REFORM REVISITED-DECEMBER 2009

 

Ramon Cortines the current Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified school district is now demanding a 2% pay cut this year and a 10% cut next year. Most of the cuts will come from the classroom and the teacher side of the budget. It is easier to replace a teacher position that has been cut than to put back administrative positions that have been eliminated.

The following is an article that Harriet Perl and I wrote in March of 1990. Unbelievably the situation in the Los Angeles Unified School District is worse today than it was then! Class size has been increased and there are more administrators, many more administrators!

LET’S HAVE REAL REFORM—MARCH 1990

Despite a great deal of talk about reform, education remains a bulwark of autocratic stagnation, with kids and teachers still last in line for the money, still getting what is left over after the bureaucracy takes the lions share of the budget. A few weeks ago I received a copy of the “88-89” LAUSD budget audit. As I read the document, I began to realize the upside down budget priority system of the LAUSD. It is a priority system that feeds the bureaucrats and the bureaucracy and starves the educational needs of school children. What is happening in Los Angeles with our school districts budget is happening in many other districts in this state. In fact some smaller districts have even more waste than L.A., Pomona, Long Beach, Azusa, and Beverly Hills just to name a few. These districts have a higher administrator-teacher ratio than the 1 to 11.6 in Los Angeles. The incredibly small percentage of the budget that is actually spent on the students’ education is the truly appalling aspect of the L.A. District’s budget. There is no question that the main function of a school is to educate kids. So, if the 60% of the kids that stay in school and graduate can’t read and write beyond the eighth grade level and can’t compute a two-step math problem, then all the money that taxpayers spend on the schools is wasted. The schools are unquestionably not fulfilling their function. Why?  

For years now as test scores dropped, it was we teachers that were blamed. We were the obvious ‘fall guy” for the failure of public education. No one pushed that idea more than administrators. If the heat was on us, then it wouldn’t be where it should be, on them. Administrators had a double problem: make the educational system look better to the taxpayers and maintain their own cushy positions. Telling the public that teachers were at fault solved their problems perfectly. In the 70’s and 80’s the legislature decided to pass “reform” legislation to evaluate teachers every other year, the Stull Bill. The legislature also passed the CBEST, a test all prospective teachers had to pass. The result of these “get the teacher” reforms was that nothing changed. Test scores continued to go down, obviously proving that teachers are not the problem. In fact, teachers are the strength of the system. Teachers hold the systems together and make them work as well as they do. A study of the districts budgets in the 1980’s tells a terrible story of mismanagement and waste. (The last nineteen years have seen no change). Any business will tell you that management should never receive more than 15% of the budget. LAUSD Administrators annually consume more than 30% of the budget. In 1988-89 the LAUSD budget was $3.5 billion. Last year (1988-89) the 33,000 teachers earned an average salary of $35,000 (including benefits), that comes to$1,245,000,000. Add the $83,766,000 spent on text books and supplies for students. You then realize that only 35% of the budget is spent directly on the classroom. The district’s administrators received 25% of the entire $3.5 billion budget, $976,700,000. That figure does not include the cost of school site administrators. Any business that only spends 35% of its budget on the product (in our case, students’ education) would be out of business or creating a lousy product. It is almost impossible for a bureaucracy to reform themselves. It will take legislation to do the job. One absurd California law that must be changed is the one that allows districts to have one administrator for every 12 teachers. There should be a law that requires districts to budget 75% for supplies and personnel that work directly with children. Teachers are the real educational experts, not administrative bureaucrats that “escaped” the classroom as fast as they could for higher pay and less work. You want real reform, ask an experienced teacher. They will tell you what to do and how to do it. The problem is nobody ever asks!

Fire the Doctors?

On November 26, 2009, the Lung Cancer Alliance - California released the report “State Makes Little Progress on Improving Lung Cancer Outcomes“.

Bad news. How should we respond? How about the following:

All these bad doctors should be stripped of their licenses to practice medicine. They obviously have failed to reduce the lung cancer rates; consequently since they are not doing their jobs they should not be in practice. Such incompetents should be removed from the medical profession.

Ridiculous. Not a solution to the problem, and an insult to an entire group of highly qualified professionals. We would not offer such a “solution” to a problem and certainly would not assume that any physician should be judged by such a statistic. We know, for example, that in spite of all the evidence that smoking can cause cancer, millions of people continue to smoke. Their doctors have told them to quite smoking and offered help in doing so, without success. Penalizing the doctor will not solve the problem.

