Sunday, October 28, 2012

When Teacher Unions Fail Teachers

I had the opportunity to come across a copy of the Connecticut Education Association's newsletter that endorses Barack Obama rather than Romney.  It was a piece called "The Choice is Clear".  And in that endorsement it contained a comparison chart of the two candidates that was surreal.

The reasons to endorse Obama included numerous assertions that Obama's commitment to NCLB and RTTT were desirable!  In one category after another the union was endorsing Obama because he he was faithfully sticking to education policies that were not only bad for students and society (neither of which the CEA has ever cared about more than their own self-interest) but bad for teachers as well.

The endorsement was an exercise in self-immolation that characterizes the multi-polar disease that afflicts public education today.

I recently had dinner with a teacher who was very impressed by Diane Ravitch's blog. Ravitch, a former government administrator responsible for advocating for the rancid education policies she has come to now loath (and profit from loathing), has become a proxy union hero.  She says, the things that many politically sleepy teachers believe and wish SOMEONE/ANYONE would say for them. Teachers are far too busy during the school year to be effective teaching AND be effective politically.

The teachers unions who should be the voice of teacher concerns, rarely are.  The unions, run more by politically connected political operatives and lawyers than educators, are partially and significantly responsible for the public education meltdown that all public school teachers decry.They sell teacher votes like marketing firms sell phone lists to phone spammers.  And a perfect example of this wholesale selling is the Obama endorsement in their newsletter.  It is biased for the benefit of the union apparatchik and not teachers, education, or the public schools.

Ravitch's blog recently published a letter of resignation from a teacher that tidily summarized many real teacher concerns:

"Let me cut to the chase: I quit. -snip- I quit. I quit. I quit!Why?Because…
I refuse to be led by a top-down hierarchy that is completely detached from the classrooms for which it is supposed to be responsible.
I will not spend another day under the expectations that I prepare every student for the increasing numbers of meaningless tests.I refuse to be an unpaid administrator of field tests that take advantage of children for the sake of profit.
I will not spend another day wishing I had some time to plan my fantastic lessons because administration comes up with new and inventive ways to steal that time, under the guise of PLC meetings or whatever. I’ve seen successful PLC development. It doesn’t look like this.
I will not spend another day wondering what menial, administrative task I will hear that I forgot to do next. I’m far enough behind in my own work.
I will not spend another day wondering how I can have classes that are full inclusion, and where 50% of my students have IEPs, yet I’m given no support.
I will not spend another day in a district where my coworkers are both on autopilot and in survival mode. Misery loves company, but I will not be that company.
I refuse to subject students to every ridiculous standardized test that the state and/or district thinks is important. I refuse to have my higher-level and deep thinking lessons disrupted by meaningless assessments (like the EXPLORE test) that do little more than increase stress among children and teachers, and attempt to guide young adolescents into narrow choices.
I totally object and refuse to have my performance as an educator rely on “Standard 6.” It is unfair, biased, and does not reflect anything about the teaching practices of proven educators.
I refuse to hear again that it’s more important that I serve as a test administrator than a leader of my peers.
I refuse to watch my students being treated like prisoners. There are other ways. It’s a shame that we don’t have the vision to seek out those alternatives.
I refuse to watch my coworkers being treated like untrustworthy slackers through the overbearing policies of this state, although they are the hardest working and most overloaded people I know.
I refuse to watch my family struggle financially as I work in a job to which I have invested 6 long years of my life in preparation. I have a graduate degree and a track record of strong success, yet I’m paid less than many two-year degree holders. And forget benefits—they are effectively nonexistent for teachers in North Carolina.
I refuse to watch my district’s leadership tell us about the bad news and horrific changes coming towards us, then watch them shrug incompetently, and then tell us to work harder.
I refuse to listen to our highly regarded superintendent telling us that the charter school movement is at our doorstep (with a soon-to-be-elected governor in full support) and tell us not to worry about it, because we are applying for a grant from Race to the Top. There is no consistency here; there is no leadership here.
I refuse to watch my students slouch under the weight of a system that expects them to perform well on EOG tests, which do not measure their abilities other than memorization and application and therefore do not measure their readiness for the next grade level—much less life, career, or college.
I’m tired of watching my students produce amazing things, which show their true understanding of 21st century skills, only to see their looks of disappointment when they don’t meet the arbitrary expectations of low-level state and district tests that do not assess their skills.
I refuse to hear any more about how important it is to differentiate our instruction as we prepare our kids for tests that are anything but differentiated. This negates our hard work and makes us look bad.I am tired of hearing about the miracles my peers are expected to perform, and watching the districts do next to nothing to support or develop them. I haven’t seen real professional development in either district since I got here. The development sessions I have seen are sloppy, shallow, and have no real means of evaluation or accountability.
I’m tired of my increasing and troublesome physical symptoms that come from all this frustration, stress, and sadness.Finally, I’m tired of watching parents being tricked into believing that their children are being prepared for the complex world ahead, especially since their children’s teachers are being cowed into meeting expectations and standards that are not conducive to their children’s futures.
I’m truly angry that parents put so much stress, fear, and anticipation into their kids’ heads in preparation for the EOG tests and the new MSLs—neither of which are consequential to their future needs. As a parent of a high school student in Union County, I’m dismayed at the education that my child receives, as her teachers frantically prepare her for more tests. My toddler will not attend a North Carolina public school. I will do whatever it takes to keep that from happening.
I quit because I’m tired being part of the problem. It’s killing me and it’s not doing anyone else any good. Farewell.
Dr. June Atkinson"

