A Teachable Moment

These days in the world of public education the Holy Grail is evidence. What is the evidence that your care about and respect the children you teach? What is the evidence that the children in your class understand at a deep level the concept you taught in your last class.

Well, I’m looking for evidence too. What evidence do we have that people like Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner King have the slightest idea of what they are doing? Do the tests that we have begun to inflict on the children of this state – tests which they both admit children have not been prepared for – is that the evidence of their competence?

Are we to feel secure with them at the helm of the state education department because they put out a memo stating that they know that students are not going to do as well on the current round of state examinations as they have on past one? Is their total indifference to what goes on in the mind of a child who is confronted with age inappropriate material – I mean things that the test makers didn’t learn until they were in college – does that comfort us that they understand children and can fashion an education appropriate to their age and ability?

Where’s the data to show us that this Common Core has been field tested and produces the results claimed for it? Where’s the statistical support for the contention that these standards and the testing regime that goes with them can help children overcome the multiple debilitating effects of living in poverty? Isn’t it entirely more likely that we would be much better off as a nation if we could lift the 20 percent of the nation’s children living below the federal poverty standard into the middle class? Failing that, don’t we have more and better data to show that if we sent poor kids to school with middle class kids their academic performance improves, their dropout rate declines and their college participation rate increases?

What evidence is there that Tisch and King should be entrusted with the education of our state’s children? I suggest there is none.

Last night, the members of my union attended a Board of Education meeting to explain to the Board how the budget cuts they were proposing would seriously prejudice their ability to provide the same quality academic program. Their argument now is moot in that the only budget restorations the Board could muster was six tenths of a nurse for the Jewish parochial school in town and a half of a teacher to continue student attendance issues at our high school. Why anyone would even suggest cutting services to the parochial school thereby inviting the parents of those students to vote against the District’s budget is beyond me. Why the restoration awaited the final meeting before the adoption of the budget defies imagination, it was such a politically obtuse proposal.

Obtuse is actually a good word to describe the reaction of the Board to audience of teachers and parents. There was not an open mind on the dais. That was compounded by the condescension of Superintendent Lewis who repeatedly invoked a slight of hand to suggest that somehow cutting some 15 teaching positions was going to improve the instruction of our students. There were references to data all evening, as Board members smirked or weakly feigned interest in what the teachers and parents had to say.

In the end when the nasty deed was done and the budget adopted, Board members who had paid not the slightest attend to what the parents and teachers had to say, wrung their had over what a difficult budget process this had been. It hut them terribly to make these cuts, but sometimes you just have to do unpleasant things. That there had been no serious public questioning of the Superintendent’s budget, that no one Board member offered one serious alternative to some of the completely senseless cuts the budget contained, it had been a very difficult process nevertheless. It was left to Board Member Rothman to jam a needle in the eye of every teacher who had the wherewithal to remain to the bitter end. Rothman complemented Dr. Lewis and Assistant Superintendents Gierasch, Eagen and Rut for their fine work. I’ll bet none of these people has the slightest idea of why the staff was in a rage this morning. Then again, if they could understand that, they would have proposed a different budget, a budget that values people over things.

If I link to other sources in my blog, it is usually to written documents, preferring words to pictures most of the time. However, if you follow this link, you will see in a very cleverly done video on the essential challenge facing public schools – the attack of the corporate raiders, their weapon testing. Have a look. Back to words on Monday.

Yesterday’s New York Times featured an article with the suspicion provoking title “Curious Grade for Teachers: Nearly All Pass.”

For reporter Jenny Anderson it appears to be a settled question that there must be something wrong with state teacher evaluation systems if more teachers have not been found to be ineffective. After all these systems were set up by so-called reformers to generate data to support what “everybody” knows, that our public schools are failing and the failure is largely due to the many ineffective teachers who staff them. There is something “curious” about most of the teachers in Florida, Tennessee and Michigan being found to be effective or highly effective.

