From SighonSanDiego.com
By Mindy Sloan
The personal cost of teaching may be becoming too high. In my 10 years as a teacher of teachers, more and more of my students are reporting headaches, sleepless nights, irritated stomachs, chronic illness and even cancer. As someone who cares about children, and sees the necessity of having healthy teachers to support them, I can’t help but feel compelled to understand why teachers are getting sick.
Here are the reasons I have identified thus far.
Unrealistic expectations. One reason may be that we place unrealistic expectations on teachers. Classrooms are a place in which every societal challenge presents itself. If a community is impoverished, violent or drug infested, it is expressed through the children in the classroom. It is society’s expectation that the teacher in the classroom must be prepared to remediate any societal problem we present, and teach each child to read at the same time.
Changing requirements. The requirements to keep a teaching credential keep changing. As the needs of California’s children change, the training required to teach changes as well. For example, you may be a special-education teacher who has been effectively teaching children with autism for 20 years, but unless you go back to school and earn the new Added Authorization, Autism Spectrum Disorders, you will not be able to continue.
Debt. To earn a preliminary teaching credential in California, you will need a bachelor’s degree and at least one to two more years of college. The expectation for most teachers is that one should eventually earn a master’s or higher degree as well. By the time you have “finished” your education, you will have student loans that will take a large chunk of your paycheck over many years.
Teacher bashing. Teacher bashing has become politically correct. In an instant, knowing that teachers may be our greatest hope to improve student learning and ultimately prepare our nation to become more competitive on the global market changed to blaming teachers for the current economic condition. Teacher failures can’t explain the Wall Street bailout, mortgage foreclosures, violence in our streets, child abuse, homelessness or drug wars. We as a society must take responsibility for those conditions.
Teacher evaluation. Teacher evaluation has become personal. Many of you may be aware of the Los Angeles Times articles last summer, “Grading the Teachers: Valued-Added Analysis.” New York City Schools has followed suit, releasing ratings of 12,000 teachers. In both cases, each individual teacher was ranked based on the performance of the students in his/her classroom. While some ineffective teachers may be identified using this approach, there is no distinction between ineffectiveness and those competent teachers who are willing to take on the most challenging learners. Indeed, the message of the approach is clear. If you care about all learners, even those who have the most challenges, you will be identified as a bad teacher. For those who choose the profession because they love children and teaching, such a label is devastating.
Lack of support systems. There is no argument that the focus of our educational system should be on children, first and foremost. Caring for our children, however, means we must do what we can to give them the kind of adults they need to succeed. Some of these adults must be teachers, teachers who are not only academically prepared, but teachers who are emotionally and physically healthy as well. Thus far, teacher preparation programs focus on academic knowledge and skills. There is little to no mention of self-care or preparing for the emotional realities of working in today’s schools. Likewise, district funding does not include teacher support groups or systems to facilitate emotional health in current teachers. It should stand to reason that teachers who struggle with their own emotional and physical health cannot provide the kinds of environments students need to succeed. Indeed, one may consider that it is the emotionally unhealthy teacher who can be the most damaging to children.
In my experience, teachers are internalizers. They do not tend to complain and are not particularly good at advocating for themselves. They tend to put their own needs on the back burner, considering others first. The importance of healthy and effective teachers cannot be overly stated. As a group, they see every child. They impact every child. If we want to support our children, we must support their teachers.
Sloan is director of accreditation and associate professor of special education at Brandman Univeristy, part of the Chapman University System. She is the author of “Say It Now: Thank You to a Teacher.” Her e-mail address is msloan@brandman.edu
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/feb/20/is-teaching-making-our-teachers-sick/
Showing posts with label teacher bashing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teacher bashing. Show all posts
Monday, February 21, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Bashing Teachers and Public Schools comes from all sides
From the Washington Times Answer Sheet
By Stan Karp
Far too many people are bashing teachers and public schools. The attacks are coming from different places for different reasons, and we need to pay attention to the differences.
The parent who’s angry at the public school system because it’s not successfully educating his/her children is not the same as the billionaire with no education experience, who couldn’t survive in a classroom for two days, but who has made privatizing education policy a hobby, and who has the resources to do so because the country’s financial and tax systems serve the rich.
The educators who start a community-based charter school to create a collaborative school culture are not the same as the hedge fund managers who invest in charter schools to turn a profit, or who want to privatize our most important civic institution.
The well-meaning college grad who joins a Teach For America program is not the same as the corporate managers who want to use market reforms to create a less expensive, less secure and less experienced teaching force.
And the hard-pressed taxpayer who directs frustration at teachers struggling to hang on to their health insurance or pensions—which far too few people have at all—is not coming from the same place as those responsible for the obscene economic inequality that is squeezing both.
I’ve spent a large part of my adult life criticizing the flawed policies of public education as a teacher, an education activist and a policy advocate. But now I find myself spending a lot of time defending the very idea of public education against those who say, it should be blown up.
The increasingly polarized education policy debate is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of cuts. It’s not even about the hot-button issues getting all the attention like merit pay or charter schools.
What’s at stake is more basic: Whether the right to a free public education for all children will survive as a fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide it are going to survive as public institutions.
Will they be collectively owned and democratically managed, however imperfectly, by all of us as citizens, or will they be privatized and commercialized by corporate interests that increasingly dominate our society?
