It must have been some time yesterday that you and your colleagues discovered this post, taking you to task for your pro-Common Core post on engageNY. You responded on twitter with a simple "Not okay. And hurtful." A few of your colleagues responded in my comments section. You were all gentler, kinder, and more amenable to reason than I was in the original post.
I understand how you might feel beaten up by the post, and given a do-over, I would have paid more attention to the fact that, as a guest poster on a commercial website, you might not be fully prepared for the kind of punch-in-the-face discourse of the bloggosphere. But I don't want to issue one of those non-apology apologies. Your feelings got hurt, and I'm the one who hurt them, and I am sorry that I did not extend at least a bit more professional consideration for them.
But while I can regret my tone, I do not regret my message. I'm going to explain why.
While reasonable people can have arguments about the content of the Common Core, the foundation of the Core, the whole premise on which they were launched and the states were strong-armed into adopting them, is fairly simple:
American public school teachers are failing. They don't know how to do their jobs. They don't know how to teach. They suck.
It's not just a false narrative, but a profoundly insulting one, both personally and professionally. The Core were not presented as "Our teachers are mostly great, but they need a bit of help" or "We have found the secret to taking our excellent teachers to the next level" but "Our schools are failing because our teachers are failing and our only hope is to tell them how to do their jobs." (At worst., we also get "They just want a paycheck. They are the biggest obstacle to education in this country") It's a gross insult, a slap in the face. And it's just not true.
The "How Common Core Made Me a Great Teacher" essay has become its own genre, with enough similarities between the entries that one wonders whether or not they are prompted by some official saying, "Why don't you write a piece about how the Core helped you, and here's an outline you could follow." Many of the teachers who write these essays seem quite sincere, and most of them appear to be teachers who were doing quite well in the classroom already, which is why the type of essay is so galling.
Because intentionally or not, the subtext is clear: "What you've heard is true. I did not know how to do my job until the Core came along to show me the way. I am here to tell you that the narrative is correct, that my colleagues and I don't know how to do our jobs, and that every good thing I've done in a classroom has only happened because the Core came along to straighten me out."
So while it may have been the furthest intention from your mind, I found your original essay (and the essays like it, of which I read about one a month) both not okay and hurtful.
Now, did I have to be an ass about it? No, probably not. But being an ass on this blog is how I vent the steam that builds up as I watch the profession I love torn down and excellent teachers smacked around until they apologize for existing. (And sometimes I'm just kind of an ass.)
I wish that you had written a piece about your excellent career, about your fine achievements, about all the things you were and are able to accomplish because of your own professional dedication. But of course then engageNY would not have put your essay on the web, because it would not have fit the narrative.
You seem like a nice lady and a good teacher. I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, but I'm also sorry that you wrote that promotional piece for Common Core. I hope that your summer is professionally and personally rewarding.
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Why Your Evaluation Is Dumb
As you contemplate your end of the year evaluation paperwork, you are probably thinking (and not for the first time), "This doesn't make any sense." And you are correct. Current practices in teacher evaluation do not make sense-- if you assume that the purpose of these evals is to actually evaluate teachers accurately and effectively.
A good evaluation system gives the employees clear and useful feedback-- a picture of what they do well, and a plan for what they can improve. A good evaluation system also provides management with a clear picture of their organization's strengths and weaknesses. Current thought in teacher evaluation is not interested in either of these.
Proving What We Already Think We Know
Reformsters are sure that schools are failing, and that they are failing because they are packed floor to ceiling with stinky bad teachers. So evaluations don't need to be created in order to answer the question, "How are we doing?" Reformsters already know how we're doing-- we're failing. What they need is an evaluation system that confirms what we already know.
Hence stack ranking for schools. Stack ranking (ICYMI) is a now-discredited corporate model that involved determining the distribution of rankings before anyone was even evaluated. If there are ten employees in your department, we know before we even start the process that two are excellent, two are poor, and six are fair-to-middlin'.
In teacher eval land, this crops up as statements like "You don't live in excellent/distinguished/super-duper. You just visit." This is not a comment on your actual ability; the system starts with the assumption that there are very few teachers who are really good, and probably only in occasional moments. We are not looking to find excellence, because we already know it is not there.
This is just like deciding, before you even hand out the test, exactly which grades will be given, and the grading the tests by matching each test to one of the pre-determined grades. Whether your students all ace it or all flunk it, the pre-determined grades rule the outcome.
The Illusion of Objectivity
Reformsters think numbers are magical, and that only concrete objects are real (this is one of many reasons that one tends to assume that reformsters have rather sad and shallow inner lives).
If an administrator sees something with his own eyes that he can write down on paper, that must be objective. If an administrator is looking at an artifact that he can touch with his own hands, and he assigns it a number, that must be objective. Because, numbers.
