NEA Sheds Crocodile Tears for the Poor

President Obama has sent his budget plan to Congress, hoping to appease Republicans by slashing $400 billion from Medicare and other health programs (according to NEA Today) and cutting cost of living increases for Social Security recipients. Not surprisingly, Republicans are saying this isn’t enough and they have no intention of supporting any tax hikes, whatsoever. Some pundits are referring to the process as Obama negotiating with himself.

Needless to say, the cuts will hurt seniors and the poor the most (but on the brighter side, the wealthy will be able to continue to enjoying record low tax rates and subsidies for their businesses). These cuts could also have a trickle-down effect on schools. By stripping away some of the safety net for poor families, children will inevitably feel some of the cuts, which could lead to increases in malnutrition, untreated medical conditions, premature births, stress and elevated levels of cortisol, and other factors that can impair cognitive development, memory and learning.

National Educators Association (NEA) President Dennis Van Roekel criticized the plan, saying:

“Right now the focus should be on protecting and increasing benefits for our seniors, not pulling the rug out from under them . . . Social Security belongs to the people who have worked hard all their lives, contributed to the program, and relied on the promise that they and their family will be able to collect benefits that accurately reflect the cost of living when they retire. . . Any budget proposal must be balanced and fair by demanding more of the wealthiest and corporations while staying true to our nation’s commitment to seniors and those most in need.”

These comments are little more than crocodile tears coming from a man who earns close to $400,000 per year in salary and benefits and who will likely be set for life with a comfortable retirement, thanks to his members’ dues. While he may in fact feel sympathy for the poor and seniors, he is completely unwilling to do anything about it besides making a few impotent complaints—and certainly nothing that might jeopardize his income, status or personal freedom.

If NEA was a fighting union, if it really gave a damned about the wellbeing of America’s poor families and children (or simply wanted to see significant gains in educational outcomes), it would mobilize its hundreds of thousands of members to protest the entire budget debate vigorously, with direct action, civil disobedience and even strikes. The NEA is the largest union in the country. It has vast resources and could have significant influence on policy if it were to move away from its unreliable and weak strategy of lobbying and campaign financing and start exercising its true power: its members’ ability to withhold their labor.

One reason why the NEA will not do this is because it does not want to offend its darling in the White House. Despite the fact that Obama has done nothing to reduce the damage caused by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and actually worsened it with his Race to the Top (RttT), he continues to pay lip service to the notion of improving public education (which seems to be sufficient to mollify many on the left). In fairness, his budget proposal does include an additional $75 billion to fund pre-school for all low- to moderate-income 4-year-olds. Yet for many middle class families, the only preschool options available are expensive private schools that suck up large portions of their disposable income. Obama’s budget will provide no relief for these families. More to the point, since we know that pre-K programs have significant benefits for children’s long-term academic success, why not extend the existing free public education system to include all children, starting at the pre-K level? This would have the additional benefit of allowing many parents to get back to work without having to lose a large chunk of their income to overpriced private preschools.

Van Roekel is also probably pleased with the supposed billions of dollars that will go toward education jobs to replace those lost due to the sequester cuts. However, jobs, in and of themselves, are nothing to support, particularly if those jobs are for low pay, with poor benefits and unreasonable demands or lack security. Why not increase unemployment benefits, welfare and other safety net programs to a level that provides all Americans with material security and comfort until they get back on their feet, instead of continuing with the cynical and punitive system that provides only a fraction of what one needs to survive and only for a timeframe that is insufficient for finding another decent job?

Additionally, why strive for putting teachers back in front of 30-40 kids per classroom, which is all that will happen with Obama’s proposal? Why not demand sufficient funding to bring all high school classes in the country down to 20 students per teacher, and the lower grade levels down to 10 or 15 students per teacher? This would not only create a lot of jobs, but it would provide teachers sufficient time to attend to the individual and diverse needs of their students; identify physical, emotional or academic problems before they spiral out of control; and provide more engaging, student-centered, inquiry-based lessons and rely less on canned curriculum, bubble in tests and rote memorization.