Comparing the union endorsement to this teacher's litany of frustrations is instructive.  The union endorsement praises Obama for inflicting most of the pains this teacher finds offensive and unacceptable.  Can the Teachers Unions become any more divorced from the reality of their constituents?

If the public schools are to survive and thrive then the first order of business for teachers is to become independent voters AND to REFORM THE TEACHERS UNIONS.  The dirty little secret of the public school education crisis is that it is self-inflicted first and foremost by the political indifference of teacher unions and the misrepresentation of teacher interests by these unions.

A recent article in Slate magazine summarizes the differences between Romney and Obama as far less obvious than the current campaign leads us to believe.

In The Progressive Case Against Obama by Matt Stoller, Stoller enumerates the wholesale failure of the Obama administration to serve its constituency.

It represents a new kind of politics, one where Obama, and yes, he did this, officially enshrined rights for the elite in our constitutional order and removed rights from everyone else (see “The Housing Crash and the End of American Citizenship” in the Fordham Urban Law Journal for a more complete discussion of the problem). The bailouts and the associated Federal Reserve actions were not primarily shifts of funds to bankers; they were a guarantee that property rights for a certain class of creditors were immune from challenge or market forces. The foreclosure crisis, with its rampant criminality, predatory lending, and document forgeries, represents the flip side. Property rights for debtors simply increasingly exist solely at the pleasure of the powerful. The lack of prosecution of Wall Street executives, the ability of banks to borrow at 0 percent from the Federal Reserve while most of us face credit card rates of 15-30 percent, and the bailouts are all part of the re-creation of the American system of law around Obama’s oligarchy.
The policy continuity with Bush is a stark contrast to what Obama offered as a candidate. Look at the broken promises from the 2008 Democratic platform: a higher minimum wage, a ban on the replacement of striking workers, seven days of paid sick leave, a more diverse media ownership structure, renegotiation of NAFTA, letting bankruptcy judges write down mortgage debt, a ban on illegal wiretaps, an end to national security letters, stopping the war on whistle-blowers, passing the Employee Free Choice Act, restoring habeas corpusand labor protections in the FAA bill. Each of these pledges would have tilted bargaining leverage to debtors, to labor, or to political dissidents. So Obama promised them to distinguish himself from Bush, and then went back on his word because these promises didn’t fit with the larger policy arc of shifting American society toward his vision. For sure, Obama believes he is doing the right thing, that his policies are what’s best for society. He is a conservative technocrat, running a policy architecture to ensure that conservative technocrats like him run the complex machinery of the state and reap private rewards from doing so. Radical political and economic inequality is the result. None of these policy shifts, with the exception of TARP, is that important in and of themselves, but together they add up to declining living standards.
While life has never been fair, the chart above shows that, since World War II, this level of official legal, political and economic inequity for the broad mass of the public is new (though obviously for subgroups, like African-Americans, it was not new). It is as if America’s traditional racial segregationist tendencies have been reorganized, and the tools and tactics of that system have been repurposed for a multicultural elite colonizing a multicultural population. The data bears this out: Under Bush, economic inequality was bad, as 65 cents of every dollar of income growth went to the top 1 percent. Under Obama, however, that number is 93 cents out of every dollar. That’s right, under Barack Obama there is more economic inequality than under George W. Bush. And if you look at the chart above, most of this shift happened in 2009-2010, when Democrats controlled Congress. This was not, in other words, the doing of the mean Republican Congress. And it’s not strictly a result of the financial crisis; after all, corporate profits did crash, like housing values did, but they also recovered, while housing values have not.