I imagine the people who design these kinds of systems sitting at home evaluating the relationships in their lives. "Well, spousal unit, we performed sexual intercourse a total of two times this month, with an average duration of seventeen minutes. I cross-checked this with the video record of those events and determined that your facial expression shows a 5.7 on the arousal scale, giving us a solid 42 scale intimacy rating for this month. This compares to a 46 rating in April and a 51 in March, by which I must conclude that we are experiencing a significant decrease in marital satisfaction, and -- wait? why are you packing??"
Objectivity in teacher evaluation is an illusion. Because, human beings. If your boss hates you and is out to get you, no system in the world can keep him from finding a way to game your evaluation to hurt you. If she's a decent person who is trying to do the best for her people, no system can keep her from doing so (though we're trying hard to come up with a system that keeps her from succeeding.)
Even if we hand evaluators a specific list of behaviors to check off as signifiers of teacher quality, that list is itself a reflection of the bias of the person who made it, and the observer's own biases will affect what he does or doesn't see. There is no such thing as an objective measure of teacher quality. It does not exist. It has never existed. It will never exist. To present a system and claim that it is objective is in and of itself a demonstration of subjective biases about teaching.
Baloney Out Of Your Control
Depending on your location, you are subject to a bunch of evaluative baloney beyond your control.
This is simply hostage-taking. We want you to take these stupid pointless useless high stakes tests seriously, so we will hold your job rating hostage until you do. We want you to think AP courses are worth spending money on, so we will give you a job rating bump if you give us money.
It's also building in a safety for Reformsters. If we left it up to things that are in your control, it would be harder to get the results that we want. Throwing in some X factors helps guarantee that you won't somehow game the system and keep us from finding the widespread failure that the system exists to "reveal."
Saving for a Rainy Day
In Pennsylvania, we go through a long convoluted process to arrive at a pass-fail grade for teachers. Many other states have also chosen a relatively low-impact approach to evaluating, and so teachers feel relatively unthreatened by the process. Don't be fooled. The data is there, showing a wide range of teacher ability and "proving" that there's a vast pulsating pool of teacherly awfulness. Just because they haven't put the data in your local newspaper yet doesn't mean they won't get around to it.
A good evaluation system gives the employees clear and useful feedback-- a picture of what they do well, and a plan for what they can improve. A good evaluation system also provides management with a clear picture of their organization's strengths and weaknesses. Current thought in teacher evaluation is not interested in either of these.
Proving What We Already Think We Know
Reformsters are sure that schools are failing, and that they are failing because they are packed floor to ceiling with stinky bad teachers. So evaluations don't need to be created in order to answer the question, "How are we doing?" Reformsters already know how we're doing-- we're failing. What they need is an evaluation system that confirms what we already know.
Hence stack ranking for schools. Stack ranking (ICYMI) is a now-discredited corporate model that involved determining the distribution of rankings before anyone was even evaluated. If there are ten employees in your department, we know before we even start the process that two are excellent, two are poor, and six are fair-to-middlin'.
In teacher eval land, this crops up as statements like "You don't live in excellent/distinguished/super-duper. You just visit." This is not a comment on your actual ability; the system starts with the assumption that there are very few teachers who are really good, and probably only in occasional moments. We are not looking to find excellence, because we already know it is not there.
This is just like deciding, before you even hand out the test, exactly which grades will be given, and the grading the tests by matching each test to one of the pre-determined grades. Whether your students all ace it or all flunk it, the pre-determined grades rule the outcome.
The Illusion of Objectivity
Reformsters think numbers are magical, and that only concrete objects are real (this is one of many reasons that one tends to assume that reformsters have rather sad and shallow inner lives).
If an administrator sees something with his own eyes that he can write down on paper, that must be objective. If an administrator is looking at an artifact that he can touch with his own hands, and he assigns it a number, that must be objective. Because, numbers.
I imagine the people who design these kinds of systems sitting at home evaluating the relationships in their lives. "Well, spousal unit, we performed sexual intercourse a total of two times this month, with an average duration of seventeen minutes. I cross-checked this with the video record of those events and determined that your facial expression shows a 5.7 on the arousal scale, giving us a solid 42 scale intimacy rating for this month. This compares to a 46 rating in April and a 51 in March, by which I must conclude that we are experiencing a significant decrease in marital satisfaction, and -- wait? why are you packing??"
Objectivity in teacher evaluation is an illusion. Because, human beings. If your boss hates you and is out to get you, no system in the world can keep him from finding a way to game your evaluation to hurt you. If she's a decent person who is trying to do the best for her people, no system can keep her from doing so (though we're trying hard to come up with a system that keeps her from succeeding.)