The larger goal, to borrow a phrase from the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political lobby financed by hedge fund millionaires that is a chief architect of the current campaign, is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization.
What is new and alarming are the large strides those promoting business models and market reforms have made in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of poor communities who have, in too many cases, been badly served by the current system.
The narrative of public education as a systematic failure has been fed in recent years by shifting federal policy. It’s moved away from its historic role as a promoter of access and equity through support for things such as school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools and services for students with special needs, and embraced a much less equitable set of mandates around testing, closing schools, firing school staff and distributing federal funds through “competitive grants” to “winners” at the expense of “losers.”
First with No Child Left Behind, and then with Race to the Top, Democrats have been playing tag team with Republicans building on the test and punish approach. Just how much this bipartisan consensus has solidified came home when I picked up my local paper one morning and saw Gov. Chris Christie, the most anti-public education governor New Jersey has ever had, quoted as saying “This is an incredibly special moment in American history, where you have Republicans in New Jersey agreeing with a Democratic president on how to get reform.”
Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.
The corporate/foundation crowd has successfully captured the media label as “education reformers.” If you support charters, merit pay, and control of school policy by corporate managers you’re a reformer. If you support increased school funding, collective bargaining and control of school policy by educators, you’re a defender of the status quo.
This is particularly true when it comes to the way the issue of poverty is being framed.
Of course poverty is no excuse for bad teaching, poor curriculum, massive dropout rates or year after year of lousy school outcomes. We need accountability systems that put pressure on schools to respond effectively to the communities they serve. And in my experience, parents are the key to creating that pressure and teachers are the key to implementing the changes needed to address it. Finding ways to promote a collaborative tension and partnership between these groups is a key to school improvement.
But the reformers’ notion that schools alone can make up for the inequality and poverty that exists all around them has become part of the “No Excuses” drumbeat used to impose reforms that have no record of success as school improvement strategies.
Instead they’re political strategies designed to bring market reform to public education.
Today we hear absurd claims about how super-teachers can eliminate achievement gaps with scripted curricula handed down from above, and how the real problem is not the country’s shameful 23% child poverty rate or underfunded schools. Instead it’s bad teachers.
Now it’s true that effective teachers and good schools can make an enormous difference in the life chances of children. And it’s also true that struggling teachers who don’t improve after they’ve been given support need to find other work.
But when it comes to student achievement—and especially the narrow, culturally-slanted, pseudo-achievement captured by standardized test scores—there is no evidence that the test score gaps you hear about constantly can be traced to bad teaching. And there is overwhelming evidence that they closely reflect the inequalities of race, class, and opportunity that follow students to school.
Teachers count a lot. But reality counts too. Reformers who discount the impact of poverty are actually the ones making excuses for their failure to make poverty reduction, and adequate and equitable school funding, a central part of school improvement efforts.
The federal government has put more effort into tying individual teacher compensation to test scores and pressing states to eliminate caps on charter schools than encouraging them to distribute more fairly the $600 billion they spend annually on K-12 education.
At the same time they want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create more tests based on the new common core standards and use those tests to implement merit pay plans.
Spending more money on standardized tests is like passing out thermometers in a malaria epidemic. People need better health care, more hospitals, and better-trained doctors, they don’t need more thermometers.
These test-based evaluation systems have the potential to seriously damage the teaching profession. Their basic assumptions are at odds with the way real schools actually work, and bending school practices to accommodate them could negatively affect everything from the way students are assigned to classes, to the willingness of teachers to serve high needs populations to the collaborative professional culture that good schools depend on for success. They’ll also require another massive increase in standardized testing.
The last issue I want to mention is charters. Today there are about 5,000 charter schools that enroll about 4% of all students. Few justify the hype they receive in "Waiting for Superman,” and those that do, like the schools featured in the film, are highly selective, privately subsidized schools that have very limited relevance for the public system. It’s like looking for models of public housing by studying luxury condo developments.
In the past 10 years, the character of the charter school movement has gone from community-based, educator-initiated local efforts to spur alternative approaches for a small number of students, to nationally funded efforts by foundations, investors and educational management companies to create a parallel, more privatized system.
This does not deny the reform impulse that is a real part of the charter movement. Many times during my 30 years of teaching at a large dysfunctional high school, I wanted to start my own school. And many of the issues that public school advocates like myself criticize in charters, like creaming, and unequal resources exist within the public system too.
But public schools have federal, state and district obligations that can be brought to bear. There are school boards, public budgets, public policies and public officials that can be held accountable in ways that privatized charters don’t allow. In post-Katrina New Orleans, where more than 60% of all students now attend unequal tiers of charter schools, there are students and parents who cannot find any schools to take them.
No one questions the desire of parents to find the best options they can for their children. But any strategy that promotes charter expansion at the expense of system-wide improvement and equity for the all schools is a plan for privatization not reform.
It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. And public schools are one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose in this country.
In some respects public education is our most successful democratic institution, doing more to reduce inequality, offer hope, and provide opportunity than the country’s financial, economic, political, and media institutions.
Those who believe that business models and market reforms hold the key to solving educational problems have a [reform] agenda, but:
It does not include all children and all families.
It does not include adequate, equitable and sustainable funding.
It does not include transparent public accountability.
