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Here’s The Plan, Stan….

Published August 2, 2011 on Schools Closed
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Here’s The Plan, Stan.

What’s the plan? Well, here’s how we do it. First we make sure we cut as much from public school budgets as we can without actually closing them. Then we hire a bunch of consultants from out of state who have the right political credentials to pronounce that the schools are dysfunctional and must be privatized in order to “save” them.

This scenario reminds me of a television news report I watched during the Vietnam war. The correspondent was lying in a ditch with an Army officer as bullets and artillery rounds whistled overhead. Every once in a while a helicopter gunship would spray machine gun fire and at least two aircraft swooped in overhead and dropped napalm. All the ordnance was impacting on what appeared to be a tiny village in the near distance. The cameraman was reacting to the explosions as the camera and image jumped around. The correspondent and the officer were lying on their backs and the microphone was placed in the officer’s face with the question: “What’s going on here, what’s the plan?” The reply was cool, calm and entirely without irony as is to be expected from a combat hardened trooper: “Well, we’re going to have to destroy this village in order to save it.”

Here we are, in 2011, destroying public education in order to “save” it. That’s the plan, Stan. We are at it again. The Bush-initiated No Child Left Behind scam is working its magic and schools all over the US are flunking the test. Teachers in Atlanta, Georgia, have been caught cheating the test results to make it look as though their students were actually passing the national exams; 178 teachers and administrators were named in the report!  Florida is often held up as a place where students have improved but, in fact, their students still perform below national averages, so why is experience in Florida held up as a qualification to run a school system? Another question: Why is the charter school held up as a paragon? In Los Angeles the charter school faculty turnover rate is 50% per school year! One teacher described the situation thus; “By the time students graduated from my school, there was not a single teacher who had been there the whole time.” Then there are the demeaning lotteries for placement in charter schools, schools funded with public money. Watch the film “Waiting for Superman” online at http://www.waitingforsuperman.org/  to see how the charter school system works and then ask if you would want to place you child in this scene.

THE WAR ON PUBLIC EDUCATION

The working assumption here is that schools exist because society deems it important and necessary to educate children. And this is why schools should be left out of the political agenda where they seem now to occupy a central position. One has to wonder why someone like Jeb Bush would be touring the country advocating for policies that, in the end, will only damage the educational process. I have long wondered why political conservatives of a certain class (wealthy, privileged, politically influential) have such a fixation on schools and schooling. It is most certainly not because they have the welfare of children in mind. Republican Governor Rick Perry of Texas, now a presidential possibility, is cutting $4 billion from the Texas school budget! In New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie attempted to cut $800 million from that state’s education budget but is being challenged by the courts and the story in Michigan is pretty much the same. Along with the usual budget cuts, Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Walker, encouraged by billionaires with no apparent connection to public education, has added disenfranchising teacher’s unions to the agenda.

When the same attacks are happening across the country one doesn’t have to be paranoid to question what the “real” agenda is. Here is a comment from the  BuzzFlash on the blog site Truthout on Friday 17 June 2011 from a reader named Mario:

“This is really an assault on the working class. A good education is the first step towards upward social mobility. An ignorant populace (the Republican dream) is one that is easier to control and convince.

The BuzzFlash editor, Mark Karlin, added:

This will result in a caste system that will create not a “free market,” but a relatively closed one. Wealth and economic well-being then become not a result of ingenuity, education and entrepreneurialism, but rather of family inheritance. This is also called a fossilized economy.

The Objectives – The Cruel Myth of Privatization.

The first and foremost objective of the school privatization activists will be the elimination of teachers unions. The next objective they will seek to achieve will be greater social control of students and the composition of school population by social class distinction. Poor kids will go to poor-kids schools and well-off -kids will go to well-off-kids schools. The net result will be even greater social polarization, even greater alienation and much less commitment to the whole of society – a parlous path to the future to say the least. The privatization of schools has more to do with greed than altruistic feelings about improving education for all. It is about social control as well.

Adding to this dismal vision of the future are billionaires hiring politicians and lawyers to lobby for privatizing public education. Why? Not because they want to improve education for the masses but because they smell a profit. What then if they are successful? What happens to those who cannot or will not pay? Kids who are barely educated now, who come from homes where parents are indifferent or discouraged will certainly be excluded. That scenario obviously becomes a portrait of disenfranchisement, disillusionment and, worst of all alienation. At least when kids are in school they are exposed to adults who are caring and invested in preparing young people for a life in society, imperfect though it may be. As a result of the press for privatization the US will find itself with an alienated underclass with no commitment to a common social contract. We will become a society that puts a price on everything and knows the value of nothing – especially people.

This essay also appears at: NMPolitics.net

Standardized Children?