Even if we hand evaluators a specific list of behaviors to check off as signifiers of teacher quality, that list is itself a reflection of the bias of the person who made it, and the observer's own biases will affect what he does or doesn't see. There is no such thing as an objective measure of teacher quality. It does not exist. It has never existed. It will never exist. To present a system and claim that it is objective is in and of itself a demonstration of subjective biases about teaching.
Baloney Out Of Your Control
Depending on your location, you are subject to a bunch of evaluative baloney beyond your control.
This is simply hostage-taking. We want you to take these stupid pointless useless high stakes tests seriously, so we will hold your job rating hostage until you do. We want you to think AP courses are worth spending money on, so we will give you a job rating bump if you give us money.
It's also building in a safety for Reformsters. If we left it up to things that are in your control, it would be harder to get the results that we want. Throwing in some X factors helps guarantee that you won't somehow game the system and keep us from finding the widespread failure that the system exists to "reveal."
Saving for a Rainy Day
In Pennsylvania, we go through a long convoluted process to arrive at a pass-fail grade for teachers. Many other states have also chosen a relatively low-impact approach to evaluating, and so teachers feel relatively unthreatened by the process. Don't be fooled. The data is there, showing a wide range of teacher ability and "proving" that there's a vast pulsating pool of teacherly awfulness. Just because they haven't put the data in your local newspaper yet doesn't mean they won't get around to it.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
The Least
I have a friend who posits a simple rule for relationships-- the person who has the least concern has the most power. The person who has less interest has more control.
I'm not sure how useful the rule is for understanding romance, but it certainly does deconstruct plenty of other relationships. If dishes in the sink don't bother me, I can let them sit well past the science experimenty point at which you will snap and do them.
And if I care way more than you do whether teaching is done well or not, you are in the driver's seat. Folks look at actions like the North Carolina legislature's stated intention of rendering teaching non-viable as a career and ask, "Don't they realize this will destroy teaching, that nobody will ever want to teach in this state?!" And the answer is they probably do know-- they just don't care. We are often so caught up in our own values that we assume only people who don't understand the situation could be so uncaring. Teachers repeatedly get caught in versions of the following conversation:
Teacher: So there's the explanation. Do you see now how much damage you'll be doing? Do you see how that will just wreck the system and fly in the face of everything we know about education? Do you see what you're doing?
Reformster: Well, sure I see what I'm doing. What's your point?
Teacher: Fine, then. I'll just quit and you'll have to find some brain-damaged drunken slacker to come in and teach the students in my place, and he won't even try to work as hard at it as I have.
Reformster: Cool! Sounds good!
Reformsters don't care about public education, and certainly not about the teachers who work in it, other than the amount of "care" that is wrapped up in a desire to wipe something out. Supporters of public ed will always find dialogue with reformsters frustrating because the reformsters just don't give a rats tiny little posterior.
When someone cares less about something than you do, you have no leverage. That's why folks often open a negotiation by trying to find some leverage
For instance, it became shockingly clear that students do not feel an inherent need to work try their very best to generate useful data on standardized testing instruments-- almost as if they recognized that these tests are a big fat waste of student time and #2 pencil lead. So to take back control of the situation, reformsters made the tests necessary to get out of high school (or, in the most lunatic situations, to get out of third grade).
To make people care more than you do, take hostages. Take their diplomas hostage, or their careers.
What can advocates for public education do? What hostage can we take? Well, the reformsters are mostly about money and power. These are not easy things to take hostage. But I seriously doubt that anything else will move the needle.
I'm not sure how useful the rule is for understanding romance, but it certainly does deconstruct plenty of other relationships. If dishes in the sink don't bother me, I can let them sit well past the science experimenty point at which you will snap and do them.
And if I care way more than you do whether teaching is done well or not, you are in the driver's seat. Folks look at actions like the North Carolina legislature's stated intention of rendering teaching non-viable as a career and ask, "Don't they realize this will destroy teaching, that nobody will ever want to teach in this state?!" And the answer is they probably do know-- they just don't care. We are often so caught up in our own values that we assume only people who don't understand the situation could be so uncaring. Teachers repeatedly get caught in versions of the following conversation:
Teacher: So there's the explanation. Do you see now how much damage you'll be doing? Do you see how that will just wreck the system and fly in the face of everything we know about education? Do you see what you're doing?
Reformster: Well, sure I see what I'm doing. What's your point?
Teacher: Fine, then. I'll just quit and you'll have to find some brain-damaged drunken slacker to come in and teach the students in my place, and he won't even try to work as hard at it as I have.
Reformster: Cool! Sounds good!
Reformsters don't care about public education, and certainly not about the teachers who work in it, other than the amount of "care" that is wrapped up in a desire to wipe something out. Supporters of public ed will always find dialogue with reformsters frustrating because the reformsters just don't give a rats tiny little posterior.