It does not include the supports and reforms that educators need to do their jobs well.
It doesn’t address the legacy or the current realities of race and class inequality that surround our schools every day.
Where we go from here, as advocates and activists for social justice, depends in part on our ability to re-invent and articulate this missing equity agenda and to build a reform movement that can provide effective, credible alternatives to the strategies that are currently being imposed from above.
We need to reclaim not just our schools, but our political process and our public policy-making machinery, and control over our economic and social future. We don’t only need to fix our schools, we need to fix our democracy.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/why-teacher-bashing-is-dangero.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Stan Karp
Far too many people are bashing teachers and public schools. The attacks are coming from different places for different reasons, and we need to pay attention to the differences.
The parent who’s angry at the public school system because it’s not successfully educating his/her children is not the same as the billionaire with no education experience, who couldn’t survive in a classroom for two days, but who has made privatizing education policy a hobby, and who has the resources to do so because the country’s financial and tax systems serve the rich.
The educators who start a community-based charter school to create a collaborative school culture are not the same as the hedge fund managers who invest in charter schools to turn a profit, or who want to privatize our most important civic institution.
The well-meaning college grad who joins a Teach For America program is not the same as the corporate managers who want to use market reforms to create a less expensive, less secure and less experienced teaching force.
And the hard-pressed taxpayer who directs frustration at teachers struggling to hang on to their health insurance or pensions—which far too few people have at all—is not coming from the same place as those responsible for the obscene economic inequality that is squeezing both.
I’ve spent a large part of my adult life criticizing the flawed policies of public education as a teacher, an education activist and a policy advocate. But now I find myself spending a lot of time defending the very idea of public education against those who say, it should be blown up.
The increasingly polarized education policy debate is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of cuts. It’s not even about the hot-button issues getting all the attention like merit pay or charter schools.
What’s at stake is more basic: Whether the right to a free public education for all children will survive as a fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide it are going to survive as public institutions.
Will they be collectively owned and democratically managed, however imperfectly, by all of us as citizens, or will they be privatized and commercialized by corporate interests that increasingly dominate our society?
The larger goal, to borrow a phrase from the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political lobby financed by hedge fund millionaires that is a chief architect of the current campaign, is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization.
What is new and alarming are the large strides those promoting business models and market reforms have made in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of poor communities who have, in too many cases, been badly served by the current system.
The narrative of public education as a systematic failure has been fed in recent years by shifting federal policy. It’s moved away from its historic role as a promoter of access and equity through support for things such as school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools and services for students with special needs, and embraced a much less equitable set of mandates around testing, closing schools, firing school staff and distributing federal funds through “competitive grants” to “winners” at the expense of “losers.”
First with No Child Left Behind, and then with Race to the Top, Democrats have been playing tag team with Republicans building on the test and punish approach. Just how much this bipartisan consensus has solidified came home when I picked up my local paper one morning and saw Gov. Chris Christie, the most anti-public education governor New Jersey has ever had, quoted as saying “This is an incredibly special moment in American history, where you have Republicans in New Jersey agreeing with a Democratic president on how to get reform.”
Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.
The corporate/foundation crowd has successfully captured the media label as “education reformers.” If you support charters, merit pay, and control of school policy by corporate managers you’re a reformer. If you support increased school funding, collective bargaining and control of school policy by educators, you’re a defender of the status quo.
This is particularly true when it comes to the way the issue of poverty is being framed.
Of course poverty is no excuse for bad teaching, poor curriculum, massive dropout rates or year after year of lousy school outcomes. We need accountability systems that put pressure on schools to respond effectively to the communities they serve. And in my experience, parents are the key to creating that pressure and teachers are the key to implementing the changes needed to address it. Finding ways to promote a collaborative tension and partnership between these groups is a key to school improvement.
But the reformers’ notion that schools alone can make up for the inequality and poverty that exists all around them has become part of the “No Excuses” drumbeat used to impose reforms that have no record of success as school improvement strategies.
Instead they’re political strategies designed to bring market reform to public education.
Today we hear absurd claims about how super-teachers can eliminate achievement gaps with scripted curricula handed down from above, and how the real problem is not the country’s shameful 23% child poverty rate or underfunded schools. Instead it’s bad teachers.
Now it’s true that effective teachers and good schools can make an enormous difference in the life chances of children. And it’s also true that struggling teachers who don’t improve after they’ve been given support need to find other work.
But when it comes to student achievement—and especially the narrow, culturally-slanted, pseudo-achievement captured by standardized test scores—there is no evidence that the test score gaps you hear about constantly can be traced to bad teaching. And there is overwhelming evidence that they closely reflect the inequalities of race, class, and opportunity that follow students to school.
Teachers count a lot. But reality counts too. Reformers who discount the impact of poverty are actually the ones making excuses for their failure to make poverty reduction, and adequate and equitable school funding, a central part of school improvement efforts.
The federal government has put more effort into tying individual teacher compensation to test scores and pressing states to eliminate caps on charter schools than encouraging them to distribute more fairly the $600 billion they spend annually on K-12 education.
At the same time they want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create more tests based on the new common core standards and use those tests to implement merit pay plans.
Spending more money on standardized tests is like passing out thermometers in a malaria epidemic. People need better health care, more hospitals, and better-trained doctors, they don’t need more thermometers.