This is the shape of the system Obama has designed. It is intentional, it is the modern American order, and it has a certain equilibrium, the kind we identify in Middle Eastern resource extraction based economies. We are even seeing, as I showed in an earlier post, a transition of the American economic order toward a petro-state. By some accounts, America will be the largest producer of hydrocarbons in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia. This is just not an America that any of us should want to live in. It is a country whose economic basis is oligarchy, whose political system is authoritarianism, and whose political culture is murderous toward the rest of the world and suicidal in our aggressive lack of attention to climate change.
Many will claim that Obama was stymied by a Republican Congress. But the primary policy framework Obama put in place – the bailouts, took place during the transition and the immediate months after the election, when Obama had enormous leverage over the Bush administration and then a dominant Democratic Party in Congress. In fact, during the transition itself, Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson offered a deal to Barney Frank, to force banks to write down mortgages and stem foreclosures if Barney would speed up the release of TARP money. Paulson demanded, as a condition of the deal, that Obama sign off on it. Barney said fine, but to his surprise, the incoming president vetoed the deal. Yup, you heard that right — the Bush administration was willing to write down mortgages in response to Democratic pressure, but it was Obama who said no, we want a foreclosure crisis. And with Neil Barofsky’s book ”Bailout,” we see why. Tim Geithner said, in private meetings, that the foreclosure mitigation programs were not meant to mitigate foreclosures, but to spread out pain for the banks, the famous “foam the runway” comment. This central lie is key to the entire Obama economic strategy. It is not that Obama was stymied by Congress, or was up against a system, or faced a massive crisis, which led to the shape of the economy we see today. Rather, Obama had a handshake deal to help the middle class offered to him by Paulson, and Obama said no. He was not constrained by anything but his own policy instincts. And the reflation of corporate profits and financial assets and death of the middle class were the predictable results.
The rest of Obama’s policy framework looks very different when you wake up from the dream state pushed by cable news. Obama’s history of personal use of illegal narcotics, combined with his escalation of the war on medical marijuana (despite declining support for the drug war in the Democratic caucus), shows both a personal hypocrisy and destructive cynicism that we should decry in anyone, let alone an important policymaker who helps keep a half a million people in jail for participating in a legitimate economy outlawed by the drug warrior industry. But it makes sense once you realize that his policy architecture coheres with a Romney-like philosophy that there is one set of rules for the little people, and another for the important people. It’s why the administration quietly pushed Chinese investment in American infrastructure, seeks to privatize public education, removed labor protections from the FAA authorization bill, and inserted a provision into the stimulus bill ensuring AIG bonuses would be paid, and then lied about it to avoid blame. Wall Street speculator who rigged markets are simply smart and savvy businessmen, as Obama called Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, whereas the millions who fell prey to their predatory lending schemes are irresponsible borrowers. And it’s why Obama is explicitly targeting entitlements, insurance programs for which Americans paid. Obama wants to preserve these programs for the “most vulnerable,” but that’s still a taking. Did not every American pay into Social Security and Medicare? They did, but as with the foreclosure crisis, property rights (which are essential legal rights) of the rest of us are irrelevant. While Romney is explicit about 47 percent of the country being worthless, Obama just acts as if they are charity cases. In neither case does either candidate treat the mass of the public as fellow citizens.
Teachers should think twice about how they vote this November.  Obama and his education policies are far worse than Bush's.  And working parents and teachers are far worse off than they used to be.  While Romney may be no better, a number of his statements imply some relief from the federal chokehold Obama has placed on public education.