Equally ridiculous, though not as immediately obvious, is the common cry that teachers are responsible for the stubbornly low scores made by California school kids on their standardized tests. And since it is the teachers’ fault that the kids are not making good scores, fire the teachers! Get rid of the incompetents!

President Obama and his Secretary of Education Duncan are not proposing the firing of teachers, but they are planning, among other criteria, to rate, to judge (and that means to pay) teachers on the basis of how their students score on standardized tests. The implication is incompetence, and the insult to the profession is clear.

What about those scores? Do they indicate something important about the quality of teaching? In fact, there is considerable doubt among testing experts as to the validity of the standardized tests being used. Scoring involves a median point, so that every score is either above or below; thus 50% of the scores are going to be “below”, no matter what. Even if the scoring were done differently, the individual child is not being judged as an individual; the whole point of a standardized test is that everyone is tested the same way, regardless of individual needs, skills, or situations.

Take a look at the kids being tested in the populous inner cities - a euphemism for areas of poverty. Poverty for children means having inadequate access to healthcare; it means living in crowed conditions with insufficient parental attention and guidance (especially where both parents work or a single parent is trying to support a family, which is all too often the case), plus fear and anxiety because of gangs. In addition factor in English language learners and children with learning disabilities. Throw all of these into a classroom, give them all the same test, and then judge them by a score.

Take a look at the teaching conditions in these classes. Irregular attendance and poor health alone will guarantee that many of the kids aren’t present enough to learn the lessons they will be tested on. Where motivation is hampered by emotional issues, where the youngsters are feeling their way into new territory with customs and ideals different from those they learned in their homes, how well are their scores going to compare on a test that in effect competes them against luckier children from affluent communities?

Moreover, poor urban children move often - it is not uncommon for inner city children to move two or three times a year; each move calls for more adjustment and provides more difficulties for a child to overcome. Studies show that every time a child changes schools the probability of graduation drops 2% to 3%. With millions of kids changing schools several times a year, we can begin to see just one of the many reasons why those test scores and the graduation rates are too low. (Johnson, in his capacity as UTLA president, learned that it is not rare for a teacher to have a class that does not have one student in class at the end of the semester who was enrolled at the beginning.)

Rating teachers on the test performances of kids who live in all the conditions listed - and more - makes as much sense as rating cancer doctors on the recovery rates of their patients.

Unfortunately, the President and the Secretary of Education are showing a very limited understanding of education today and the role of the teacher. Every teacher knows that many social and economic factors have dramatic impact on a child’s classroom performance. When these factors are negative, they reduce the child’s ability to do well academically, and increase the difficulty of classroom teaching.

Instead of threatening teachers and humiliating their low-scoring students, let’s give proper support to all of them: enough time, enough materials, for teachers to work with students as individuals, and enough good sense on the part of the rest of us to refrain from judging them on the basis of questionable standardized test results.

Where Have All The Union Leaders Gone?

When teacher union leaders lose their will to fight the bloated bureaucracy of the school district, they have to give the membership some hope of improvement. Many of these leaders then substitute fighting for real union issues by becoming advocates of reform.
Unions and management are natural adversaries. Teachers don’t always understand this but the administrators do and are trained how to win disputes with union members. School administrators are not good at not having their way. Their attitude is usually, my way or the highway. Teacher unions are the only powerful interest that will fight to save public schools. Politicians only support schools as long as the union contributions roll in, even then that support is usually lukewarm at best. Most parents don’t support public schools, they would prefer private schools for their children. Unions work to improve public schools while being attacked as corrupt and protectors of “bad teachers”. In this atmosphere, union leaders have to be strong. This is not a world for the timid and faint hearted. The English Historian John Keegan wrote in his recent History of the American Civil War that General George McClellan
“ was psychologically deterred from pushing action to the point of result; he did not try to win.” He wrote “General U.S. Grant, turned out to be both an absolutely clear sighted strategist and ruthless battle winner”. Union leaders have to be latter day Clarence Darrows in the defense of their profession and the institution they serve. As President of the United Teachers Los Angeles from 1984 to 1990 (self analysis, always dangerous), I tried to strongly advocate for what was fair and fight that which was not fair or equitable. I seldom missed a chance to go on the offensive, always looking at the end game. The objective was to win the war. This scared a lot of teachers and engendered the hatred of a lot of civic leaders and district officials. Improving the lives of our 32,000 members was all that mattered. As Harry Truman said, “If you want to be loved, get a dog.” What UTLA accomplished between 1984-1990 had not occurred before or since. During those years we increased salaries 54%, ended all elementary teacher yard duty, negotiated lifetime medical benefits for retired teachers and created a good school based management program. Future union leadership killed SBM by creating a phony program under the direction of corporate Los Angeles called LEARN. It was never intended to work and no longer exists.
UTLA won one of the largest teacher strikes in U.S. history. In May of 1989 twenty five thousand teachers went on strike and the school district collapsed in nine days. A great example of what teachers can do when they get organized and fight. Current teacher leaders have to stop being George McClellan and turn themselves into U.S. Grant. Fight everyday for your kids and your teachers. Be the best Clarence Darrow you can by defending the interest of your kids, teachers, and the institution that has made America great.
Free public education in the United States depends on these leaders
and their members.