These test-based evaluation systems have the potential to seriously damage the teaching profession. Their basic assumptions are at odds with the way real schools actually work, and bending school practices to accommodate them could negatively affect everything from the way students are assigned to classes, to the willingness of teachers to serve high needs populations to the collaborative professional culture that good schools depend on for success. They’ll also require another massive increase in standardized testing.
The last issue I want to mention is charters. Today there are about 5,000 charter schools that enroll about 4% of all students. Few justify the hype they receive in "Waiting for Superman,” and those that do, like the schools featured in the film, are highly selective, privately subsidized schools that have very limited relevance for the public system. It’s like looking for models of public housing by studying luxury condo developments.
In the past 10 years, the character of the charter school movement has gone from community-based, educator-initiated local efforts to spur alternative approaches for a small number of students, to nationally funded efforts by foundations, investors and educational management companies to create a parallel, more privatized system.
This does not deny the reform impulse that is a real part of the charter movement. Many times during my 30 years of teaching at a large dysfunctional high school, I wanted to start my own school. And many of the issues that public school advocates like myself criticize in charters, like creaming, and unequal resources exist within the public system too.
But public schools have federal, state and district obligations that can be brought to bear. There are school boards, public budgets, public policies and public officials that can be held accountable in ways that privatized charters don’t allow. In post-Katrina New Orleans, where more than 60% of all students now attend unequal tiers of charter schools, there are students and parents who cannot find any schools to take them.
No one questions the desire of parents to find the best options they can for their children. But any strategy that promotes charter expansion at the expense of system-wide improvement and equity for the all schools is a plan for privatization not reform.
It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. And public schools are one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose in this country.
In some respects public education is our most successful democratic institution, doing more to reduce inequality, offer hope, and provide opportunity than the country’s financial, economic, political, and media institutions.
Those who believe that business models and market reforms hold the key to solving educational problems have a [reform] agenda, but:
It does not include all children and all families.
It does not include adequate, equitable and sustainable funding.
It does not include transparent public accountability.
It does not include the supports and reforms that educators need to do their jobs well.
It doesn’t address the legacy or the current realities of race and class inequality that surround our schools every day.
Where we go from here, as advocates and activists for social justice, depends in part on our ability to re-invent and articulate this missing equity agenda and to build a reform movement that can provide effective, credible alternatives to the strategies that are currently being imposed from above.
We need to reclaim not just our schools, but our political process and our public policy-making machinery, and control over our economic and social future. We don’t only need to fix our schools, we need to fix our democracy.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/why-teacher-bashing-is-dangero.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Friday, February 4, 2011
Teaching as a Service Industry
From the Guardian.co.uk with a Nod to Mike Klonskys Small Talk Blog
by Paul Thomas
Management and labour are hurtling towards an impasse, and a work stoppage looms. Workers are seeking public support by emphasising the importance of benefits for workers, specifically longterm healthcare for conditions caused by the profession that do not appear until later in life.
This may sound for many like the possible scenario for a teachers' strike, backed by a powerful teachers' union. But if this were a teachers' strike, in 2011, we could anticipate little support for those teachers – not least because of the propaganda created by Davis Guggenheim's documentary Waiting for "Superman" and the rise of false prophets of education reform (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee).
However, above, I am speaking about the possible NFL strike that hangs over this coming Super Bowl weekend: a struggle between billionaires and millionaires, which, indirectly, shines an important light on the rise of teacher and teacher union-bashing in the US. Adam Bessie, on Truthout, identifies how the myth of the bad teacher has evolved:
"In this political season of faux anti-establishment anger born of very real economic desperation, public educators have become the villain du jour, their reputations collateral damage in the war against 'big government'. In a remarkable sleight of hand, the super rich who imploded the economy, manufacturing the recession which now enrages the public, have successfully misdirected the public's justifiable anger away from them and toward teachers."
While few people have begun to demonise and criticise either the billionaire owners or the millionaire players (represented by a union) in the NFL, the education reform landscape is built on a false premise – blaming teachers and unions for school failures – that lacks credibility and masks the overwhelming source of education failures: namely, poverty.
Ironically, the new push against teachers' unions, cloaked in discourse about the damage done by "bad" teachers, comes from Democrats. For example, Arne Duncan, speaking on behalf of the Obama administration in Little Rock, Arkansas on 25 August 2010, focused on teacher quality:
"The big game-changer for us, however, in terms of both formula and competitive programmes, revolves around the issue of teacher quality … Nothing is more important and nothing has a greater impact on the quality of education than the quality and skill of the person standing in the front of the class – and there is so much that needs to change in the way that America recruits, trains, supports and manages our teachers."
But the political attacks on teachers and unions, which come from both the left and the right, would likely not resonate as much as they have done, if it were not for the celebrity tour on the back of the documentary Waiting for "Superman", whose message has been perpetuated by celebrity reformers. Two of those, Bill Gates and Geoffrey Canada, share an entrepreneur status that suggests expertise on everything simply because they are wealthy. (Possibly, also, this is what protects NFL owners and players from social ridicule in their fight.)