When someone cares less about something than you do, you have no leverage. That's why folks often open a negotiation by trying to find some leverage
For instance, it became shockingly clear that students do not feel an inherent need to work try their very best to generate useful data on standardized testing instruments-- almost as if they recognized that these tests are a big fat waste of student time and #2 pencil lead. So to take back control of the situation, reformsters made the tests necessary to get out of high school (or, in the most lunatic situations, to get out of third grade).
To make people care more than you do, take hostages. Take their diplomas hostage, or their careers.
What can advocates for public education do? What hostage can we take? Well, the reformsters are mostly about money and power. These are not easy things to take hostage. But I seriously doubt that anything else will move the needle.
Monday, June 2, 2014
When You're in a Hole...
Valerie Strauss covers the news from OK that one more state is Mighty Unhappy with Common Core. Unlike the pretend rejection of the Core happening in other states, the OK legislature has laid out a set of standards for how it shall be determined that the new standards do not resemble the Common Core Standards. They are rejecting both CCSS and the horse they rode in on.
That piece of legislative legerdemain awaits a gubernatorial pen stroke (or lack thereof) to determine its fate. That'll be fun to watch. But in the meantime, I was struck by the appearance in Strauss's article of a hot new talking point that is a serious contender for Dumbest Argument in Favor of Keeping CCSS.
The Oklahoman newspaper quoted Steven Crawford, executive director of the Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration, as predicting that “chaos” would ensue if the Core is rescinded. One middle school math teacher, Heather Sparks, Oklahoma’s 2009 Teacher of the Year, was quoted as saying:
“For next year, we’ve already written our curriculum map and the pacing guides for the Common Core standards. It’s kind of disheartening. If these are repealed, we’ll have to go backward.”
We've seen this on a couple of occasions now, including John White's spirited defense of those poor Louisiana teachers facing the totally confusing and disorienting CCSS defection of Gov. Jindal.
The argument seems to be that, having come this far, we just have too much invested in time and effort and blood and sweat and, well, if not tears, a little bit of mistiness right at the corner of our eyeballs, right there-- anyway, we've put so much into this, we can't just back out now.
So, you know, it's a good idea to throw good money after bad. And we've got yourself dug deep in a hole, you should totally keep digging. If you're stuck waist deep in the Big Muddy, you should totally listen when the big fool says to push on. When the snake oil salesman says you need to buy just a few cases more to get your health back, well, then, buy a hundred cases! When you've already lost your car and home, it's a great idea to keep feeding coins into the one-armed bandit.
It's not that Core opponents aren't sympathetic to this disinclination to change direction. After all, a few of us may have expressed a similar sentiment back when we were being told that we needed to dump out everything we'd done in the past and get with the Common Core program right now, right this moment, build-the-plane-while-we-fly-it immediately.
The difference is that back then, we had no reason at all to believe that jumping on the Common Core school bus would take us anywhere we wanted to go. We know with a high degree of certainty that it is a one-way trip to Education Malpracticeland.
So, pro tip for Heather Sparks and other CCSS boosters-- if the best thing you can say about your product is, "Well, you've already thrown a bunch of money away on it. You shouldn't back out now!" and not something like, say, "Let me tell you how great this is working," you are doing a very poor sales job. It may be that you're a lousy salesperson, or it may be that you've got a product that no salesman could make attractive, but either way, you're in a hole and you should stop digging.
That piece of legislative legerdemain awaits a gubernatorial pen stroke (or lack thereof) to determine its fate. That'll be fun to watch. But in the meantime, I was struck by the appearance in Strauss's article of a hot new talking point that is a serious contender for Dumbest Argument in Favor of Keeping CCSS.
The Oklahoman newspaper quoted Steven Crawford, executive director of the Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration, as predicting that “chaos” would ensue if the Core is rescinded. One middle school math teacher, Heather Sparks, Oklahoma’s 2009 Teacher of the Year, was quoted as saying:
“For next year, we’ve already written our curriculum map and the pacing guides for the Common Core standards. It’s kind of disheartening. If these are repealed, we’ll have to go backward.”
We've seen this on a couple of occasions now, including John White's spirited defense of those poor Louisiana teachers facing the totally confusing and disorienting CCSS defection of Gov. Jindal.
The argument seems to be that, having come this far, we just have too much invested in time and effort and blood and sweat and, well, if not tears, a little bit of mistiness right at the corner of our eyeballs, right there-- anyway, we've put so much into this, we can't just back out now.
So, you know, it's a good idea to throw good money after bad. And we've got yourself dug deep in a hole, you should totally keep digging. If you're stuck waist deep in the Big Muddy, you should totally listen when the big fool says to push on. When the snake oil salesman says you need to buy just a few cases more to get your health back, well, then, buy a hundred cases! When you've already lost your car and home, it's a great idea to keep feeding coins into the one-armed bandit.