S

Reality Lesson

Reality Lesson


There ought to be a law. A law that says no one can propose a way to reform schools and/or raise student test scores unless the author of the law has spent at least four semesters teaching in an inner city school - teaching anonymously (not known as a possible lawmaker), teaching a full program and receiving no more help or attention than any other faculty member.
We guarantee that s/he will not propose the kind of “Race to the Top” that President Obama is pushing with his carrot of $5 billion to schools that tie student test scores and teacher adequacy into a single rating. Judging how well a student is being educated by how well the student scores on the current test is just plain wrong. Apparently the President is unwilling to accept the judgment of the only true authorities on classroom education, the teachers; instead, he is pursuing his goals despite warnings from teachers that he is on the wrong path.
To understand why test scores are not the measure of education, why a teacher is not to be judged by his/her students’ scores, it is apparently going to be necessary to forget PC, forget the usual careful language of education gurus, and tell a few truths about classrooms today. Here goes:
Kids don’t show up. Check the absence rates of schools with low scores. Kids living in poverty and/or broken homes are absent because they are sick, but as often they just didn’t make it to school for many other reasons. What kind of test scores will kids have if attendance is irregular, if they simply aren’t there to learn the lessons they will be tested on?
Kids are not well enough to learn their lessons. Coming to school half sick, lacking energy, malnourished, without adequate clothing or sufficient sleep, kids aren’t going to absorb the day’s lessons. Many - far more than we want to know about - are neglected and abused.
The kids are culturally indifferent or hostile to the whole concept of school. In some communities - and yes, ethnicity does matter - parents don’t believe in education enough to encourage their kids; many parents simply don’t pay attention to whether their children are attending regularly, let alone learning. The kids are not convinced that sitting in a classroom for hours every day is a good idea.
The kids are distracted and led by alternatives to classroom learning. They change channels when they are bored. They have cell phones, they can text, they can listen to music, they can have fun at will. And having fun is what the world around them, especially today’s media, tells them life is all about.
The kids are scared. Gangs infest their neighborhoods, demanding loyalties, inflicting damage of all kinds, including the commonplace of gunfights and murder. They come to school worried, watching carefully for indications of how they must behave in order to escape or to join the social levels at their school and in their community. Aggression and violence are the norm in the world they know.
The kids are hostile to authority in school, rude and disobedient to their teachers, disruptive to good order in the classroom. There is little school authorities can do to ensure reasonable discipline or to remove bad actors.
Not all of the above applies to all of the kids, certainly. But enough of it does apply to make any classroom in a poverty/ethnic community a fragile learning environment, enough to try the patience of a saint and to test the skill of a teaching genius. The kids’ test scores are not descriptive of their abilities, only indicators of which of their problems were active on the day of the test. To judge the kids and their teachers by those scores is simply insane.
Obama ought to know all of this. He was a community organizer and he must have met these conditions over and over again. But he has forgotten or he is willing to forget.
It is not pleasant to look clearly at what is happening in what we call our inner cities; we don’t, any of us, want to know that so many of our children are doomed by their living conditions. Above all, we don’t want to do whatever is necessary - ask the teachers, ask the social workers - to help these kids get decent lives and the chance to grow into responsible, reasonably contented adults.
So instead we blame their teachers. Raise those test scores! If you don’t, we will mess with your salaries, with judgments of your professional skills and integrity. If we drive you out of teaching, fine; there will always be a new crop of young idealists to come in at minimum salaries to take your places. The facts show that they will last, most of them, less than five years, but that’s all right; keep on blaming them, keep the turnover going, and while you’re at it, cut the education budgets and for good measure, throw in inept, untrained people to supervise the whole thing.

Sorry if the truth hurts.

Public? charter? Private?

Public? Charter? Private?