Lies and Damned Lies: U.S. Test Scores Actually Near the Top

For years, free market education reformers have claimed that the U.S. public education system is broken—some have even called it a threat to our national security (Reagan’s Nation at Risk report, 1983). They have used this “crisis” to justify everything from No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top to attacks on teachers’ seniority, tenure and due process rights. It has led to a decade of accountability and testing mania that has eaten up instructional time and replaced activities that foster creativity and critical thinking with rote memorization. It has taken away billions of dollars that could have been used for teacher training, recruitment and remuneration, and transferred it into the pockets of test and textbook publishers, private charter school operators, and online curriculum producers.

The claims that America’s schools are failing are grossly exaggerated, if not utterly false. For example, the number of students attempting and passing SAT and AP exams has been growing every year and in every ethnic and social group (see here and here). Furthermore, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, for the first time in history, more than 30% of Americans aged 25 or older—56 million people—have bachelor's degrees, while only 5% did 70 years ago—something that would be impossible if K-12 education was not successfully preparing its graduates for college. According to Good Education, more than one-third of these degrees are now in STEM fields. The data also indicates that gender and ethnic disparities are closing, with 30% of women now holding degrees (compared to 31% of men), while the percentage of Hispanic degree holders increased 80% over the past decade, with over 14% now holding degrees.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Free market reformers love testing because it seems objective and scientific (plus they can massage the statistics to suit their needs). Most people lack the time and expertise to disaggregate the numbers, examine the methodology, and identify biases and experimental errors that can skew the data and influence the validity of their conclusions. Consequently, the media typically report test results without such analyses, proliferating misconceptions and inaccuracies like the notion that U.S. students’ test scores are substantially lower than those in other wealthy nations (as measured by the PISA test).

However, as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) correctly points out in a new report (that you can read here), lower income students in every country perform more poorly on the tests than affluent students. However, because economic inequality is greater in the U.S. than in virtually every other country with which we are compared, our national average appears comparatively low. To make matters worse, there was a sampling error in the most recent PISA test, resulting in an over-representation of students from the most disadvantaged U.S. schools, thus further depressing the average U.S. scores.

When EPI re-estimated PISA scores, adjusting for the disproportionate number of economically disadvantaged students in the U.S., it found that average U.S. scores in reading and math were substantially higher than the official numbers. Using EPI’s corrected numbers, the U.S. moves to sixth in reading (up from the officially reported 14^th) and 13^th in math (up from the officially reported 25^th) compared with other OECD countries.

Although U.S. students still performed worse than those in the top three countries (Canada, Finland and Korea), the difference was markedly narrowed when adjusted for socioeconomic differences. Perhaps more significantly, economically disadvantaged students in the U.S. performed better than their social class peers in most other countries, including in these three top scoring countries.

Thus, while U.S. educational outcomes appear worse than those of its trading partners (due mostly to its greater levels of social inequity), it is actually doing a better job than its trading partners at boosting the test scores of its poorest students. Furthermore, the performance of the poorest U.S. students has been improving over time, while the performance of poor students in other similar countries has been on the decline, suggesting that U.S. schools are doing a better job addressing the needs of their economically disadvantaged students.

3 of California’s “Top” Schools On the Chopping Block, And Good Riddance

What makes a “top” school, top? According to the San Francisco Chronicle (and most other media) it is test scores. Thanks to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Obama’s Race to the Top (RttT), test scores are all that matter these days. This has led to numerous cheating scandals, as well as a reduction in science, arts, physical education and other curricula to make room for more test preparation. It has also led to a number of other scandals, such as the one at Oakland’s American Indian Charter Schools, now under threat of closure for financial improprieties, despite its relatively high test scores.

The American Indian schools are currently being investigated by the Alameda County district attorney for funneling $3.8 million to founder and former director Ben Chavis and his wife for shady real estate deals and services, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. As director, Chavis signed school checks over to himself for properties he rented to the schools. In one case, he charged the schools $1.09 per square foot per month, when Oakland Unified was charging one-fifth of that ($2.50 per year).

The Oakland school board has asked the school to shape up and convince them their books are now in order. The board will make its final decision on March 20.