Both Gates and Canada also use compliant media adroitly to promote their unsupported claims. Canada appeared on the Colbert Report as part of his tour, specifically reinforcing the idea that teacher accountability is central to school reform. "We've got to hold the adults responsible … We've allowed our schools to fail these kids with no consequences," Canada told Colbert's audience.
Gates, again due to his incredible wealth and corporate success, commands media attention – media that rarely question his claims. Take, for example, the Newsweek interview by Daniel Lyons with Gates and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. While the entire interview perpetuates misunderstanding about education reform, the focus on teacher quality and the role of unions exemplifies the claims of the new reformers – even as it exposes those claims' lack of credibility.
In August of 2010, the attack on teacher professionalism was intensified when the Los Angeles Times published teacher quality analyses based on value-added methods (VAM). The charges against teacher quality and teachers' unions elicited several stringent rejections (here, here, and here), but most challenges came from educators themselves – and, of course, received little media coverage when compared to the attention lavished on Gates, Rhee and Canada.
The message has solidified: US public schools are failures because we have too many bad teachers, and we have too many bad teachers because teachers' unions use their excessive power to keep bad teachers in jobs. But it doesn't end there.
By October 2010, the narrative developed further, to take in that our teaching core is weak because "[c]ountries with the best-performing school systems largely recruit teachers from the top third of high school and college graduates, while the United States has difficulty attracting its top students to the profession, a new report finds." The formula was growing complex, but there was a pattern to the proposed solutions: usurp teachers' union control and fire bad teachers; then restock the depleted teacher core with recruits from among top US students.
Ultimately, this PR campaign by corporate and political leaders has been effective, even if it remains inaccurate. Teacher quality represents only a small percentage of achievement, and there is little evidence that teacher quality is the greatest issue, or even one of the main problems, facing student achievement in public schools.
A provable problem with teacher quality, however, is teacher assignment. Peske and Haycock show that students in poverty, students of colour and ELL students are in classrooms with the least experienced teachers, who are often uncertified or underqualified. Of course, teacher quality does matter in terms of what happens once students are within the walls of schools, but we seem blind to the longstanding tradition of assigning the most experienced and best-qualified teachers to the elite students, who already experience major advantages in their lives outside of school.
That the evidence-based inequity of teacher assignment is ignored, while the myth of the bad teacher is perpetuated, is evidence of the motivation behind the new reformers – an unspoken commitment to the status quo of this social inequity that benefits the very people so keen to lay charges against teachers and unions. And the rants against unions are just as suspect as the claims that bad teachers are crippling schools. Two examples expose the flaws in union-bashing.
First, the new reformers hold up Finland as the model for education reform – while failing to identify two crucial facts: that Finland has low childhood poverty (about 3-4%, compared to over 20% in the US) and that Finland's teachers are nearly 100% unionised. Consider, also, South Carolina, a high-poverty state with a reputation for having a weak education system. South Carolina joined the accountability era at the beginning, taking "A Nation at Risk" seriously and creating standards, testing and accountability in 1984. Despite nearly three decades of precisely the process supported by the new reformers, South Carolina finds itself still ranking at the bottom of education in the US. The real dynamic here is that South Carolina remains a high-poverty state – the true cause of low test scores – and also that South Carolina is a non-union state, with no union contracts for teachers and no tenure.
Now, let's step back from all the separate but overlapping claims about teachers, teacher quality and teachers unions. If we look at them together, we discover that two powerful yet contradictory messages exist in the larger public discourse promoted by the new reformers: contradictory messages that allow one message to mask the other. Political and corporate leaders seek to speak about teaching as if it is a profession, while expecting those professionals to function as a service industry. The narratives offered by Obama and Duncan, Waiting for "Superman" and organisations such as Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and Teach for America argue for the best and the brightest to implement mandated, common core standards, so that their students can take national tests for which those teachers will be held accountable. And all that while teachers are required to waive their first amendment rights, right to due process, and work for salaries that are less than a regular NFL fine.
Beneath the political and corporate veneer espousing teaching as a profession lurks a simple fact: the corporate and political elite wants teaching to be a service industry. Worse yet, they have their wish, because teaching is now a service industry, ultimately devoted to perpetuating an economic system based on social inequity and a venal consumer culture.
So, let's return to the NFL dispute. Corporate, political and public sentiment is against teachers' unions, framing unions as the source of all that ails public education; this narrative now holds firm. But virtually no one has cried foul when it comes to the unionised labour struggle of millionaire NFL players pitted against billionaire team owners. This may seem contradictory, but I believe it is not.
Corporate America benefits from the NFL thriving and from the de-professionalising of teaching – regardless of the union element. Outcries about bad teachers and corrupt teachers' unions are not about educational reform, but about guaranteeing that teaching will become permanently a service industry in which schools are reduced to the sole purpose of producing compliant workers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/04/usdomesticpolicy-schools
by Paul Thomas
Management and labour are hurtling towards an impasse, and a work stoppage looms. Workers are seeking public support by emphasising the importance of benefits for workers, specifically longterm healthcare for conditions caused by the profession that do not appear until later in life.
This may sound for many like the possible scenario for a teachers' strike, backed by a powerful teachers' union. But if this were a teachers' strike, in 2011, we could anticipate little support for those teachers – not least because of the propaganda created by Davis Guggenheim's documentary Waiting for "Superman" and the rise of false prophets of education reform (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee).