Friday, October 05, 2012

Obamney Fatigue

The first of the presidential debates is over and the battle lines are being drawn by the same special interests whose interests are at stake.  And there is no shortage of Sherlock Holmes-wanna-be "fact-checkers".  The argue about the magic numbers each candidate uses to justify their so-called political positions.

My rant is a bit different.  Let this post be the first reality check on this abysmal excuse for a presidential election.  I'm a lifelong Liberal and a Democrat and I feel like a Stranger in a Strange Land.  Jim Lehrer set out to distinguish the differences between the two candidates in their politics.  The more important question of the difference between the candidates positions and that of reality was never broached.

On a national stage we had two profoundly mediocre candidates discussing education.  Obama, proud as a peacock, waxed poetic about his Race to the Top (RTTT) initiative.  When Romney confronted the president about the red herring of education somehow affecting this country's global competitiveness, Obama claimed that RTTT was closing a "gap".

Not to be outdone Romney praised Arne Duncan for making schools accountable and exposing failing schools.

Lehrer never followed up to ask why holding public education hostage to the federal Department of Education ever made any sense.  Nor was there any discussion as to why so-called core standards were necessary or desirable.

Romney got more right than Obama ever will in advocating for a return of schools to local control  but nothing any politician does from here on out matters.  The Obama administration poisoned that well forever.  You see Race to the Top funding required States to legislate away State control of the public schools to the federal government teat.  And that teat means absolute conformity to the Obama administration's agenda.  If Romney wins it will be his to tinker with.  I have zero faith in either.

RTTT was Obama's double down on a Bush  agenda that supplanted the public school's responsibility to nurture a love of learning within a child with a love of absolute conformity in the most bizarre experiment in social engineering in the free world ever.  Couple this collusive, toxic stew with the desire of philanthropy gone rabid to take control of public education and two national teacher unions whose best interests always take a back seat to their legal adviser's political aspirations and public education has long ago driven off the cliff.

We will never hear the debate that needs to be debated about education.  It is impossible.  The make-believe bullshit between these candidates will drown that out.  But it would be fun to hear such a debate.

Another topic worth giving a reality check is the mythical toughness of both candidates on Wall St excesses.  To hear Obama tell it, he reigned in Wall St and took them out to the wood shed!  I must have missed that historic spanking.  My recollection is that those most responsible for the excess were given government jobs with pensions and expense accounts.  They proceeded to give trillions more out to the offending institutions worldwide.  Nobody went to jail.  The so-called interest was often zero.  So when Obama claims that we're being paid back WITH INTEREST, the interest must be little more than cynical wonder that they got away with it.

And those new regulations.  Guess who wrote them?  Hint: it wasn't a regulator's regulator.  The chances that Romney would be tougher than Obama is unlikely.  They are both classic lapdogs.

Health care is also worth a reality check but I'm feeling ill from all this.

I don't write as much about public education these days.  It's circling the drain.  Too many cycles of the two parties trying to be just like each other has created a surreal Washington group think that has resulted in the worst of all compromises winning.  Our national policies are hopelessly and silently retarded and the inmates in charge argue about the arithmetic of their hallucinations.  This political season is a never-never land of contention.

We will be warned to close this gap and that, that prosperity is a term away, and that vicious personal attacks on each candidate's character will sway the undecideds to victory.  But victory just means more of the same depressing dross we have slogged through for the past twelve years.  It is enough to make a grown man cry.