Abe Lincoln spoke of this country’s government of the people, by the people, and for the people as a precious heritage, but there is a trend right now toward viewing government as being so evil that one would have to assume Lincoln was just plain wrong. Columnists and TV and radio commentators on the right scarcely bother with specifics; they simply condemn government activity as wrong and urge privatization as the truly American and safe way to take care of whatever functions have been traditionally managed by government.

The first example that comes to mind is Iraq war contractors; they have taken on an enormous part of what used to be military operations. If current indications are accurate, the reliance on contactors has resulted in all kinds of troubles, including murder and huge overpayments by taxpayers for services given. Contractors have made billions; it is questionable whether they have done the job better than the military has traditionally done it.

The next thought on privatization is, of course, about charter schools. The charter school movement is nationwide and the specifics of how these schools function are as varied as the places where they operate. It is hard for the public to evaluate how charters work because some charter companies are nonprofit and some are for-profit; some must follow local protocols and some are freed from almost every such obligation. To compare charter schools - as a generic term - to public ones is to fall into the old cliché of comparing apples and oranges.

Nevertheless, the comparisons are being made. Mostly, they are being used to bulk up the current urban myth that public schools are a failure and to promote the general cause of privatization. Although the comparisons are bound to be open to challenge, they show a mixed result. A Stanford University study of about half the charter schools in the country found that 46% were no better than neighboring public schools, 37% were significantly worse, and only 17% were definitely better. In Philadelphia, the Rand Corporation compared public to charter and privately managed schools and found the charter students did no better than their public school peers. A Philadelphia School District study compared achievement data from the two groups and found that six privately managed schools were better but ten were worse. New York state recently reported that of the ten worst schools in the entire state, five were privately managed schools in New York City.

Moreover, charter and privately managed schools, free of the usual oversight from a public school district, are ripe for exploitation by entrepreneurs more interested in money than student achievement. Diane Ravitch, historian of education at New York University, reported, “A small charter school network in New York City with about 1,000 students paid its leader $370,000 in 2007.” She went on to report “the organizer of charter schools in a Pennsylvania suburb is also the primary vendor of goods and services to his schools and earns more than $1,000,000 annually.”

We know that charter schools are free to cherry pick their students, unlike public schools which must enroll all comers. Teachers may have less difficult conditions in the charter schools, but they also have fewer professional protections.

Charter schools are part of a general move to privatization, and are promoted with zeal by the political far right as part of its anti-government campaign. Schools, the foundation of our democracy and the path of hope for every child, ought not to be the subject of a political movement.

Target: Public Schools

It’s back to school time. Stores have sales on school supplies, comic strips show kids in backpacks groaning their way to class, and politicians slam the schools as failures. Welcome to open season on public education.
Despite whatever flaws the likes of Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton can point out, the fact is that public school failure is an urban myth. Statistics show that in 2008 84.2% of African-Americans age 25 and older had high school diplomas; 9l.8% of whites had them, as did 85.7% of Asians and 63.7% of Hispanics. No other country can match these figures, the result of free, public - that means government-run - schools.
Okay, fine, but look at the discrepancies between the ethic groups’ graduation rates. How does that happen, since we know from plentiful research that there are no inherent differences in ability among such groups. The reason is not one we like to face. It is poverty, whether in the black or brown inner-cities or the rural poor of the picking fields of California or the hollows of Appalachia.
Millions of children, mostly minorities, live in families surviving, just barely, below the poverty line. (Poverty is defined by the federal government as a family of four living on $18,000 a year or less.) Poverty means living in the violence of drug - and gang-infested neighborhoods. It means having no health insurance and no medical facilities nearby and no money to buy medicine. It means broken homes and poor school attendance. Above all, it means kids coming to school half sick, hungry, sleepy, scared, and without encouragement to learn from parents who themselves lack education and have passed on to their children a lack of commitment to learning.
Child poverty is a reality that politicians do not want to recognize or work to eradicate. Instead, they blame the only institution that really tries consistently to cope with and help these children the rest of us would rather forget about. No political leader is willing to launch another war on poverty as Lyndon Johnson did in the l960’s. It is easier to target public schools, where the problems are most visible. Teachers and teacher unions become the villains - pretty much like blaming doctors and hospitals for the poor health of poor America.
For solutions, politicians, turning to the moneyed groups that offer themselves as the solution, push for various kinds of private or charter education. They want us to believe that inserting the profit motive into education will produce better results and bring up the statistics about minority kids. Some of the right wing extremists are willing to ignore the facts about poverty and dismantle the best public school system is the world. But their for-profit schools cannot match the public schools for educating all the children - the mentally challenged, the physically challenged, the newly arrived immigrant with no English skills, the emotionally disturbed, everyone. It’s a snap to educate just the brightest, to pick and choose which kids to enroll. That’s not what public education does: our schools work to educate all comers, no matter what.
And that is what makes public schools the cornerstone of American democracy; that is what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he planted the idea of a school in every township in America in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. That’s the basic concept of American democracy, and it must not be sacrificed.