Published July 21, 2011 on Schools 1 Comment
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Have you ever met a standard child? Just one in your entire life? Were you, perhaps, a standard child yourself? No? Neither have I met one nor was I one. So what is it then with the idea of, the concept of, Standardized Tests for children? I am here making a distinction between early childhood education, let’s say from nursery school thru middle school. In the news on July 16th, 2011 a story is a about a cheating scandal in Atlanta, Georgia. The cheaters were not school children but teachers fudging the standardized testing such that No Child Would Be Left Behind nor would any teacher be tossed out or penalized because one of their students had failed the standardized test. Apparently teachers colluded to, among other things, erase wrong answers and replace them with correct ones. Are you surprised? I’m not.

The Georgia state report published this past June indicated that the cheating had been going on since 2001 and named 178 teachers, 82 principals and affected tens of thousands of children. According to the report the schools, as a result of the pressures of the No Child left Behind business, operated in a culture of “fear, intimidation, and retaliation,”. It is telling that teachers were told that even children entering middle school who were reading at a first grade level had to pass the standardized test at the middle school level or else!  Teachers were intimidated by administrators with humiliation and threats of dismissal.  So much for professionalism, so much for comprehending the innate abilities of children as individuals. So much for education whatever that might mean to the designers of No Child Left Behind which, in my opinion, was one of the many scams perpetrated during the Bush administration.

A clarion call? Perhaps.

At the July 2011 biennial conference of the American Federation of Teachers, AFT president Randi Weinegarten exhorted teachers stand up and push back against the new self-anointed education experts who seem to be coming out of the political woodwork around the country, Ms Weinegarten raised many important and critical issues including the destructive rhetoric being deployed against teachers and the cuts to education budgets among others. She made very good points including criticizing the making of testing “targets” more important that education. More of this needs to be heard and it needs to be addressed to parents as well as the general public.

We are not talking about utopia here we are looking at the cold hard realities of the state of public education today. In a July 10, 2011 article in the Sunday NY Times, Paul Tough, offered the following prescription for school reform.

“It means supplementing classroom strategies with targeted, evidence-based interventions outside the classroom: working intensively with the most disadvantaged families to improve home environments for young children; providing high-quality early-childhood education to children from the neediest families; and, once school begins, providing low-income students with a robust system of emotional and psychological support, as well as academic support.”

This prescription falls short of my own beliefs in several ways one of which is that it is not only disadvantaged children who are disadvantaged. Middle-class children have problems of their own that interfere in their educational lives and those concerns must be addressed as well. The whole of school reform encompasses much more than what happens in school and within families. School reform must be a sustained national priority.

A dismal vision of the future.

We are becoming to a large extent a society that puts a price on everything and knows the value of nothing. With regard to education, the most dismal outcome of this dynamic would be, in my opinion, the taking over of public education by private corporations, billionaires and their politicians and lawyers – their hired hands. Why are they promoting the privatization of public education? Not because they want to improve education for the masses you can be certain of that, but because they smell a profit. What then, if they succeed? What happens to children whose families cannot or will not pay – kids from homes where parents are themselves barely educated, indifferent or discouraged? What happens to schools in impoverished neighborhoods?

The first and foremost objective of the school privatization activists will be the elimination of teacher’s unions. Their next objective will be greater social control of students and the composition of school populations by economic class distinction. Poor kids will go to poor-kids schools and well off kids will go to well-off kids schools. The net result – even greater social polarization and alienation than we now see and much less commitment to the whole of society – to a viable national social contract. The privatization of public education has more to do with greed than altruistic feeling about improving education for all. It is about social control as well; standardized children are an essential component of that venal dystopian vision.

Getting down to basics.

Published June 27, 2011 on Schools Closed
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Try to imagine, if you would, a professional football team having budget problems, and management’s solution is to lay off players but hang on to the front-office staff. As a result, they can field only a 10-man team. How would that work out? Does it make sense if their purpose is to win games? How could they win a game?

No professional football team in its right mind would attempt to pull off a stunt like that, but school systems seem not to give it much thought at all. Laying off teachers is no different from laying off players in this scenario.

Compare the impact on children and on the quality of instruction between laying off 50 administrators and laying off 50 teachers. Lay off teachers, increase class sizes and complain when kids don’t learn? Oh, then test the kids and, presto, you have a self-fulfilling scenario in which you can now declare that schools are failing. Got it?

I learned in the Air Force as a strategic air command combat crew officer that the mission must always come first. Those who carry out the mission are the priority, which means functionality outranks administrative services. On a SAC base the base commander was subordinate to the wing commander and nothing was allowed to trump the combat crews and their equipment – in other words, mission first.