The problem is that it is not just financial improprieties that call the schools’ quality into question. Chavis, who ran the schools from 2001 until 2007, has been accused of humiliating students, swearing at them and calling them names publicly. The East Bay Express reports that he also made racist and sexist comments in front of students, while the WSWS reports he physically abused an adult visitor to the campus and forced a student to shave his head as a punishment. The Express also found that the schools’ high test scores had nothing to do with good teaching or school structure, but were the result of cherry-picking higher performing students—a form of cheating that violates OUSD’s own policies. In essence, the schools were phony “top” schools that rigged the system in order to look good, maintain high enrollment, and serve as a cover for Chavis’ embezzlement schemes.

While the OUSD is threatening to revoke the schools’ charters and shut them down, they should not be seen as the hero riding in on their white horse. According to the Express, the school board had known for years about Chavis’ abuses and misconduct, yet continually renewed the schools’ charters, citing their wonderful test scores as justification. Indeed, the OUSB, due its lack of effective oversight, was complicit in both the cheating scandal and Chavis’ embezzlement of millions of dollars from the district

The OUSD likewise had no problem with the schools’ refusal to hire unionized teachers or its rabid anti-communism (one of the schools’ “10 Commandments” was “Thou shalt be aware of quacks who believe in communism. Hast thou ever heard of illegal immigrants risking their lives to enter Cuba?”

 

The AFT is Finally Fighting Testing (Not)

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is expanding its drive “against excessive testing” with a pithy and pathetic new campaign called “Learning Is More Than a Test Score.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten said the campaign is intended to de-emphasize testing and bring back arts and physical education. However, according to the Washington Examiner, she conceded (as she has always done) that testing has a crucial role to play. Indeed, Weingarten has supported legislation and helped broker contracts with school districts that promote the use of student test data to evaluate teachers (see here, here, here, here and here).

The AFT is not really opposed to high stakes tests. The name of the campaign, “Learning is More Than a Test Score,” implies that the union accepts the tests as one aspect of learning, while its reference to “excessive” testing implies that it simply wants less of it. Either way, the union has accepted the inaccurate and discredited assertion that high stakes tests improve learning outcomes and capitulated to the corporate education “reformers” attempt to rationalize and profit from public education (i.e., testing is big business for the test and textbook publishers).

From a purely selfish perspective (the only perspective a fighting union should take since its purpose is supposedly to improve the working and living conditions of its members), all high stakes tests should be opposed since they can only tell us how well students answer multiple choice questions compared with their peers, under timed and stressful conditions—not where, when or how they learned to do this. The fact that test scores (and student achievement) correlate more strongly with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds than with teaching ability (see here, here and here) should draw into question their validity as a measure of teacher skill in the classroom. Furthermore, the data show that the tests cannot an accurately or consistently measure performance for the majority of teachers and may only be accurate for those at the extremes, and only if averaged out over three years—something that is rarely done.

However, even from the perspective of a public servant (the perspective usually taken by the unions, since they are terrified of being accused of putting their own wellbeing above that of their students), the tests should be opposed. Test administration takes considerable class time away from actual learning (as much as 2-6 weeks, depending on the school). The drastic consequences for schools compels many to sacrifice even more class time for test preparation, sometimes even to the extent of slashing entire programs (e.g., physical education, art, music, science). The tests are stressful and anxiety-provoking for children, yet serve no educational purpose (i.e., children cannot learn anything useful from the tests). They also make school seem even more boring and meaningless, contributing to students’ sense of alienation from learning and disdain for school.

Even from a taxpayers’ perspective all tests should be opposed, as they cost billions of dollars and suck revenue out of the classroom, where it can benefit children, handing it over to test and textbook publishers. In California, alone, it is estimated that the new Common Core Standards (CCS) exams will cost $1 billion to implement (most of it going toward new books, test design, and computers and software to administer the tests). Yet there is no evidence that any high stakes standardized test has improved learning.

Indeed, the real impetus behind the testing mania is corporate profits, not improving the learning or wellbeing of children. In California, where $20 billion has been slashed from K-12 education over the past 4 years, the state Board of Education voted to adopt the CCS two years ago, knowing even then that it would cost more than $1 billion and that the state would have to borrow or slash further to get the money. Yet California already had among the toughest standards in the nation. There was no educational benefit from changing the standards, no potential for it to significantly improve learning, graduation rates or the achievement gap.