To Test or Not to Test

To Test or Not to Test

For a moment, just suppose:
You are a high school English teacher, and your class has just read a short story in the assigned textbook. The story is about a teenager who has a run-in with a parent, and after some difficulties, there is a comfortable resolution. You question the students about various aspects of the plot and characterization. A student offers that he knows someone who has been through a similar situation, and it didn’t work out as well. Another student suggests that maybe the story had too happy an ending, but four hands go up and a student says she thought the ending was very realistic. Another student called upon says he didn’t like the story at all, but he is countered by another who says it was at least not boring like yesterday’s lesson. More hands go up, but before you can call on them, the bell rings. As they leave the room, a student says to you, Hey, it was interesting today!
For a moment, you are pleased: it was a good lesson. The kids were really involved, and they had made a connection between literature and their lives - a good sign that might lead to reading more on their own. And then you remembered: it was one day closer to the test, and you had not mentioned how the author used symbols and similes, the kind of thing likely to show up on the test. The kids had a good lesson in literature, but how are they going to do on the test?
“The test.” The president likes testing. The legislators like testing. The media report on testing. After all, how else will anyone know whether you have taught the kids anything? And if the kids do not do well on the test, maybe it will mean that you aren’t the good teacher you just thought that you were.
And sure enough, when the day comes, the test has questions that require the students to understand symbolism, and there is a specific question about similes. You failed to make those points; maybe some of the kids picked it up from the discussion, but it was up to you to make sure. You are not a good teacher after all.
A bit silly, yes? But that is the problem teachers are up against when testing becomes the guideline, the goal, the answer, to the big question of how much education is taking place in any classroom. Knowing in general what is going to be on the test, it is up to you to teach to that test. The test makers aim at determining how many facts a student has mastered about a subject - not necessarily the subject as it is taught in your class or school, but just in general. The math questions, for example, may go beyond what is reasonable in every class or school; the questions about literature may probe for technicalities but overlook a basic like an adolescent’s emotional response. Nevertheless, and no matter how teaching to the test reduces a lesson to rote memorizing and leaves no time for critical thinking or reasoning, you must prepare your students for passing that test.
In the abstract, testing the students seems a fair way to determine whether they have been adequately taught. But students in a classroom are not abstractions. They are real: just about all are scared when test time comes around; some of them come from homes in poverty and are ill fed, tired, worried, and half sick; some of them come from homes where another language is spoken and the children are still learning English; some have special needs, are intellectually challenged and simply cannot keep up on academic matters. But all of them must be sitting there, taking the tests.
And the test results are taken very seriously by those in charge of the schools. They are to be used as measurements of teacher quality, of school quality, of school district quality - even of eligibility for money from government.
Moreover, there is the matter of how those tests are scored. They can actually make it impossible to measure real improvement. If the tests produce a median score - i.e. the number halfway between the best and the worst raw score - and the next year a school district does better by ten points, the median climbs higher, and schools which actually did improve by five points have dropped below the middle and are classified as below par, deficient. Seems crazy, but that’s how tests work.
Standardized tests simply cannot, by their very nature, fairly test the children of an entire city or state. We know from research (Public Policy Institute of California, for example) that socioeconomic factors play a huge role in test results, and everyone - from district administration through teachers and the kids - is unfairly, inappropriately labeled. To withhold government funds or to judge teacher quality by the current testing system is simply wrong.

WHO ARE THE TEACHERS?

WHO ARE THE TEACHERS?

As the media usually present teachers, they fall into two groups. One is composed of incompetents endlessly leeching unearned pay from taxpayers. The other is made up of self-sacrificing, saintly souls devoted to the students whom they inspire to amazing accomplishment. Examples of the two types are constantly featured in the media, and the public can hardly be blamed for assuming that the stereotype is a fairly accurate picture.

The actuality is different, of course. For a better picture, begin with some revealing statistics. As of the school year 2005-06, there were 5,995,000 public school teachers, and every one of them had at least a bachelor’s degree. More than half, 56%, held master’s degrees, and there was even a scattering, .08%, with a doctorate. Women made up 79% of the profession and men only 21%, though in 1961, 31.3% were men; apparently many men fled to other fields. As custom would have it, teaching children continues to be pretty much the province of women. Given the general label of women’s work, teaching salaries not surprisingly rank low among the professions.