However, above, I am speaking about the possible NFL strike that hangs over this coming Super Bowl weekend: a struggle between billionaires and millionaires, which, indirectly, shines an important light on the rise of teacher and teacher union-bashing in the US. Adam Bessie, on Truthout, identifies how the myth of the bad teacher has evolved:
"In this political season of faux anti-establishment anger born of very real economic desperation, public educators have become the villain du jour, their reputations collateral damage in the war against 'big government'. In a remarkable sleight of hand, the super rich who imploded the economy, manufacturing the recession which now enrages the public, have successfully misdirected the public's justifiable anger away from them and toward teachers."
While few people have begun to demonise and criticise either the billionaire owners or the millionaire players (represented by a union) in the NFL, the education reform landscape is built on a false premise – blaming teachers and unions for school failures – that lacks credibility and masks the overwhelming source of education failures: namely, poverty.
Ironically, the new push against teachers' unions, cloaked in discourse about the damage done by "bad" teachers, comes from Democrats. For example, Arne Duncan, speaking on behalf of the Obama administration in Little Rock, Arkansas on 25 August 2010, focused on teacher quality:
"The big game-changer for us, however, in terms of both formula and competitive programmes, revolves around the issue of teacher quality … Nothing is more important and nothing has a greater impact on the quality of education than the quality and skill of the person standing in the front of the class – and there is so much that needs to change in the way that America recruits, trains, supports and manages our teachers."
But the political attacks on teachers and unions, which come from both the left and the right, would likely not resonate as much as they have done, if it were not for the celebrity tour on the back of the documentary Waiting for "Superman", whose message has been perpetuated by celebrity reformers. Two of those, Bill Gates and Geoffrey Canada, share an entrepreneur status that suggests expertise on everything simply because they are wealthy. (Possibly, also, this is what protects NFL owners and players from social ridicule in their fight.)
Both Gates and Canada also use compliant media adroitly to promote their unsupported claims. Canada appeared on the Colbert Report as part of his tour, specifically reinforcing the idea that teacher accountability is central to school reform. "We've got to hold the adults responsible … We've allowed our schools to fail these kids with no consequences," Canada told Colbert's audience.
Gates, again due to his incredible wealth and corporate success, commands media attention – media that rarely question his claims. Take, for example, the Newsweek interview by Daniel Lyons with Gates and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. While the entire interview perpetuates misunderstanding about education reform, the focus on teacher quality and the role of unions exemplifies the claims of the new reformers – even as it exposes those claims' lack of credibility.
In August of 2010, the attack on teacher professionalism was intensified when the Los Angeles Times published teacher quality analyses based on value-added methods (VAM). The charges against teacher quality and teachers' unions elicited several stringent rejections (here, here, and here), but most challenges came from educators themselves – and, of course, received little media coverage when compared to the attention lavished on Gates, Rhee and Canada.
The message has solidified: US public schools are failures because we have too many bad teachers, and we have too many bad teachers because teachers' unions use their excessive power to keep bad teachers in jobs. But it doesn't end there.
By October 2010, the narrative developed further, to take in that our teaching core is weak because "[c]ountries with the best-performing school systems largely recruit teachers from the top third of high school and college graduates, while the United States has difficulty attracting its top students to the profession, a new report finds." The formula was growing complex, but there was a pattern to the proposed solutions: usurp teachers' union control and fire bad teachers; then restock the depleted teacher core with recruits from among top US students.
Ultimately, this PR campaign by corporate and political leaders has been effective, even if it remains inaccurate. Teacher quality represents only a small percentage of achievement, and there is little evidence that teacher quality is the greatest issue, or even one of the main problems, facing student achievement in public schools.
A provable problem with teacher quality, however, is teacher assignment. Peske and Haycock show that students in poverty, students of colour and ELL students are in classrooms with the least experienced teachers, who are often uncertified or underqualified. Of course, teacher quality does matter in terms of what happens once students are within the walls of schools, but we seem blind to the longstanding tradition of assigning the most experienced and best-qualified teachers to the elite students, who already experience major advantages in their lives outside of school.
That the evidence-based inequity of teacher assignment is ignored, while the myth of the bad teacher is perpetuated, is evidence of the motivation behind the new reformers – an unspoken commitment to the status quo of this social inequity that benefits the very people so keen to lay charges against teachers and unions. And the rants against unions are just as suspect as the claims that bad teachers are crippling schools. Two examples expose the flaws in union-bashing.
First, the new reformers hold up Finland as the model for education reform – while failing to identify two crucial facts: that Finland has low childhood poverty (about 3-4%, compared to over 20% in the US) and that Finland's teachers are nearly 100% unionised. Consider, also, South Carolina, a high-poverty state with a reputation for having a weak education system. South Carolina joined the accountability era at the beginning, taking "A Nation at Risk" seriously and creating standards, testing and accountability in 1984. Despite nearly three decades of precisely the process supported by the new reformers, South Carolina finds itself still ranking at the bottom of education in the US. The real dynamic here is that South Carolina remains a high-poverty state – the true cause of low test scores – and also that South Carolina is a non-union state, with no union contracts for teachers and no tenure.