To a rational, fiscally conservative person, no need plus no money should have equaled no new test. Instead, heavy lobbying by the educational publishers convinced the board to spend money it did not have on a test it did not need, thus further impoverishing California’s schools. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, with Governor Jerry Brown’s supposedly balanced budget and promise not to make any further cuts in K-12 funding. (Proposition 30, while doing nothing to restore the $20 billion cut over the past 4 years, was supposed to hold K-12 funding steady, but it is not yet clear whether the cost of CCS has been factored in).

More is Less?

Rather than opposing more testing, AFT and NEA have come out in support of CCS (see here), arguing that the CCS tests will be better and more meaningful than the previous ones, even though the tests have not yet been created and it is impossible to know how they might differ. By most accounts, though, the new CCS exams will not significantly decrease the amount of class time lost to testing, anxiety for children, pressure on schools to improve at all costs, or cuts to “nonacademic” programs.

To be fair, the AFT has made a statement in support of Seattle’s Garfield High School teachers who are boycotting Washington’s MAP test. This is a unique and positive step, as neither the AFT nor the NEA have supported this kind of teacher civil disobedience in the past. The unions’ historical perspective has been that this is tantamount to insubordination and failure to fulfill one’s job responsibilities—thus administrators would be justified in disciplining them. On the other hand, the AFT is not providing any material, logistical or tangible support, nor are they promoting similar boycotts or civil disobedience elsewhere—actions that would be necessary if they really want to see an end to the testing mania.

California’s Cheating Scandal: NCLB-Gate, Yet Again

First there was Michelle Rhee’s cheating scandal in D.C. Then there was the Georgia cheating scandal. Since then, there have been numerous other cheating scandals across the nation, all driven by the same force—No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

With the threat of slashed federal revenues, school closures, mass firings of teachers, compulsory conversion to charter schools and numerous other onerous consequences, schools, districts and entire states are under phenomenal pressure to raise test scores. Under such pressure, it is not surprising that many are resorting to cheating.

Now California has been implicated in its own cheating scandal. 23 schools are being stripped of the state rankings for cheating or misconduct related to the state standardized exams, according to the Los Angeles Times. The infractions include helping students correct mistakes or giving them the test questions in advance.

The percentage of California schools that have been caught over the last three years is relatively small (only a couple dozen out of over 10,000 schools). Yet, in order to be stripped of their rankings, the schools had to have irregularities for more than 5% of their population, something that suggests a school-wide problem. It is also quite likely that the number of schools involved in cheating is much higher, since we only know about the ones that have been caught.

These cheating scandals reflect two fundamental problems with high stakes exams that testing proponents refuse to acknowledge:

1. While it is certainly reasonable to hold teachers accountable for good teaching, high stakes exams do not do this. The tests are essentially a measurement of students’ literacy, academic maturity, and their ability to sit still and focus on multiple choice questions for extended periods of time. Students who have these skills tend to do well on the tests, regardless of their teachers’ ability in the classroom. Conversely, an excellent teacher who has a large percentage of students who are reading far below grade level or who do not do homework or come to class regularly would likely see low test scores, despite her skill in the classroom.
2. Student test scores are far more dependent on outside-of-school factors like students’ socioeconomic status than they are on the quality of their schools and teachers. This significantly limits how much improvement schools can squeeze out of their students. Thus they are being held accountable and punished for something over which they have very limited control. Under these conditions, cheating should not only be expected, but could even be rationalized as a precaution against a school’s closure or the mass firing of its teachers, something that would likely do more harm than good for the students.

Of course most would probably argue that teachers should have more integrity and refuse to participate in cheating, even when pressured by their administrators, as is often the case (see Crescendo Charter School cheating scandal). But this is asking a lot when teachers are being laid off for far less than insubordination and job prospects continue to be dismal. I would rather see more teachers refuse to participate in the tests in the first place, since the tests are incapable of improving student learning or ensuring good teacher quality and they only serve to increase the stress and anxiety that already exist in schools, for both students and teachers.