According to the 2005-06 survey, the average work day for teachers was 7.4 hours, but the average teacher spent 50 hours a week on professional duties. That figure might help to explain the disturbing fact that 50% of all new teachers quit within five years.

Numbers can’t tell the whole story. Working conditions for teachers bear little comparison to those of other professionals. Hours are set and assignments made for the teacher; a teacher on duty literally is locked into a schedule. A duty-free lunch is seldom as long as 45 minutes; elementary teachers supervise playgrounds and lunchrooms in addition to teaching classes. Submission to a routine signaled by ringing bells is only part of what a teacher accepts as infringement of professional status. More troubling is the fact that the teacher is told what, when, and how to teach. Creativity, intellectual strength, range and depth of knowledge are all at discount if not simply ruled out, and teachers are reduced to pushing “teacher proof” curricula. Such restrictions are usually based on the current demand that students score well on specific - district or state devised and mandated - tests. Basing the success of public education on such “proofs” of learning is an issue deserving its own blog, which will be coming.

Idealism is a common characteristic of the teacher, but it is challenged by the daily reality of the classroom. Public schools can’t pick and choose their students (as can private and charter schools); they take everyone who shows up. “Everyone” includes children unable or unwilling to meet classroom requirements; a thousand problems may create the underachieving or misbehaving child, but it is still the teacher’s job to lead that child into educational achievement, no matter what. At the same time the teacher must not neglect the children at the other end of the scale who are ready and willing to learn.

These goals collide with insufficient materials (individual teachers spend hundreds of dollars from their own pockets to provide them), uncomfortable and overcrowded classrooms, inadequate textbooks, and a lack of supportive services such as school nurses and librarians. Moreover, teachers often work under the authority of principals with little teaching experience but big egos, whose judgments can create problems and even kill a career.

In spite of these and many other roadblocks to job satisfaction, teachers persevere in their very stressful work, and those who choose to do it vary in their ability to do it well. As is true in any profession, some muddle along below expectations and others rise to levels of excellence. Every adult remembers that one really superior teacher, the one who caught the hearts and minds of many, who lives in recollection as a life-changing, life-nurturing force. Such individuals are as rare in teaching as they are in every profession, as they are in life. To expect all teachers to meet that standard is unrealistic and unfair.

Just as there are exceptions at the top, there will be exceptions at the bottom. Sadly, most adults can also recall a teacher unworthy of the profession. The media inflate the problem of bad teaching by telling the public that such horrors abound and cannot be fired. Simply not true - another blog will show how incompetents can be removed.

What needs to be remembered is that between the extremes works the vast majority, teachers who are competent, hard working, and successful in meeting all the requirements of their profession. They sign on for jobs that tax their patience and challenge their ideals. They, not the extremes, are the heart and soul, the essential driving force of public education.

Failure Is a Myth

Failure Is a Myth

One topic which universally interests Americans is public schools. Mention anything about teachers or school kids, and the conversation is off and running. Much of it is fueled by the media, which usually tell us the rightwing propaganda that things are not going well. Certainly there are problems, but it is worth noting that in Los Angeles, for example, polled opinion about public schools varied according to whether the respondents did or did not have children in the schools. Not surprisingly, those who knew the schools first hand liked them better than those who knew them only by hearsay. We think a few statistics might help everyone see the schools as they are, not as they are said to be.

To begin, it must be kept in mind that the United States is the only country to require school attendance for every child until age 18 or graduation. We alone among nations attempt to put every child through an academic curriculum for 12 years. Every child, no matter what his or her academic capability, is entitled to and must receive the full educational program. A grand goal indeed. The rest of the world keeps their best students on an academic track as they test everyone else into trade school type curriculum.

How many kids are there in our schools? The astonishing total in 2008: 49.8 million, which is a 26% increase since 1985, and the number is projected to increase 9% by 2017. Of these, 3,328,000 are projected to graduate from high school in 2008-09, among the highest number in the industrialized world. That much public education comes at a price: the projected figure for the school year 2008-09 is $631 billion, which amounts to 7.4% of the Gross Domestic Product. Note, however, that despite the increase in enrollment, spending went up only one-half percent in ten years.

The story doesn’t end with high school graduation. From 1998-2008, 29% of the U.S. population had graduated from college with a Bachelor’s Degree. Few nations in the world can equal that number of college graduates.

