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.