests!' How can you condemn the tests--and continue giving them? Wasn't 'just following orders' soundly discredited long ago? "
—Susan Ohanian, Hemlock on the Rocks, July 14, 2014

This quote has been bouncing around the eduwebs for almost a week, and it has engendered quite a discussion, and it's a discussion worth having.

Susan Ohanian is someone who deserves to be taken seriously, if for no other reason than she started ringing the alarm bell on the modern era of school reform well before most other people were even paying attention. It has been over a decade since she won the National Council of Teachers of English Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, and she is still crystal clear when she writes. Her site should be on your list.

Simply put, I have huge respect for Ohanian and what she has to say. But this time, I disagree.

I don't disagree with the notion that AFT and NEA have failed to provide strong and courageous leadership in these challenging times. From Van Roekel's 2013 "Well, if you don't like Common Core, what should we do instead" to Weingarten's 2014 "Well, then, just rewrite the Core yourself to show them how the standards should look," the national unions have not been champions of American public school teachers.

But this advice would be irresponsible. Worse, in some places, it would be useless to teachers and helpful to their opponents.

For instance, in Cleveland, where the district is already trying to get rid of teachers to make room for racks of TFA temps, a direct refusal to administer tests would have reformsters cheering. The teachers could all be fired for insubordination, and the replacement process greatly simplified and accelerated. The teachers would lose their jobs, and their replacements would gladly continue with the testing before the seats were cold.

One of the challenges we face  on the national level is that different districts are in different stages and present different climates. What is a bold and important stand in one district is a foolish way to shoot yourself in the foot in another. What might engender public support in one location might draw public scorn in another.

One of the things we're fighting against is One Size Fits All Schooling. Does it not make sense that we will not best oppose it with One Size Fits All protesting?

I am not suggesting that we all sit fat and happy and comfortable. If you aren't doing something at least a little bit uncomfortable in this struggle, you probably aren't helping. If your technique de resistance is to sit at home and wait for the day when the people in power wise up and make everything okay again, you are part of the problem.

But for most of us who are not in the big marquee districts like NYC or LA or Philly, the national unions are not going to be our salvation. Yes, it sure would be nice if they were supportive and helpful, but we're all going to have to develop our own strategy on the local level.

Yes, refusing to give the test is a great, great move-- IF you are in district where you will not immediately be fired for insubordination. You may have an administration that is allied with the foes of public ed, some TFA stooge who wouldn't know pedagogical idea if it bit him on the butt. Or you may have an administration that is just as frustrated and angry with the high-stakes test-driven status quo as you are. Your parents may be clueless and unaware of anything that's going on ("So what's that Common Core thingy?") or they may be fully educated and ready to fight. It makes a difference.

In a way, I can see an up side to the utter uselessness of the national unions at this point. If they were involved and leading, I suspect many locals and teachers would be sitting comfortably, waiting for the national to save the day. But we know that Superman not only isn't coming, but might well not be on our own side if he did show up. So we need to depend on ourselves, and our allies and resources, and we need to fight wisely and pick the battles that would do the most good where we are. And we need to pay particular attention to marshaling, saving and preserving those resources, because this is a marathon, not a sprint, so we need to stay tough for the long haul, and not flame out in the first mile.

AFT Spanks Duncan (Sort Of)

I know this is old news, but I've been out of town. On Sunday, July 13, I was in the air flying toward the very city where the AFT was kind of taking a stand.

The NEA had taken similar steps earlier by calling for the ouster of Arne Duncan, though outbound president Dennis Van Roekel immediately chalked it up to members just being, you know, cranky or in a bad mood, so they just took it out on Arne Duncan. So, to summarize, NEA members called for Duncan's ouster, Duncan indicated that he wasn't going to pay attention, and the president of NEA said that Duncan really didn't need to take it seriously. So, you know, earth-shattering stuff there.

The AFT resolution was marginally more interesting, although, like the NEA resolution, has ceased to matter to anyone at all in less than a week.