FL Teachers Required to Work Longer Without Compensation?

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Modern School has covered several of the ways that No Child Left Behind and the testing/accountability mania benefit private business (see here, here and here), such as forcing schools to convert to charter schools, hiring private tutors and increasing purchases of canned curriculum and test preparation materials. Florida is on the verge of implementing a new backdoor gift to private education profiteers: using state tests to increase workloads, thus decreasing hourly wages for teachers.

As wages and working conditions deteriorate at traditional public schools, they start to look more and more like private, for-profit charter schools, where unions are rare and working conditions and pay have always tended to be poor.  Not only does this make it harder for the traditional public schools to hire and retain the best teachers, thus harming students by depriving them of quality teachers, it allows the bottom-feeding charters to continue paying poorly and demanding longer hours, which helps their bottom line.

The Florida state legislature passed a law in March, the Huffington Post reports, that requires the 100 lowest-performing schools on the reading FCAT test to provide an additional hour of reading instruction each day. Considering that this extra hour is over and beyond their normal work day, teachers should be recompensed at an overtime rate of at least time and a half. Yet there is no guarantee that they will even be paid their normal hourly rate.

The state supposedly has earmarked $30 million to pay teachers. However, according to Karen Aronowitz of United Teachers of Dade, this is not enough to cover all the affected teachers’ actual hourly rate. According to the Palm Beach Post, their district, alone, will require $7-8 million to cover the new program. Miami-Dade is expected to suck an additional $3 million for the program, leaving only $19-20 million for the rest of the state.

Obama’s Plan to Improve Science Education by Overworking Teachers

It is perplexing to many that we continue to have high unemployment and simultaneously have to import foreign workers to fill so many high tech jobs because of the dearth of sufficiently educated domestic workers. There have been numerous attempts to rectify this problem, but they all suffer from similar fallacies such as the myths that our education system is broken or deteriorating or that our teachers are terrible or disinterested or unwilling to persevere in the profession.

Indeed, 30,000 STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teachers leave the profession each year according to Good Education and this, no doubt, takes a terrible toll on the consistency and integrity of STEM programs. However, K-12 education loses thousands of teachers each year from all disciplines, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the needs and specifics of STEM teaching. For example, over 100,000 teaching jobs have been lost in the last year, while over 300,000 have been lost since 2008, according to Fire Dog Lake, primarily due to budget cuts resulting from declining tax revenue.

Furthermore, significant numbers of teachers from all disciplines quit within their first three years because they were not sufficiently prepared or are no longer willing to deal with the demands, stress and intensity of the job. And, as Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Blog pointed out last year, the attrition rates in other professions are also relatively high and this may actually be a good thing, especially for K-12 education, as it helps weed out those who are ill-prepared or ill-suited for the profession.

Of course it’s not just about retaining STEM teachers. It is also about attracting them to the profession in the first place. STEM graduates tend to have more remunerative options than humanities and social science graduates, like working for a biotech or software company. To this end, the White House announced last week the creation of an elite STEM Master Teacher Corps, the members of which will serve as models and inspiration for aspiring young STEM teachers, according to the Good Education report.

The Obama plan will begin this year with 50 teachers, expanding to more than 10,000 teachers over the next four years. These "master teachers" would be required to lead professional development and school reform efforts in their schools and districts, create lesson plans and novel strategies to improve their peers’ teaching, and mentor novice teachers to help keep them in the classroom. In exchange for all this extra labor, the “master teachers” will receive a national award recognizing their excellence and a stipend of $20,000 per year.

The Good Education article suggests that while the stipend “might not put them on par with a hot programmer at Google, the compensation will close some of the gap and make their salaries competitive with other careers they might be qualified for.”

Now $20,000 might seem like a substantial sum of money, particularly when many teachers are making only $40,000 per year (or less). However, for a teacher earning $30-40,000 per year base pay, their new salary would hardly be competitive with the IT or Biotech industries. Furthermore, Good’s estimation looks only at the take home pay, not the amount of pay relative to the amount of labor, status and stress.