It's not that Core opponents aren't sympathetic to this disinclination to change direction. After all, a few of us may have expressed a similar sentiment back when we were being told that we needed to dump out everything we'd done in the past and get with the Common Core program right now, right this moment, build-the-plane-while-we-fly-it immediately.
The difference is that back then, we had no reason at all to believe that jumping on the Common Core school bus would take us anywhere we wanted to go. We know with a high degree of certainty that it is a one-way trip to Education Malpracticeland.
So, pro tip for Heather Sparks and other CCSS boosters-- if the best thing you can say about your product is, "Well, you've already thrown a bunch of money away on it. You shouldn't back out now!" and not something like, say, "Let me tell you how great this is working," you are doing a very poor sales job. It may be that you're a lousy salesperson, or it may be that you've got a product that no salesman could make attractive, but either way, you're in a hole and you should stop digging.
Civic Irresponsibility
For the true opponents of public education, these are heady times, because as the battle for public education heats up, these folks can see nothing but clear sailing. It's not a question of finding a path to victory-- it's just a matter of deciding which path of many they would like to follow and which allies they would like to invite to the after-party.
On the one hand, they could continue to buddy up to the Reformsters. The Reformsters have done them the favor of strapping public education into a straightjacket of reformy nonsense-- a set of lame, amateur standards tied to punitive high stakes tests of no educational value, used to create a punishing system of evaluations. The Reformsters are sure that public schools and public school teachers are failing, and they are going to keep making up data gathering systems based on how well those systems prove that failure exists. Reformsters are determined to drive career teachers away and hamstring the ones who stay. The Reformsters will use Common Core as the backbone of a system designed to reform public education into oblivion.
On the other hand, we have the Tin Hat crowd who oppose CCSS and all that comes with it-- because it all proves that government schools cannot be trusted and have always been waiting to indoctrinate young people into evil ways. They don't see reformy stuff as a perversion of public ed, but as an expression of public education's true nature, and they are arming themselves to fight back against the evil beast.
In other words, if public education is the girl next door, Reformsters are the ones who dress her up like a twenty-dollar hooker to "help fix her up," and the Tin Hat crowd are the ones pointing and hollering, "I told you! I always knew she was a dirty whore!"
Waiting in the wings? The moustache-twirling uncle who has been planning to steal her inheritance.
There's another group, a group for whom the problem of public education is similar to the problem of welfare, health care, and other social programs. The problem is simple. They don't want the government taking their money just to turn around and spend it on the little people, the poor people, Those People, the people whose lowly station in life is just proof that they are inferior and undeserving.
So they work both sides. They're busy whispering in ears one one side ("Hey, maybe you should have her show even more boobage!") and while tickling earlobes on the other ("Oh my God! Do you believe how trampy that trampy tramp is?!")
Watch out!! The feds are destroying local control-- destroy the Department of Education!! Beware! The standards aren't being pushed strongly enough-- make those school districts toe the line!
Then there are occasional moments like this extraordinary tweet from Neal McClusky of the Cato Institute
I'm thinking of the story from Frederick Douglass's autobiography. His owner's wife had taken to teaching the little boy to read; her husband took her aside to instruct her strictly in the proper non-education of slaves. Because throughout history, people who have wanted to maintain control of their lessers have understood that withholding education from the lower classes is an excellent way to keep them in their place.
What's American is to make the tools of socio-economic mobility, starting with education, available to all. It is an ideal that we have had trouble living up to at times for a variety of reasons including gender and racial prejudice.
But these days public ed is in more peril than ever. We have people who want to dismantle it and make money from the parts. We have people who want to tear it all down. And we have people who simply don't want to have to use their good money to educate Those People. Say what you will about Rockefeller and Carnegie-- they had at least a rudimentary sense of civic responsibility. These days we're looking at people who believe that civic responsibility is great as long as they don't have to actually give up money or power to indulge it.
They will call themselves champions of freedom, and they are, sort of. But it's the freedom of poor folks to take on the great grinding engine of life and society with nothing but a pea-shooter loaded with grit. And they are fans of their own freedom-- the freedom to be in complete control of their own lives, free from any need to worry or care about what happens to the lesser beings who are their countrymen in name only.
On the one hand, they could continue to buddy up to the Reformsters. The Reformsters have done them the favor of strapping public education into a straightjacket of reformy nonsense-- a set of lame, amateur standards tied to punitive high stakes tests of no educational value, used to create a punishing system of evaluations. The Reformsters are sure that public schools and public school teachers are failing, and they are going to keep making up data gathering systems based on how well those systems prove that failure exists. Reformsters are determined to drive career teachers away and hamstring the ones who stay. The Reformsters will use Common Core as the backbone of a system designed to reform public education into oblivion.