Union politics are a fascinating study for anyone who is intrigued by things that call themselves democratic and yet aren't particularly so. All union members are equal, but some are more equal than others, and not much happens at these conventions that isn't carefully stage managed by the most equal union members of all. The AFT is particularly confusing because 1) there are unions within the union and 2) there are loyalty oaths involved that amount to "agree to be assimilated."

I understand the urge to exert these high levels of control over members. I was a union president of a relatively small local, and the Herding Cats aspect can become stressful really quickly. I can easily imagine being a national leader, looking at the giant masses of people coming together from every corner of every point of view and thinking, "Damn, if we don't take some control, this will just be a hellish mess of gooey anarchy" (and, yes, "Hellish Mess of Gooey Anarchy" would be a great band name). I can even understand the feeling of "We are so close to getting Great Things done and we can't let that get derailed" as well as the feeling of "Boy, do I like having power."

But let all those feelings get control of you, and pretty soon you're acting like a representative group that doesn't have much respect for the people it's supposed to be representing. Or you start saying things like "I'll punch you in the face if you try to take away my Common Core,"a statement that really ought to come from someone other than a teacher/union leader.


So AFT's call for President Obama to put Duncan on an improvement plan comes with an interesting backdrop. According to Stephen Sawchuk at EdWeek, some union leaders didn't want to go all in with the NEA's Throw the Bum Out resolution, viewing it as silly and pointless. Michael Mulgrew, who allegedly made to offer to punch people in the face over CCSS, thought that the NEA resolution was beneath him, which raises some questions about how he draws the Beneath Me line.

The AFT resolution has the virtue of setting an example by calling for due process, and I give it points for ignoring the fiction that Obama is somehow disconnected from his own education policies.

On the other hand, it is ineffectual. And AFT president Randi Weingarten echoed Van Roekel in explaining that it basically just meant that teachers are really hurt and pissed off. As Arthur Goldstein tweeted, "I certainly hope they follow this non-demand with a strongly worded letter. That'll show 'em."

And Weingarten went one worse, with a call for teachers to leap on in there and rewrite the Core to show "them" how it should be. This is just an artfully reworded version of Van Roekel's odious comment to the NEA's 2013 convention-- "If you don't like the Common Core, then what do you want to do instead?" I called for Van Roekel's resignation over that one (an act every bit as effective as the NEA and AFT resolutions) because I think it's an indefensible thing to come from a national union leader.

To accept and embrace the Common Core is to accept and embrace the premise of its creation-- that US schools are in trouble because US teachers are lost and ineffectual. If there's anyone who shouldn't be agreeing with that, it's the folks who represent the millions of teachers that the Core is intended to "fix."

Like the NEA, AFT leadership appears to have decided to see if they can't bleed off all that teacher anger about CCSS and the rest of the corporate high-stakes test-driven status quo by focusing it on Arne Duncan (who, after all, won't be damaged by it a bit) so that the precious cargo of Common Core Swellness will remain unthreatened. "Look at that scary thing over there! Go get it! Go stomp on it! No need to look behind this curtain here."

This blog piece is somewhat pointless. Five days later, the AFT resolution is an unimportant gesture of no real importance. What's sad is that leaders had to know that was the case when they let the thing pass in the first place.

Meet the New NEA Presidents

In election results that surprised nobody anywhere, NEA delegates crowned heir apparent Lily Eskelson Garcia the new presidents of NEA.

Liana Heitin reported on the election for EdWeek, and... well... I'm excited? Bemused? Worried about Garcia's susceptibility to cognitive dissonance.

"I believe Secretary Duncan is sincere..."

"And I absolutely believe he is sincerely wrong," she said in a post-election interview. It's a great statement, sweeping and clear. I'll even give her the desire to step away from vituperative personal political attacks. It is not necessary to prove Duncan is a dim-witted mugwump corporate tool ninnymuggins if we just establish that he's wrong.

Getting specific

Garcia showed her ability to get down to specifics by slamming the ever-popular third grade pass-this-reading-test-or-else policy popular in states where education policy is run by people who don't know any eight year olds. She held up Oklahoma as a specific example (though, as Heitin points out, Oklahoma just threw that policy out, but okay-- it's been a busy day).