Now, let's step back from all the separate but overlapping claims about teachers, teacher quality and teachers unions. If we look at them together, we discover that two powerful yet contradictory messages exist in the larger public discourse promoted by the new reformers: contradictory messages that allow one message to mask the other. Political and corporate leaders seek to speak about teaching as if it is a profession, while expecting those professionals to function as a service industry. The narratives offered by Obama and Duncan, Waiting for "Superman" and organisations such as Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and Teach for America argue for the best and the brightest to implement mandated, common core standards, so that their students can take national tests for which those teachers will be held accountable. And all that while teachers are required to waive their first amendment rights, right to due process, and work for salaries that are less than a regular NFL fine.
Beneath the political and corporate veneer espousing teaching as a profession lurks a simple fact: the corporate and political elite wants teaching to be a service industry. Worse yet, they have their wish, because teaching is now a service industry, ultimately devoted to perpetuating an economic system based on social inequity and a venal consumer culture.
So, let's return to the NFL dispute. Corporate, political and public sentiment is against teachers' unions, framing unions as the source of all that ails public education; this narrative now holds firm. But virtually no one has cried foul when it comes to the unionised labour struggle of millionaire NFL players pitted against billionaire team owners. This may seem contradictory, but I believe it is not.
Corporate America benefits from the NFL thriving and from the de-professionalising of teaching – regardless of the union element. Outcries about bad teachers and corrupt teachers' unions are not about educational reform, but about guaranteeing that teaching will become permanently a service industry in which schools are reduced to the sole purpose of producing compliant workers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/04/usdomesticpolicy-schools
Saturday, January 15, 2011
What are teachers waiting for?
I have been saying this for years. -cpg
From Ed Voices
By Chris Janotta
On January 4th, many teachers, parents, students, and other Americans started out 2011 by wearing the color red to show their support for public education. Nearly five thousand people from all across America replied through Facebook that they were wearing red, and many more than that actually participated.
The “Wear Red For Public Ed” campaign generated press and discussion from Colorado to Florida and just about everywhere in between. Teachers said it made them feel empowered and not so alone when they saw others dressed in the same color. The event was so successful, that it has now become a weekly goal to “Wear Red For Public Ed” every Tuesday. Based on all of this, the “Wear Red For Public Ed” campaign was successful at doing what it was meant to do: create awareness and get people involved in and talking about public education.
However, many teachers have asked, “What next?” Well, here’s what I think.
Teachers have always been in the public eye, but currently, teachers are under the microscope more than ever. Education has become a hot topic, and, like it or not, teachers are the face that people see when they think of public education. It seems everybody has an opinion about how teachers should teach, how much they should be paid for doing it, and what that pay should be based upon. A day doesn’t go by that somebody, somewhere doesn’t write something regarding such topics as teacher tenure, teacher’s unions, or teachers’ productivity. As a teacher, I welcome and encourage this discussion. However, it is well past the time that teachers insert themselves into the conversation.
For far too long, teachers have complained about “teacher-bashing,” but have either voiced the complaint without providing any type of solution, or have kept their voices safely tucked behind the scenes in teachers’ lounges or other places where only sympathetic ears are listening. Occasionally, teachers might even let their voices venture throughout the realms of the Internet, anonymously posting comments on those stories they find most offensive.
Teachers, I am here to tell you that the time for “safe” complaining, the time for preaching to the choir, the time for anonymity has expired.
We must let the public get to know us, we should let the public hear our complaints, but, more importantly, we must let the public hear our solutions. And we must all do this together.
There are plenty of teachers out there right now standing up for public education and speaking out on behalf of public educators, but plenty is not enough. There are many teachers blogging, Tweeting, and Facebooking about the real issues facing public education, but many is not enough. There are even some teachers out there like Gina Frutig of North Carolina who have been bold enough to speak up about public education straight to the faces of our legislators, but some is definitely not enough.
If teachers truly want the public education system to succeed, then we must all be a part of that success; we must all share a part of the collective voice that I believe the rest of America is ready to hear.
What makes me so sure Americans want to hear from teachers? Well, when seeking advice for an ailment, they consult a physician. When the problem at hand concerns the law, they enlist the professional services of an attorney. It is only natural, then, that when the issue on the table is public education, the American public would want to hear from professional public educators. Who knows the ins and outs of the public education system better than teachers? Who else, other than teachers, works day-to-day putting the policies of education into practice? Who best to ask about what works in the classroom versus what doesn’t work if not teachers?
The problem is, the public isn’t asking these questions because they are being pre-fed the answers by those outside the teaching profession—and they are believing them. If you don’t think this is true, just take a look at the results of some of the polls that are out there. They show that the majority of people feel America’s public education system is not up to the standards it should be.
Why do they think this? Because this is what those outside the profession are telling them. However, when looked at more closely, these same polls reveal that Americans feel the schools in their own communities are doing quite well.
Why the huge contrast? Because in their own communities, Americans see the work teachers do. They communicate with those same teachers via phone calls, emails, and fa-to-face conferences. They understand the problems teachers face on a daily basis, such as dealing with a lack of resources or technology, having no control over the curricula they are forced to teach and test on, and having to make accommodations due to overcrowded classes, just to name a few.