The typical workload of a teacher includes managing and controlling classrooms of up to 35-40 students while identifying and serving their diverse and unique needs. This, alone, accounts for 5-6 hours (66-80%) of a teacher’s workday. In the remaining time, teachers must design and prepare creative and effective lesson plans; set up labs and projects; read and grade essays, lab reports, exams and other assignments; attend meetings; fill out reams of paper work; satisfy the sometimes contradictory and often overwhelming demands of administrators and local and state ordinances; and regularly communicate with parents. During this time, they have dozens of intense interpersonal interactions, generally with people who are not very good at articulately or respectfully communicating their needs, thus adding stress and frustration to an already overwhelming work day.

Considering these demands, all teachers, regardless of their discipline or location, should be earning six-figures as their base pay, without having to do a lot of extra work, as required by Obama’s STEM plan.

While it is certainly nice to be offered extra money for extra work, $20,000 does not come close to compensating teachers for the amount of work required by Obama’s STEM program. Mentoring novice teachers, alone, could add another 5-10% to a teacher’s already busy workday, especially if it includes frequent observations and meetings to debrief the observations. Curriculum design, too, can be extremely time extensive. Many teachers devote entire summers and/or additional hours after school (without pay) to curriculum design. Likewise, school redesign and reform efforts can eat up weeks or months during the summer, followed by additional daily or weekly labor during the school year.

It should also be pointed out that all this extra work can burn teachers out, taking away attention, patience and focus from their students. Many teachers no doubt have the energy and drive to make this work in the short-term, but the Obama plan calls for a minimum four-year commitment. It is difficult to imagine 10,000 martyrs across the country not only being able to give up so much of their personal lives to the cause of improving STEM education for four or more years, but being able to do it well, without sacrificing the wellbeing of their students and colleagues.

Under the Obama plan, STEM teachers will still to have relatively low status and autonomy (like other teachers), thus contributing to high attrition and difficulty attracting people to profession in the first place. They will continue to be subjected to arbitrary and ill-conceived reforms and legislation (e.g., No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top), attacks on their working conditions and job security (e.g., tenure and evaluation reform), and little to no academic freedom and autonomy in the classroom. They will also continue to be subjected to unreasonable expectations to solve major socioeconomic problems that are beyond their capabilities (like ensuring that low income 9^th graders who are reading at the 2^nd grade level are able to graduate on time ready to enter a four-year university).

This brings up another faulty premise of the Ed Deform movement: Kids aren’t graduating prepared for career and college because of defects with their schools or teachers. In reality, the minority of students who are not graduating on time or who are graduating without the necessary basic skills for career or college are overwhelmingly low income students who started kindergarten far behind their peers in pre-reading and math skills and who fell further behind as they progressed through school, not because of bad schools or teachers, but because their more affluent peers had a host of after-school and summer advantages that were unavailable to them.

Therefore, if we want to see more students graduating prepared for STEM careers or college we need to address both the increasing poverty of our students and the growing societal wealth gap, as well as the declining revenue available to K-12 education, since education funding can help ameliorate some of the negative educational impacts of poverty (e.g., free and reduced lunch and breakfast programs; after school childcare for young children of working parents). A much more effective use of the $100 million the Obama administration plans on spending on his STEM program would be to increase funding for programs like free and reduced lunch, restoring nursing and counselors to the schools, and adding more after-school and summer enrichment programs for low income children.

This, of course, is unlikely. First, virtually no policy maker acknowledges how much poverty affects educational outcomes and none is willing to invest in programs that reduce poverty, let alone tax the wealthy to do so. Furthermore, the STEM push is coming primarily from industry which wants greater control of its future workforce and increased consumption of its products. It’s not about helping children, especially poor children.

In the short-term, increased STEM education means more computers and iPads in the classroom, which means more profits for tech companies. In the long term, even if it does result in companies hiring more domestic employees, it will be primarily the elite upper echelon of public K-12 educated students who reap the benefits of high paying, high status tech jobs, as it is today. Lower income kids who are behind in their academic skills and course work will continue to have lower graduation and college admission rates, higher unemployment, and fewer job opportunities. Having better trained science teachers will not erase the effects of poverty, improve students’ reading from the 2^nd to 11^th grade level, or provide a safe, quiet place for them to study.