And Garcia threw out GERM (the global education reform movement) which is one of the few snappy names for the people variously known as deformers, reformsters, and "reformers" (with ironic quotation marks), linking it specifically to Koch Brothers, ALEC, and "prominent industrialists."

This is your first hint that things are not looking up at NEA. Why pick all our examples from the Evil Conservative Republican Menu while ignoring that plenty of nominally Democratic folks like DFER, She Who Will Not Be Named, and, oh, the well-meaning Arne Duncan, are a big fat part of GERM as well?

And then things go deep into the weeds

When asked about the Gates Foundation, whose influence on education policy is a constant source of debate among educators, Garcia said she applauds the work they've done to promote the Common Core State Standards. "I read those standards, and I love them," she said.

Under which rock has Garcia been hiding? I don't have enough space here to cover every single argument and piece of evidence that makes it clear that opposing testing and loving the Common Core requires a tolerance for cognitive dissonance usually not available without powerful drugs. Just a list of all the GERM organizations funded by a combination of swell honorable Gates money and evil GOP money would be enough to sprain the scroll function on a computer.

Being for the Core and against testing is like loving knives and being opposed to cutting. It is like being a fan of genitals but hating sex. It is like loving airplanes and believing they should never leave the ground. It is like wanting to buy a great instrument and declaring that it's best to never play it. It is like bringing a gorilla into your home and imagining that it will never dirty the furniture. It is like setting the timer on a bomb and being shocked that it eventually explodes. It's like thinking your dog is really pretty but being opposed to dog poop.

Oh, President Garcia, we are going to have some chats here, you and you and I.

Half a Great Communicator

On the subject of her leadership style. "People will know where I stand. There will be absolutely no question. I think that will get me in trouble sometimes."

That may be, but if I may. What tends to get NEA leadership is not the part of communicating where they tell everybody else what they think-- it's the part where they listen.

I'll note here that while DVR had a twitter account that he never used, Garcia appears to have no twitter account at all. The NEA has a real problem with , I don't know, the entire 21st century. I once wrote "Today's NEA is not your father's NEA. It's more like your grandfather's NEA." The union's inability to function in any mode other than the pronouncement-by-press-release and occasional NEA-site essay makes a joke out of its other pronouncements.

I welcome, for instance, NEA's stated intention to help teachers get better at doing their job, to help with professional development. But damn-- you guys can't even operate the twitter! I don't know if I trust you to advise me on how to set up an overhead projector. What the heck are you going to tell a twenty-two year old about how to function as a teacher in today's world when NEA leadership still works in slightly-modified pre-WWII techniques?

So here we go  

It's a bold new era in which NEA declares that we must fight the back end of the Reform Horse and kill it dead, but the front end of the Reform Horse is beautiful and noble and to be cherished and loved. It is possible that NEA actually needs two separate presidents at this point-- one for talking out of the left side of her mouth, and one for talking out of the right side. In the meantime, apparently, President Garcia will serve as both.

[Update: Garcia does a keep a blog, which you can find here, including a further explanation of how she keeps CCSS and testing separate inside her head. I've added it to the blogroll over to your right.]

Duncan Slapped by NEA Rank and File

The NEA resolution calling for the departure of Arne Duncan will be picked apart at great length this weekend. I'm pretty sure that Arne is not looking at his paper this morning thinking, "Well, damn. I guess I'd better resign then." Nor do I think his resignation would accomplish much in practical terms. But it sends a message-- several, actually-- and those are interesting on their own.

Leaving Obama Out of It

Interesting that the resolution calls for Duncan to resign rather than the President to fire him. Reminds me of the Declaration of Independence, which conveniently blamed the British government's misbehavior on the King, quite possibly because some folks wanted to leave the door open to deal with the Parliament (aka the people actually creating the offensive policies). It was a nice piece of political angle-playing, but I'm not sure it did much good.