On the other hand, we have the Tin Hat crowd who oppose CCSS and all that comes with it-- because it all proves that government schools cannot be trusted and have always been waiting to indoctrinate young people into evil ways. They don't see reformy stuff as a perversion of public ed, but as an expression of public education's true nature, and they are arming themselves to fight back against the evil beast.
In other words, if public education is the girl next door, Reformsters are the ones who dress her up like a twenty-dollar hooker to "help fix her up," and the Tin Hat crowd are the ones pointing and hollering, "I told you! I always knew she was a dirty whore!"
Waiting in the wings? The moustache-twirling uncle who has been planning to steal her inheritance.
There's another group, a group for whom the problem of public education is similar to the problem of welfare, health care, and other social programs. The problem is simple. They don't want the government taking their money just to turn around and spend it on the little people, the poor people, Those People, the people whose lowly station in life is just proof that they are inferior and undeserving.
So they work both sides. They're busy whispering in ears one one side ("Hey, maybe you should have her show even more boobage!") and while tickling earlobes on the other ("Oh my God! Do you believe how trampy that trampy tramp is?!")
Watch out!! The feds are destroying local control-- destroy the Department of Education!! Beware! The standards aren't being pushed strongly enough-- make those school districts toe the line!
Then there are occasional moments like this extraordinary tweet from Neal McClusky of the Cato Institute
I have exact opposite view of @palan57: http://t.co/2vONgqLQuU U.S. built on individual liberty - gov schooling fundamentally un-American
— Neal McCluskey (@NealMcCluskey) June 2, 2014
I'm thinking of the story from Frederick Douglass's autobiography. His owner's wife had taken to teaching the little boy to read; her husband took her aside to instruct her strictly in the proper non-education of slaves. Because throughout history, people who have wanted to maintain control of their lessers have understood that withholding education from the lower classes is an excellent way to keep them in their place.
What's American is to make the tools of socio-economic mobility, starting with education, available to all. It is an ideal that we have had trouble living up to at times for a variety of reasons including gender and racial prejudice.
But these days public ed is in more peril than ever. We have people who want to dismantle it and make money from the parts. We have people who want to tear it all down. And we have people who simply don't want to have to use their good money to educate Those People. Say what you will about Rockefeller and Carnegie-- they had at least a rudimentary sense of civic responsibility. These days we're looking at people who believe that civic responsibility is great as long as they don't have to actually give up money or power to indulge it.
They will call themselves champions of freedom, and they are, sort of. But it's the freedom of poor folks to take on the great grinding engine of life and society with nothing but a pea-shooter loaded with grit. And they are fans of their own freedom-- the freedom to be in complete control of their own lives, free from any need to worry or care about what happens to the lesser beings who are their countrymen in name only.
Cato: Why Are Schools Too Expensive?
In 2005, David Salisbury published a paper for the Cato Institute entitled "Saving Money and Improving Education: How School Choice Can Help States Reduce Education Costs." As the title suggests, the paper supports school choice as the solution for a particular problem. I've considered the solution elsewhere, and so today I'm just looking at Cato's conception of the problem. Even though the paper is a decade old, it tells us more than a little bit about right wing thinky tank thinking in this area.
Back in 2005, of course, Cato was still a libertarian think tank and not part of the Koch Brothers PR machine. Salisbury's title was director of the Center for Educational Freedom (because if there's anything that has always characterized American public education, it is bondage and slavery). The problem that he set out to solve in this paper was a simple one-- schools cost too damn much tax money.
Salisbury proposes three reasons that schools are increasingly costly.
Increasing Number of Employees
Between 1988 and 1998, public education employment grew faster than student enrollment, faster than the private sector. The student-teacher ration has been dropping steadily, and government figures indicate that the trend has continued since 2005. Salisbury offers charts and graphs to make this point for visual learners, but I never really doubted him for a second on this one.
In the more recent past, school-age population has dipped in many areas, but school districts have been reluctant to cut staff, so the ratio goes up. Additionally, the trend over the past thirty years has been a parade of regulations and court cases that result in mandates for more of certain staff. Aides, para-teachers, teachers all have to be added to meet the legal requirements for serving certain populations.
Additionally, growth in nominally public charter schools creates more teacher job openings. Twenty five students previously put in one classroom might now be spread out over three different classrooms (one more way in which choice systems do not save money).
Beyond teachers, we see growth in administrations to cope with additional regulation. Most school districts in the last forty years have added at least one Official In Charge of Nothing But Filling Out Government Paperwork and Accounting.
Artificially High Labor Costs
Those are Salisbury's words, and don't they just say volumes. Salisbury compares public school teachers to private school teachers, and since private school teachers are paid less, we must conclude that public school teachers are paid too much. There is also a comparison to other professions based on hourly rates which strike me as wonky, but I don't have access to the data necessary to see what exactly is going on there. So why are public school teachers paid these unnatural wages? Salisbury cites the influence of the union, and names three techniques as "likely" culprits.