It’s not all good new, of course. Some kids do dropout - more in some areas than in others, but even so, the total dropout rate fell in the years 1987-2007 from 12.6% to 8.7%. Dropout rates closely reflect the economic status of the students, the poorer the student, the higher the dropout rate.

Overall, these figures indicate that public education is doing a good job for a huge number of kids. Who’s doing the teaching for all these students? A lot of teachers - 3.2 million of them. And how well are they faring? In 2006-07 the average teacher salary was $50,816, not a bad figure. However, that number represents an increase since 1996-97 of only 3%, and inflation has grown more than 3% in 10 years. Also, behind that salary lie ten to fifteen years of experience and some 80 college units beyond the BA degree. Teachers still do not earn fully professional salaries.

Obviously, statistics indicate that American public education is not, as the common myth asserts, falling into failure. The myth of failure of public education is “proven” by unsatisfactory test scores or inner-city drop out rates, and it is necessary to remember that inner-city children, who live under dreadful conditions, not surprisingly score lower than more privileged children and pull down a school district average. It is not public education which has failed; it is poverty which has succeeded.

Our public education system, with its ideal of educating all our children, is under threat in a society which does not prioritize funding for education in the many communities where schools are the only place in which children can hope and strive for a productive adulthood. In too many pockets of poverty throughout the nation teachers struggle to meet the needs of their overcrowded classrooms, to open the door to a better future for their students. Their very presence, their continuing efforts, are part of the success of public education.

(Statistics from Digest of Educational Statistics - National Center for Educational Statistics.)

WHY TEACHER UNIONS?

Workers join unions. Teachers are professionals and don’t belong in unions. That is pretty much a common belief, especially in the media. However, a close look at teaching shows that it is, actually, ahybrid - part profession, part labor. In common with doctors and lawyers, for example, teachers must qualify through extensive and specific college courses and then pass a stringent exam. But in common, say, with retail clerks and TV technicians, teachers once hired are told where, how, when and in detail what they are to teach. Teachers dissatisfied with or fired from a specific school district must go elsewhere to find a job, to a new city or even a state, unlike the clerk, who can leave Wal Mart for Sears. Include low wages, submission to a well-paid and distant bureaucracy, and substandard working conditions, and it is obvious that though prepared and eager to be professionals, teachers are treated like workers. And workers join unions.

Why then do we hear so much negative chatter about teacher unions? Attacks on public education from right wing politicians focus on teacher unions, implying that if only the “too powerful” unions were out of the picture, education would have a chance to improve. How powerful are teacher unions? In fact, unions can only negotiate, not dictate. Even where a contract has been won, the union (and the teachers) still have no say over curriculum, textbook selection, district organization, salaries of administration, and much more. The power of the unions is, despite all the hullabaloo about them, very limited.

Teacher unions do use whatever power they have by engaging public interest and public power through political activity. Political action committees (PACs) implement a basic principle of democracy, the right of individually powerless people to collect money as a group in order to level the playing field with such big players as corporate interests and major political factions. PACs are attacked again and again for trying to “buy“ politicians and influence legislation; if teachers support candidates and issues that affect their profession, they are doing no more than every other organized sector in a democracy. As it is, though, unions spend on average only about 20% of what business spends on causes they favor.

Using whatever power they have, teacher unions play a triple role: they protect individual teachers from administrative injustice, they preserve the rights and standards of the teaching profession, and they promote the cause of education for all children. A teacher union does for teachers what any union does for its members: provides support and strength which come only with many acting as one - unity. So, precisely what is on the agendas of teacher unions? What do they fight for? Here are their chief goals.

Quality education for all, across the community: the same levels of funding for supplies, for experienced teachers, for proper buildings and equipment, regardless of economic levels.

Class size reduction as a key element of successful education.
Minimal proportion of education budgets for bureaucratic costs, which can absorb as much as 30% of a district budget; education funds must go to the classroom, where education happens.

Improvement of teacher pay, aiming for professional levels. It is commonly acknowledged that the hard work and dedication of teachers are seldom rewarded properly; only the power of many united into one bargaining unit can achieve progress.

Protection of due rights processes for teachers, whose professional activity and status should never be subject to the whims of individual administrators. Mistakenly lumped under the word tenure, “due process rights” simply means a teacher won’t be fired without due cause.

Maintenance of supportive services provided by librarians, school nurses, and counselors; their specialized professional work is not expendable.
Advancement of education goals and methods as they are recognized through professional experience: educational reform. It must originate with teachers, not be imposed by theoreticians far removed from real classrooms.