Sending a Message to NEA Leadership

I've been assured by many folks that Dennis Van Roekel is a heck of a guy, and I have no reason to doubt that, but NEA leadership has blown every call every step of the way. In terms of leadership, they've looked a lot like a drum major who turned left when the band marched right, and now they are scrambling to catch up.

If the NEA ever got turned in the right direction, this was how it was going to happen-- a push-back from the states, refusing to behave as they were supposed to.

The Vergara trial and reactions to it have one more importance on top of all the rest-- it's the first time that NEA leadership and Duncan's office have actually disagreed with each other. I am NOT, please note, analogizing the parties involved, but from a tactical standpoint, Vergara may end up being the reformsters' Little Big Horn-- it looks like a decisive victory, but in the long term, it only serves to rile up the opposition.

I really enjoy the mental picture of Duncan on the phone with NEA leadership saying, "Hey, control your damn people," to which NEA leadership responds by shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Sorry, man, but they're pissed and we can't do anything about it."

The Darkly Cynical Read

I like the idea of NEA leadership reacting with a muted "Oh, bloody hell" when the resolution started to look like it had legs. But the cynical read is that this was not a breakdown of NEA's notoriously careful stage managing of its actions. I note this only because the wording of California's resolution dovetails nicely with the new OMGZ!! Bad Tests!! initiative of the NEA. If I wanted to bleed off some of the rank and file reform rage and make sure that it doesn't accidentally hit the Common Core, this is one way I would do it.

On the other hand, the dovetailing may just be a case of California doing a good job of reading the room.

But Let's Be Hopeful

Even if this was stage managed by NEA (and I have no real reason to believe that it is), it still represents a significant shift. NEA has played with similar crankypants motions before and they both died.

It would be nice if this is seem as proof positive to leaders in DC and NEA conference rooms that the union leadership cannot just deliver members in a nice neat package, all lined up behind whatever the bureaucrats and union officers decide in a quiet conference room. It would be nice if this is more proof that bogus polls and facile reassurances will not make the anger over reformy nonsense simply disappear.

So let's hope that this resolution is a message to all sorts of folks, most specifically NEA leaders and a bunch of folks in DC that teachers have had it with this amateur-hour bullshit trash-and-dismantle approach to our profession and the public education that we've devoted our lives to. Let's continue to make it clear to the folks in DC that we have had it with their assault on American public education. Let's continue to make it clear to the Democratic party it's not true that they don't have to stand up for us because we'll vote for them no matter how many times they attack us. And let's continue to make it clear to NEA leadership that we expect them to represent the teachers of America, and not politicians who keep attacking them.

Van Roekel, Fordham and Defending the Brand

What a difference a year can make.

A year ago, Dennis van Roekel's message to NEA members was, "Well, if not Common Core, then what in its place?" This year, his message was, "Common who? Hey, look at this toxic testing badness!"

With all the tight aim of a finely-crafted focus-group-tested PR campaign, DVR used the NEARA convention as a launching pad for a campaign to push back hard against The Big Test while also, as Fred Klonsky put it, building a firewall around Common Core.

DVR's keynote seems (full disclosure-- I wasn't in Denver and I am depending on the reports of those who were) a work of exceptionally fine tuning, the kind of careful tap dance that you can't perform without knowing every inch of the dance floor.

He led off with a history of the last several decades of school reform, name-checking the usual rage-inducing suspects (even in a speech, it seems, She Who Must Not Be Named is red meat click bait) without getting lost in details. But somehow a study of the evolution of various ill-fated, teacher-blaming, education-crushing reforms did NOT bring DVR to Common Core. Rather, the evil bad boy of school reform is high stakes testing, first bullying its way into the spotlight and now ruining the entire show.

Look! Look over there, at that Bad Testing!! No no no-- not over here at the CCSS! It's the tests! That's what done it!

DVR outlines four points for getting the accountability train back on track:
1) expand early childhood education to improve school readiness, 
2) redirect resources away from testing companies and toward  improved conditions of learning and teaching,  
3) create high standards for all learners and 
4) take ownership of and responsibility for a quality teacher workforce.