Translating this to schools would properly mean teaching and learning are the mission and teachers, as the “mission” personnel, would have priority. Ideally, teachers would set the school’s priorities and establish the operational policies.

The administration would be subordinate to the needs and priorities of the teachers. Parents would be held responsible for both the physical and the mental attendance of their little darlings.

We can imagine a flat organization in which teachers and administrators are at the same level but with different responsibilities and functions. Regardless of the formal arrangements, the administration’s only reason for being must always be to support the mission of the school – that being educating children, which means providing teachers with what they need to carry out their responsibilities to the children.

The hierarchy would be defined by the mission and not by a person. Could this work? Of course it could, if people would set aside their ego issues and subordinate themselves to the mission. Administrators would have to get over their “front office” syndrome, work cooperatively and put teachers and children first.

This essay first appeared on nmPolitics.net

School reform? First we need parenting reform.

Published June 16, 2011 on Schools 2 Comments
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School reform? First we need parenting reform.

We are presently witnessing an historical moment of truth as one state government after another begins a budget massacre. Getting the axe first will be the softest target of them all – public education. Aside from the obvious, immediate damage this does to public education, it shows how deep the belief in education goes in contemporary American society. The “real” social value of education to the public and to politicians these days is revealed – when budget cutting is the current issue, education gets it in the neck first. The only reasonably intelligent question that can be asked is, “Why?”

One possibility is that education is no longer as valued a part of the national belief system as it once was. Education seems to no longer be held as an investment in the future, but more of a fungible line item in a strained budget. Why should it be this way? Here are some of the arguments being expressed:

– Has education made getting a job easier or even possible?

– Teachers are merely putting in their time to retirement.

– Teachers have too much prep time.

– Schools have too much vacation time.

– Teachers are paid too much and there are too many of them.

– Kids aren’t learning how to read as well or as quickly as the new “experts” tell us they should, and that is, no doubt, the fault of teachers.

Schools, we are told, need the guidance of “experts” like Jeb Bush of Florida and Hanna Skandera in New Mexico, neither of whom has a background in education. Apparently they don’t need experience or background. I suppose we could all be grateful they aren’t interested in doing brain surgery.

Easier to pick on teachers

Why have public schools and teachers become the soft target of the moment? One reason, I believe, is because schools are simply vulnerable to this sort of attack; they are easy to criticize and difficult to defend. Not all kids learn at the same rate nor do they all have the same motivations to learn – they are not production-line widgets; hence, their achievement progress is not uniform. Children too often come from homes where parents are more interested in big screen TVs, sports, recreational activities – anything but learning. Research has shown that many children come from homes where there are scant if any reading materials at hand. Oh, and let me suggest one more reason – parents’ lack of interest in assuming responsibility for their kids’ performance in school.

If politicians and the new educational experts were to pick on parents the way they pick on teachers, it would be a parlous situation for their political ambitions. If the new self-anointed experts spoke up about curriculum and instruction, it would be too obvious that they don’t know what they are talking about. So, the response is to require more testing and pick on teachers – much easier. Imagine, if you can, one of these politicians standing up before an audience of parents and saying, “These are your children, dammit, and you are responsible for them.” Not in this lifetime, I assure you.

Parenting reform

Where can we go from here? We cannot even begin to discuss school reform until we deal with parenting reform. How can we convince parents that they are the front lines of education? I would suggest one first step would be to stop the politically motivated rhetoric. Next, stop the eye-wash and propaganda about testing. Seriously, folks there is no better indication that you don’t know what you are talking about when you promote more testing as educational reform. An experienced classroom teacher is never not testing. Never!

Next we need political leadership that instructs – yes, instructs – the public about their role in the process of educating their young. (See above.) We need public dialog that elevates teachers and teaching to the same level as firemen and cops. Have you ever heard a politician mouth-off about firemen and policemen on a par with what we hear about public schools and teachers? I doubt it. Teachers, for their part need to get their backs up and start educating the public – not just parents, but the body politic.

Teachers, weed out the deadwood

Teachers also need to clean up their profession and weed out the deadwood. Stop hunkering down and denying the obvious – there are ineffective, lazy people in the teaching profession, and teachers and their unions are the only ones who can properly get rid of them. Be proactive, get over the notion that protecting the deadwood protects you – it does not. In fact, you will all look better when you give those guys the boot.

When I was a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, I never saw a bad carpenter protected by anyone. The best were separated from the good, the good from the bad, and the bad eliminated. It wasn’t the employers who enforced the standards either, it was the union.

The carpenters and joiners are a strong and respected union because they insist on excellence. If they can do it, so can the American Federation of Teachers. Come on Randi*, get with it!

* Randi Weingarten, AFT president.

This essay first appeared on nmPolitics.net

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