Proper funding in local and state budgets for education. Legislators too often fail to prioritize the cost of education: California, for example, pays $50,000 a year to keep someone in prison but balks at $8,000 a year to educate a child.
Inclusion of teachers in planning school district budgets and curriculum. Classroom experience knows the needs: the administrative bureaucracy is too far removed from day-to-day education activities to have total power over them.

With such goals, teacher unions are a positive force in a community, often the only group fighting to keep alive the American dream of quality education for all the nation’s kids. They need all the power they can muster to meet that goal.

MERIT PAY,NO WAY

MERIT PAY, NO WAY (or MERIT PAY, DEMERIT PAY)



Just about all adults remember an inspiring teacher who truly transformed their lives. Rewarding such a teacher - merit pay - seems fair and logical. Merit pay has a great ring to it. The idea has been around education and political circles for years, and its advocates see it as the solution to almost every problem in public education. They assume that it is possible to evaluate teacher performance objectively and fairly. But teaching is not done by robots addressing robots, and descriptions of those memorable teachers would display widely - even wildly - different characteristics. How, then, can the awardees of merit pay be chosen?
Currently, assessment of education success tends to rely upon test scores - the teacher whose students score high is successful; the teacher whose students rate lower on tests is inadequate or mediocre. Unfortunately, test scores won’t tell you how well a teacher taught, because there is no way that classrooms can be equal. Even when a school tries to group students according to academic ability, there are other factors which influence test scores: attendance, for example, or the number of English learners. And how to compare English and math classes, or chemistry and physical education? If a teacher is assigned low performance students, how compare his/her teaching skills with those of the teacher assigned to honors classes? And finally - and most important- the validity of standardized tests themselves is open to serious question.
If not test scores, then what? The usual method suggested is for the principal to evaluate the teacher. S/he is the school leader, the one who presumably knows the abilities of the faculty. But can even the best-intentioned principal visit every teacher often enough to know what happens regularly in a classroom? Moreover, if the principal actually does have that knowledge, how can s/he avoid subjective assessment? Unfortunately, every teacher has at some time been in a school where administrative evaluation was unfair, where a principal punished teachers for union activity, for voicing opinions unacceptable to the principal, for speaking up in meetings, for personal qualities that ran contrary to the principal’s values. Principals have power to change assignments; for example, we know a school where a 20 year kindergarten teacher was abruptly transferred to a sixth grade class. Sometimes, too, a principal simply overlooks the work of a teacher who does not attract administrative attention. Even where the principal tries to be fair, personal judgment would be open to question on every level. And under a principal with a little Caesar complex, merit pay would become patronage and favoritism, with teachers reduced to competition for favorable attention. The merit in merit pay would vanish; in its place would be a loss of morale and education standards.
Merit pay is clearly a practical impossibility, even if it were a desirable concept. Every teacher knows that teaching is not a science; no matter how carefully the teacher follows the rules laid down by education departments in college, adjustments must be made in the real classroom. If anything, teaching is an art more than a science, and teaching is one of the hardest of all jobs. All teachers have five years or more of college under their belts, but they seldom are allowed professional discretion in their classrooms, and it is a truism that everywhere they are seldom paid what society admits their work is worth. We have one of the best educated, most dedicated workforce in America, and it would be an insult to this national treasure to introduce a flawed system whereby a “few” good teachers are rewarded with extra money while the rest of this talented group of overworked women and men would suffer the indignity of being labeled not good enough, not deserving of merit pay.
Maybe in some ideal world merit pay would work; in ours it has no merit

Public Education, the Inside Story

Welcome to our blog on public education. We are two people with over 50 years of classroom teaching experience. Wayne Johnson, in addition to 27 years of classroom teaching in Los Angeles Unified District, was president of the 32,000 member teacher bargaining unit in Los Angeles for six years. He was also president of the 330,000 member California Teachers Association for four years. Harriet Perl was a classroom teacher for 35 years and worked for Los Angeles Unified as a counselor to victims of violence for nine years.

We know public education from the inside, and we want to share our information with you. We plan to show you the reality behind some of the important issues in public education today, such as:

How to fire bad teachers
Merit pay as a reward for good teachers
Private and charter schools vs. ordinary public schools
Principal power
The role of teacher unions
The college prep track for all kids
Why so many kids drop out
Where the education dollars go
Who teaches the teachers?
Teacher tenure
Parents' role in their children's schools
What it's like to teach today
Are vouchers the solution?

And much more!