1 is harmless. 2 is an interesting pipe dream. 4 is perhaps the most interesting, representing an intention of the union to finally get involved in teacher quality. And 3, of course, reaffirms the NEA's devotion to the Common Core. Not that DVR ever mentioned the Core. Focus-testing apparently made it clear that it was not a guaranteed applause line. 

No, the purpose of this initiative is two-fold. Attack the tests. Defend the brand.

It helps that the tests deserve attacking. They're a weak target at this point, and they are the backbone, teeth and testicles of the entire CCSS movement. And they are odious, awful, wretched excuses for anything useful. They are every bit as bad as DVR said they are, and that's part of the campaign's strength-- it's based on truth. It just stops telling the truth once we get to the question of why we have these tests in the first place. Because for some reason, the imperative is to protect the CCSS brand.

Gates proposed moratorium on testing is likely the same thing. At all costs protect the brand.

CCSS is a hot air balloon struggling to avoid crashing back to earth, and testing is the overweight guy who may have been our BFF when we took off, but now we need to get rid of anything that is dragging the CCSS balloon down, so over the side with you, buddy.

Likewise, CCSS foes were chortling yesterday to see Robert Pondisco at the Fordham Institute's blog eviscerating a model teaching example from engageNY's Kate Gerson, who demonstrated an example of why Common Core is often associated with students who would rather have their eyebrows plucked bald one hair at a time. Gerson appears to be channeling the worst teaching techniques of the 1960s, and my heart goes out once again to NY teachers who have to deal with this drivel.

But is Pondisco, shooting holes in the Core? Of course not. The Fordham has been relentless in defending the brand-- from everybody and anybody including She Who Must Not Be Named and Arne Duncan himself. The Fordham applies the same technique over and over again-- they spot something egregious or stupid, and instead of making the amateur hour mistake of trying to protect it because it's Core, they get out their knives, carve it up, and declare, "This is NOT Common Core. This is what you get when some idiot does Common Core wrong." They have mastered a not-easily-mastered skill, because defending yourself from your enemies is easy; defending yourself from your friends is way harder.

Look, I welcome NEA attacking tests. As I've written before, the tests are the very worst, most destructive part of the reformy beast. But if we keep supporting the idea of national standards, we are going to keep getting national standardized tests. Railing against the testing while defending the CCSS is like cutting off dandelions and carefully tending their roots.

This circling of the wagons around the Core is good news for those of us in the resistance. For one thing, Core supporters are way over-estimating how easily CCSS can be cut loose and protected from the effects of things like a testing system that was built right into the Core's dna. For another, the fact that they're willing to try is a measure of how much trouble they're in.

And if, a year after defiantly defending it, DVR is ready to go through his last speech without even mentioning the Common Core, there is hope that my national union might be starting to get the beginning of a clue.

Are Reformsters Under Attack?

I have generally avoided picking on quotes from That Woman that appear in her joint blogventure with Jack Schneider, mostly because I think it's a worthy experiment that deserves some place to breathe. But recently she dropped an extraordinary quote that I can't let pass. It happened in a discussion of unions, specifically discussing the need for bridge-building if any collaboration is going to occur.

You say that would require a cease-fire against the unions; but I'd say that the cease-fire needs to be mutual. Reformers are under attack every day from unions as well.

This is a false equivalency of the rankest kind. Let us look, for instance, at my state of Pennsylvania.

Currently I, as a teacher, am under attack by StudentsFirst. Their national Let's Trash Tenure & FILO tour has been here for a few months, complete with slick advertising, video clips, and well-heeled lobbying.

As a teacher with thirty-some years of experience, I am directly in the cross-hairs of this campaign. StudentsFirst asserts that I need to live with the constant threat of being fired or else I will just default to Lazy Slacker status. They would like career status to be based on PA's version of VAM which includes the results of a bad test and, among other things, points for the number of AP courses my school pays the College Board to teach.

I, on the other hand, have a blog. 

So let's look at the fire that needs to be mutually ceased.