1) Negotiations. Because, I guess, there should be no negotiations for wages. Teachers should just take what's offered and be done with it.
2) Political pressure. It's not immediately clear to me where the political pressure appears in teacher wages, other than unions occasionally use political clout to help elect politicians who don't totally want to screw teachers over. This really hasn't been working all that well lately.
3) Threat of strikes. Again, I'm not sure how much impact this has these days. It certainly isn't a factor in states where the possibility of a strike has been more-than-sufficiently counterbalanced by the possibility that any teacher can be fired at any time for any reason.
But these are the three problems that need to be solved in order to solve the problem of too-high wages for teachers. It's funny, because when a CEO negotiates a new salary with the corporate board that has been packed with his powerful friends and threatens to walk away if he doesn't get what he wants, I don't hear a lot of right-wing squawking about how unnatural the CEO wages are.
When the banksters in the wake of the Wall Street-induced financial meltdown negotiated heavily by twisting every political arm they could touch with money, saying that their positions and insitutions had to be preserved or else-- that wasn't considered unnatural, either.
No, in the corporate world, the rule is that you use whatever tools you have, and however much money you wring out of the process is, by definition, what you're entitled to. I have to conclude is that what's unnatural here is the working classes daring to use similar tools.
Patterns of Teacher Retention
In the last decade, lots of reformsters have implied it, but here Salisbury comes right out and says it-- the fact that teachers stay in the profession for a lifetime is a problem. The fact that longevity leads to better pay is a problem. To control costs, we need to either churn teaching staff regularly or not pay them more for staying.
You can see pretty plainly in this paper a layout of the problems to be attacked, and in the last decade reformsters have certainly attacked these issues with everything they've got. They have worked out a variety of attacks on the "bloated labor costs" and the unions that create them, giving us everything from TFA temps to full frontal assaults of tenure destruction and no-raise teaching. In North Carolina, legislators propose to end teaching as a profession-- there's some real cost control for you.
Because public schools are just too damn expensive.
Back in 2005, of course, Cato was still a libertarian think tank and not part of the Koch Brothers PR machine. Salisbury's title was director of the Center for Educational Freedom (because if there's anything that has always characterized American public education, it is bondage and slavery). The problem that he set out to solve in this paper was a simple one-- schools cost too damn much tax money.
Salisbury proposes three reasons that schools are increasingly costly.
Increasing Number of Employees
Between 1988 and 1998, public education employment grew faster than student enrollment, faster than the private sector. The student-teacher ration has been dropping steadily, and government figures indicate that the trend has continued since 2005. Salisbury offers charts and graphs to make this point for visual learners, but I never really doubted him for a second on this one.
In the more recent past, school-age population has dipped in many areas, but school districts have been reluctant to cut staff, so the ratio goes up. Additionally, the trend over the past thirty years has been a parade of regulations and court cases that result in mandates for more of certain staff. Aides, para-teachers, teachers all have to be added to meet the legal requirements for serving certain populations.
Additionally, growth in nominally public charter schools creates more teacher job openings. Twenty five students previously put in one classroom might now be spread out over three different classrooms (one more way in which choice systems do not save money).
Beyond teachers, we see growth in administrations to cope with additional regulation. Most school districts in the last forty years have added at least one Official In Charge of Nothing But Filling Out Government Paperwork and Accounting.
Artificially High Labor Costs
Those are Salisbury's words, and don't they just say volumes. Salisbury compares public school teachers to private school teachers, and since private school teachers are paid less, we must conclude that public school teachers are paid too much. There is also a comparison to other professions based on hourly rates which strike me as wonky, but I don't have access to the data necessary to see what exactly is going on there. So why are public school teachers paid these unnatural wages? Salisbury cites the influence of the union, and names three techniques as "likely" culprits.
1) Negotiations. Because, I guess, there should be no negotiations for wages. Teachers should just take what's offered and be done with it.
2) Political pressure. It's not immediately clear to me where the political pressure appears in teacher wages, other than unions occasionally use political clout to help elect politicians who don't totally want to screw teachers over. This really hasn't been working all that well lately.
3) Threat of strikes. Again, I'm not sure how much impact this has these days. It certainly isn't a factor in states where the possibility of a strike has been more-than-sufficiently counterbalanced by the possibility that any teacher can be fired at any time for any reason.
But these are the three problems that need to be solved in order to solve the problem of too-high wages for teachers. It's funny, because when a CEO negotiates a new salary with the corporate board that has been packed with his powerful friends and threatens to walk away if he doesn't get what he wants, I don't hear a lot of right-wing squawking about how unnatural the CEO wages are.