They see these problems teachers are up against, and, since teachers are the face of public education, they begin to see some of the problems facing public education. However, those same Americans then turn on their televisions or open up their newspapers and hear or read about all of the rotten teachers that are dragging the education system down with their tenure, and their unions, and their implied lack of proper teaching techniques. They hear about all of the reforms that “need” to be put into place to fix all of this. And then they must sit back and think to themselves how lucky they are to live in a community with the only good teachers in the nation.
So how do we change this? By doing what we do best: communicating. We obviously communicate very well with the parents and guardians of our own students because they understand and support us. What we need to do now is communicate with the rest of America. Not about what we are so upset with, why we feel under attack, or how tired we are of feeling misunderstood, but about who we are, what we do, and how we think public education needs to be reformed.
And, as teachers, we need to do this publicly and continually until our message is heard and acted upon because if we don’t, your anonymous cries for help will never be answered. And when you look into the mirror and see the face of public education staring back at you, you might not recognize it anymore.
From Ed Voices
By Chris Janotta
On January 4th, many teachers, parents, students, and other Americans started out 2011 by wearing the color red to show their support for public education. Nearly five thousand people from all across America replied through Facebook that they were wearing red, and many more than that actually participated.
The “Wear Red For Public Ed” campaign generated press and discussion from Colorado to Florida and just about everywhere in between. Teachers said it made them feel empowered and not so alone when they saw others dressed in the same color. The event was so successful, that it has now become a weekly goal to “Wear Red For Public Ed” every Tuesday. Based on all of this, the “Wear Red For Public Ed” campaign was successful at doing what it was meant to do: create awareness and get people involved in and talking about public education.
However, many teachers have asked, “What next?” Well, here’s what I think.
Teachers have always been in the public eye, but currently, teachers are under the microscope more than ever. Education has become a hot topic, and, like it or not, teachers are the face that people see when they think of public education. It seems everybody has an opinion about how teachers should teach, how much they should be paid for doing it, and what that pay should be based upon. A day doesn’t go by that somebody, somewhere doesn’t write something regarding such topics as teacher tenure, teacher’s unions, or teachers’ productivity. As a teacher, I welcome and encourage this discussion. However, it is well past the time that teachers insert themselves into the conversation.
For far too long, teachers have complained about “teacher-bashing,” but have either voiced the complaint without providing any type of solution, or have kept their voices safely tucked behind the scenes in teachers’ lounges or other places where only sympathetic ears are listening. Occasionally, teachers might even let their voices venture throughout the realms of the Internet, anonymously posting comments on those stories they find most offensive.
Teachers, I am here to tell you that the time for “safe” complaining, the time for preaching to the choir, the time for anonymity has expired.
We must let the public get to know us, we should let the public hear our complaints, but, more importantly, we must let the public hear our solutions. And we must all do this together.
There are plenty of teachers out there right now standing up for public education and speaking out on behalf of public educators, but plenty is not enough. There are many teachers blogging, Tweeting, and Facebooking about the real issues facing public education, but many is not enough. There are even some teachers out there like Gina Frutig of North Carolina who have been bold enough to speak up about public education straight to the faces of our legislators, but some is definitely not enough.
If teachers truly want the public education system to succeed, then we must all be a part of that success; we must all share a part of the collective voice that I believe the rest of America is ready to hear.
What makes me so sure Americans want to hear from teachers? Well, when seeking advice for an ailment, they consult a physician. When the problem at hand concerns the law, they enlist the professional services of an attorney. It is only natural, then, that when the issue on the table is public education, the American public would want to hear from professional public educators. Who knows the ins and outs of the public education system better than teachers? Who else, other than teachers, works day-to-day putting the policies of education into practice? Who best to ask about what works in the classroom versus what doesn’t work if not teachers?
The problem is, the public isn’t asking these questions because they are being pre-fed the answers by those outside the teaching profession—and they are believing them. If you don’t think this is true, just take a look at the results of some of the polls that are out there. They show that the majority of people feel America’s public education system is not up to the standards it should be.
Why do they think this? Because this is what those outside the profession are telling them. However, when looked at more closely, these same polls reveal that Americans feel the schools in their own communities are doing quite well.
Why the huge contrast? Because in their own communities, Americans see the work teachers do. They communicate with those same teachers via phone calls, emails, and fa-to-face conferences. They understand the problems teachers face on a daily basis, such as dealing with a lack of resources or technology, having no control over the curricula they are forced to teach and test on, and having to make accommodations due to overcrowded classes, just to name a few.
They see these problems teachers are up against, and, since teachers are the face of public education, they begin to see some of the problems facing public education. However, those same Americans then turn on their televisions or open up their newspapers and hear or read about all of the rotten teachers that are dragging the education system down with their tenure, and their unions, and their implied lack of proper teaching techniques. They hear about all of the reforms that “need” to be put into place to fix all of this. And then they must sit back and think to themselves how lucky they are to live in a community with the only good teachers in the nation.
So how do we change this? By doing what we do best: communicating. We obviously communicate very well with the parents and guardians of our own students because they understand and support us. What we need to do now is communicate with the rest of America. Not about what we are so upset with, why we feel under attack, or how tired we are of feeling misunderstood, but about who we are, what we do, and how we think public education needs to be reformed.
And, as teachers, we need to do this publicly and continually until our message is heard and acted upon because if we don’t, your anonymous cries for help will never be answered. And when you look into the mirror and see the face of public education staring back at you, you might not recognize it anymore.
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