Attacks against me from StudentsFirst:
 
          1) Undermine my professional reputation by suggesting I must be lazy, cause I'm old.
          2) Threaten me with ending my career at will.
          3) Using both 1 and 2 to undermine my co-workers and destabilize my workplace
          4) Thereby threatening the educational well-being of the students that I am pledged to serve

Attacks against StudentFirst (and That Woman) from me:

         1) Sophomoric mockery

Shall we count my union's actions? Let's stick to the state, because to say that the NEA has attacked reformsters is ludicrous; they have been cheerful collaborators. But PSEA? Perhaps a bit more feisty, but have they done anything that would threaten, say, the continued existence of StudentsFirst, or That Woman's ability to make a living in her chosen profession?

There is a name for this technique in contract negotiations-- it's called stripping, and it consists of answering a proposal with a full-out attack (that simply takes things away that were already there), and then pretending that moderating that attack is "meeting you half way."

Union: We'd like to see a $1/hour raise and the addition of some flex time.

Management: We are going to cut off all workers' arms and legs.

Union: What the hell?!

Management: All right. We'll just cut off the legs. Now we've given something; you have to give, too.

The teachers whose careers have been damaged, whose job protections have been stripped, whose employment and wages are being made contingent on damaging junk science, and the manner in which all teachers are working in an environment that is being made increasingly hostile to us-- that's all the work of reformsters and their huge bankrolls and their connections to power.

How have reformsters been hurt? Which thinky tank consultants have had their jobs put in jeopardy? Which astro-turf group operators have had to worry about feeding their children? Which reformers have been forced to listen to teachers telling them how to do their jobs?

Reformsters and teachers are not locked in some struggle between equally powerful opponents who chose to attack each other. This is a battle between rich and powerful people who are being surprised that the less powerful, less rich, less important people they attacked are trying to fight back. No teacher-- certainly no teachers' union-- started any part of this fight, any more than the defense team at the Vergara trial initiated that bogus case.

Yes, reformsters' characters are being impugned. They should stop making it so easy to do that. And they should stop being surprised that when you attack peoples' lives, professions, the very work by which they support and define themselves, those people will not just roll over and play dead. It's flattering that, for just a moment, a reformster would pretend that what we teachers are doing in our own defense is hurting her somehow. But for more than just that moment, I don't believe it. And if I struggle while your foot is on my neck, I'm not sure less struggling from me is the solution to our problem.

Insulating the NEA

How is it that NEA becomes so insulated from its members? After all, we are the union, right?

My first big lesson in representative democracy came courtesy of the United Methodist Church. In the church structure, local churches are grouped into districts, and districts are grouped into larger regions, and on and on to the national level. Theoretically all these levels are responsive to the concerns of local churches, but as it turns out, not so much. The problem, as one wise man once explained to me, is that the district/regional/national body becomes the representatives' local church.

When they start out, reps say "we" when they mean the local they come from. But after a while, "we" means the regional coneference.

The EAs, like many large-scale representational bodies, use this process deliberately. When you go to a regional gathering of local reps and officers, business is always mixed with fun and parties and socializing. The energy is kept high and for newer local reps, it can be like being invited to sit at the lunch table with the very coolest kids.

In this day and age, there's little practical need for most of these gatherings. Information on issues could be sent out over the net, votes could be taken over the net, and at the very least the full-weekend gatherings could be reduced to a Saturday afternoon. Likewise union training sessions that could be a single day are often stretched into at least one overnight so that participants have the opportunity for a big social dinner followed by a dance or social event. And gathering locations are still picked based on what fun things there are to do.

While it's true that none of these training or governance events need to be dry, dull and painful, there's another purpose served by wrapping union gathering in so much socializing-- it bonds the local person to the larger group. I go back to my local school and when a co-worker talks to me about "that dumb-ass decision that those state level jerks made," I'm thinking, "No, that state-level jerk is my good friend Chris who is a great person, so I'm sure that decision is peachy swell."

For teacher-reps who have spent enough time at the state or national level, "we" means "union leadership" and "they" means "those guys who work at local schools."