When the banksters in the wake of the Wall Street-induced financial meltdown negotiated heavily by twisting every political arm they could touch with money, saying that their positions and insitutions had to be preserved or else-- that wasn't considered unnatural, either.
No, in the corporate world, the rule is that you use whatever tools you have, and however much money you wring out of the process is, by definition, what you're entitled to. I have to conclude is that what's unnatural here is the working classes daring to use similar tools.
Patterns of Teacher Retention
In the last decade, lots of reformsters have implied it, but here Salisbury comes right out and says it-- the fact that teachers stay in the profession for a lifetime is a problem. The fact that longevity leads to better pay is a problem. To control costs, we need to either churn teaching staff regularly or not pay them more for staying.
You can see pretty plainly in this paper a layout of the problems to be attacked, and in the last decade reformsters have certainly attacked these issues with everything they've got. They have worked out a variety of attacks on the "bloated labor costs" and the unions that create them, giving us everything from TFA temps to full frontal assaults of tenure destruction and no-raise teaching. In North Carolina, legislators propose to end teaching as a profession-- there's some real cost control for you.
Because public schools are just too damn expensive.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
School Choice Is UnAmerican
When I was busy listing reasons that conservatives should be opposed to school choice, I missed a biggy.
School choice is taxation without representation.
When some cranky old fart (crankier and older than I am, anyway) wants to complain about having to pay taxes for schools when his kids aren't even IN school any more, I have a standard answer. Schools are not a service for parents. The people who produced the student are not the only "customers" for the school.
The educated human who emerges from school will become a neighbor, an employee, a parent, a spouse, a voter, a (one hopes) involved citizen, a person whose job will contribute in some way to the life of the community. Everybody who will ever deal with her in any of those capacities shares the benefits of that education. They are all "customers" of public education. Whether they are relatives of the educatee or not is hardly the point.
We all have a stake in public education. We all pay taxes to support public education. And we all get to vote on who will manage the operation of our schools (well, unless we are in occupied territories like Philadelphia or Newark).
School choice throws all of that out the window. Do you think it's a bad idea for a student to attend Flat Earth High School or Racial Purity Elementary School or God Is Dead Day School? Well, under school choice, if you don't have a kid, you don't have a voice. Too bad for you.
Oh, your tax dollars will still go to that cute school where the mascot is Jesus riding a dinosaur-- but whether you're upset because that mascot is ironic or because it isn't, you don't get to complain.
And that's not the worst of it. In PA, we've already seen how this works with cyber-charters-- just thirty or forty families can decide that an entire school district will have to make massive cuts. When they jump ship, they don't just take their own tax dollars with them-- they take the tax dollars of all their neighbors as well, and those neighbors get no say in the matter at all. Even electing new school board members won't make a difference.
Local control of schools used to be one of the last remaining arenas in which regular folks, regular taxpayers still had a say (yes, I know, large city school politics are a messy cesspool of, well, politics-- but that's not where we all live). School choice undercuts that power, sometimes removing it completely. I don't see how any part of the political spectrum can think that's a great idea.
School choice is taxation without representation.
When some cranky old fart (crankier and older than I am, anyway) wants to complain about having to pay taxes for schools when his kids aren't even IN school any more, I have a standard answer. Schools are not a service for parents. The people who produced the student are not the only "customers" for the school.
The educated human who emerges from school will become a neighbor, an employee, a parent, a spouse, a voter, a (one hopes) involved citizen, a person whose job will contribute in some way to the life of the community. Everybody who will ever deal with her in any of those capacities shares the benefits of that education. They are all "customers" of public education. Whether they are relatives of the educatee or not is hardly the point.
We all have a stake in public education. We all pay taxes to support public education. And we all get to vote on who will manage the operation of our schools (well, unless we are in occupied territories like Philadelphia or Newark).
School choice throws all of that out the window. Do you think it's a bad idea for a student to attend Flat Earth High School or Racial Purity Elementary School or God Is Dead Day School? Well, under school choice, if you don't have a kid, you don't have a voice. Too bad for you.
Oh, your tax dollars will still go to that cute school where the mascot is Jesus riding a dinosaur-- but whether you're upset because that mascot is ironic or because it isn't, you don't get to complain.
And that's not the worst of it. In PA, we've already seen how this works with cyber-charters-- just thirty or forty families can decide that an entire school district will have to make massive cuts. When they jump ship, they don't just take their own tax dollars with them-- they take the tax dollars of all their neighbors as well, and those neighbors get no say in the matter at all. Even electing new school board members won't make a difference.
Local control of schools used to be one of the last remaining arenas in which regular folks, regular taxpayers still had a say (yes, I know, large city school politics are a messy cesspool of, well, politics-- but that's not where we all live). School choice undercuts that power, sometimes removing it completely. I don't see how any part of the political spectrum can think that's a great idea.
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