This is not unique to NEA; most large groups involve switching loyalties from the local to the large group (e.g. too many Congressmen). This bonding in turn facilitates one of the most common, but toxic, principles of all political activity-- the ends justifies the means.

When we arrive at the outcome of this strategy, it will be really good for the members, so it's okay if we manage the rank and file in order to get them to support what we're doing. We'll tell them just what we need them to know. We'll stack the vote. We'll guarantee that we get the outcome we want, even if we have to totally trash any semblance of democratic process to do it, because we are pursuing a Worthwhile End. It's for the members' own good.

Believe me-- I totally get how leadership fosters a...well, crankiness...about members. If you've been a union officer for more than a week, you've heard all the classics: "My principal is yelling at me for leaving an hour early every day. Make him stop." "Why didn't you get us a contract with free ice cream every Tuesday?" "Do you mean to tell me they can discipline me just because I came to school drunk five or twelve times? Protect me!!"

And informing the members? You can try to explain something 147 times to members who blow you off more thoroughly than a sleepy fifth period class of low-function juniors, but a week later some of those same members will be angrily complaining that you made a decision on that same matter without consulting them. People don't want to be involved, but they still want veto power.

So I get it. I get how easily the rank and file can get under leadership's skin. I get that union leaders are like assistant principals-- dealing mostly with the problem children.  But here's the thing-- that's the job. Complaining about how much work your members create is like complaining that the students in your class are all children. That's the job. If you don't like the job, get another job.

And none of this justifies the NEA's insulated insular behavior. None of it justifies the Us vs. Them mentality with the members, nor does it justify "managing" the rank and file because only leadership really knows what's good for them. Shut up and fall in line, because, unity. NEA is so bad at communicating. SOoooooooo bad.It is so corporate and bureaucratic that most days it seems no different than the USDOE. Have DVR and Arne ever been seen together?

Can it be changed? I doubt it.

Even if we could somehow nominate and elect outsiders to represent us, they would face the same problem all outsiders face when entering an insular system-- they wouldn't be able to get anything done, because they would need the cooperation of the Old Guard (and in fact, the Old Guard carefully watches over the path to any offices of significant power-- ain't nobody storming that castle).

But we should still pay attention. We get ballots to vote on state reps and RAs and all manner of associationy stuff and most of us barely pay attention to who is going to what. We should start paying attention. We should start making sure that our representatives are actually representing us, and we should ask about sending them just for the sessions of substance and skipping the social hour. I don't really need to have my dues dollars spent on events designed to show my representatives that hanging out with the union leaders is so much cooler than spending time with the local rank and file. I don't want being a union rep to be a terrible chore, but I also don't want union reps to forget where they came from, and these days I don't think NEA leadership could find its way home with a GPS and a hundred days to make the trip.

Today's NEA = Yesterday's GOP

Today's NEA is not your father's NEA. It's more like your grandfather's NEA.

NEA reminds me of the GOP of the last two Presidential elections -- they've heard of the technology stuff that the Young Folks are using, what with their social medianting and playing with their twitters, but it's probably just some passing fad (like the rap) and, anyway, the people who know how to work with that stuff don't seem quite like Our Kind of People, so we'd rather not have them in the parlor, please and thank you. And that equipment they use-- it would probably smudge our upholstery and ruffle our throw rug, so just ask them to stay out in the front yard and we'll consider their advice, but probably ignore it. And by the way, why don't any of the young folks ever stop by to visit?

Consider twitter. Even Job Bush and the Chamber know enough to try to at least fake a twitter presence. Word on the street is that Arne Duncan's tweets are intern-generated, but at least there is communication going on through an account with his name on it. He even attempts the occasional #AskArne, which is a terrible terrible idea, but which shows at least a rudimentary understanding of how twitter works and what you have to do to use it.

Randi Weingarten may be an active and engaged union leader, or she may be a manipulative woman bent on establishing herself as a national political power. I've heard both theories and everything in between, and personally, I don't know where the truth lies. But you know what I do know-- you can find her on twitter pretty much every day. And you know who she'll talk to? Pretty much anybody, and she'll do it live enough that I have to believe that she just goes ahead and types it herself.

Meanwhile on twitter, you can check out Dennis Van Roekel's account. Well, you can sort of check it out, because it's locked and protected. It says that DVR is following one person and has thirteen tweets. This is better than NEA vice president Lily Eskelsen Garcia, who has apparently never used the account at all. It looks like Secretary-Treasurer Becky Pringle is doing slightly better-- twenty-two tweets, half of which came from the Kansas Legislature-- with photos. The NEA PR team and NEA Today both have very active corporate accounts.

Facebook is even worse. The National Education Association (you won't find them under "NEA") has a page; out of the three-point-something million members, just under 32,000 have liked the page. NEA Today's page has just over 64,000 likes. For comparison, the Bad Ass Teachers group just topped 42,000 members with nothing resembling actual organization. The Network for Public Education, another group that isn't collecting a zillion dollars from millions of members and is barely a year old , is just shy of 10K likes on Facebook.

If I were a young teacher trying to get a handle on the various teacher-related groups out there, and I were trying to do it by looking around the interwebular materials available, I would find precious little to clarify NEA for me (of course, much of the NEA site is closed to non-members). If I scoured social media, I might conclude that NEA is a group that used to exist but has since gone out of business and is now run by bots.

Oh, and let's not forget GPS Network, a discussion board and internet community software package that now functions as one of the biggest ghost communities on the internet. There have been several rotations of "hosts" to perk up the chatty discussions, but check out the forum on Common Core, arguably the hottest hot button in the teaching world, and you'll find nothing but a handful of shills posting perky praises to CCSS at the rate of one or two a month, while the internet equivalent of tumbleweeds fill the gaping empty space in between.

The only way NEA could be on the right track is if their new motto is "Trying To Avoid Putting a Human Face on a Large Corporate Entity." The groups out there in the reformy world that actually ARE big soulless corporate entities are doing a better job of faking humanity than the country's largest collection of living breathing human teachers.

Never mind bad policies, stupid choices, and an all-too-typical rush to jump on the CCSS bandwagon before checking to see if that wagon has wheels-- NEA's presentation of itself and use of twenty-first century tools is enough explanation all by itself for their dwindling grasp of anybody under thirty-five.

Guys, I am fifty-six years old. My computer basis was a course about programming in BASIC on punchcards. I have every excuse in the world to be a cranky old luddite fart who refuses to learn his email password, and yet, I'm up to my elbows in this stuff. Hell, Diane Ravitch is no chicken d'spring, and she has built a huge voice by dogged and smart use of all the 21st century tools. And that means nobody who is not my mother has an excuse for being as stunningly bad at all of this as NEA.

Add to this new media illiteracy to a message astonishingly out-of-touch with many (if not most) of the rank and file, and it's a miracle (or perhaps simply a demonstration of collective inertia) that NEA still manages to limp forward at all. Even if the NEA message were forward-thinking and empowering, who would ever hear it??

But the backwards media is just a symptom. Witness NEA's reporting-- reporting!!-- last week on the growing test revolt. They offer a warmed-over recounting of what's going on and some words of support-- all in reference to one of the biggest movements currently going on in education, and with which the NEA has absolutely nothing to do. The new NEA Today tagline might as well be "Reporting the News That's Important in Education, But To Which NEA Is Irrelevant."

Do I think it can get better? I have my doubts. In an organization this hidebound you don't rise up through the ranks by doing anything that rocks the boat. And it's very hard to turn around an organization that believes its members are to be managed rather than listened to.

But I'd like it to be possible, if for no other reason than it would be nearly impossible in today's climate to create something from scratch like what NEA is supposed to be. I don't think we can make an impression on the national union, but I think we have a better shot in some cases of getting a useful response from the state-level association, and I think the states could get through to the national corporate level. If anybody has the contacts or means of doing that, sooner is probably better than later, because the process will be slow. After all, we might have to wait for the national office to type a response out on their remington and send it by pennyfarthing messenger.