So I guess if the new systems don’t fined numbers of ineffective teachers, we have to develop a new one. We will keep doing that until we find one that gives us a number of ineffective teachers that we feel appropriate. Then we will have the proof we demand for the failure of our schools.

I haven’t had much time for blogging the last few days. The failure of the State of New York to properly fund public education, a property tax cap that makes it extraordinarily difficult for localities to make up for the state’s indifference and the ignorance of those running local school districts all create a perfect storm that is beginning to swamp the best school districts we have, my own included.
So, there has been little time for blogging, my day spent counseling those who face layoff due to ill-conceived budget cuts and doing the political work that will hopefully change the priorities of our district so that people and their contribution to the education of children are valued more that more than technological toys, field trips, conferences, door to door school bus service and a bloated administration that does more to frustrate quality education than facilitate it. The school reformers are winning. They have used their political clout to destroy our best school districts. It will take some time to accomplish this, but absent the public rising to the defense of their local schools, the future is very dim.

Those who still think the institution worth saving, my union along with our sister local in Syosset and the PTAs of both school district is sponsoring a legislative breakfast on Saturday morning, April 6, 2013 at 10 A.M. in the cafeteria of Kennedy High school in Plainview. I encourage all my reader to attend. You can R.S.V.P. to meetyourrepresentative@gmail.com.
I’m taking next week off. I’ll be back on April 1, some would say a good day for a return.

I came across the following quotation in Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, the story of the assassination of President James Garfield. Although spoken by New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, a defender of the spoils system in American politics around 1880, his words have stayed with me all weekend as an apt description of what has happened to the word reform in the sphere of public education today. Conkling said, “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities of the word ‘Reform.’” Today’s world of public education is peopled by countless scoundrels who cloak their mendacity in robes of reform.

Watching the Sunday talk shows, one would come away with one indisputable fact. Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable entitlement programs that must be curtailed if the United States is to have any economic future. Other than Paul Krugman on This Week, that’s what all of the talking head were saying. What also became clear is that President Obama is back to trying to get a deal in which he will exchange cuts to these programs in exchange for tax loophole reforms that will net the federal government much needed revenue.

Little noticed in the mainstream media was the introduction of legislation by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, co-sponsored by Senate majority Leader Harry Reid, to remove the 6.2% cap on the payroll tax on wages above $250,000 thereby making Social security taxes more progressive. If we just simply lifted the cap altogether, Social security would be fully funded for the foreseeable future. That’s how easy it is to fix that system.

Those who cry that Medicare is unsustainable appear to have as their focus increasing the age of eligibility to 67 or more from the current 65, although none of them explains why we would want to keep people out of a system that delivers health coverage at a substantially lower cost than private insurance does. Yes, it’s true. Medicare is a great bargain. We ought to cover more people with it, not fewer. If readers want to understand how America is getting ripped off by the health industry, read Steven Brill’s brilliant article in Time. If the “grand bargain” the President is looking for includes significant changes to Social security and Medicare, he will have been snookered once again in his dealings with the Republicans in the House and Senate.

Three pieces in the New York Times this morning should send shivers down the spines of anyone interested in education, education as something more than preparing students for some mindless job in the corporate world. “The Country That Stopped Reading Books,” while ostensibly written about Mexico, forces an immediate comparison to conditions in the United States where the Common Core Standards appear to promise workplace literacy in place of liberal arts education. Thomas Friedman, never less than enthralled by technological fixes to serious problems touts mega online courses taught by media star professors as part of the solution for the rising costs of higher education in our country. Friedman would have us embrace a future in which it doesn’t matter what you know because everything can be searched on Google. To complete the dystopian vision of education this morning, there is an article about News Corp’s Joel Klein and his company’s new venture into tablet computers for school children that deliver the company’s curriculum materials and monitor student attention to the screen. Wandering eyes are brought back to the screen by a pop-up that reminds them of the task before them. How comforting to know that we will soon be sending our children off to school with Big brother in their back packs. Pretty soon, no one will even know that he’s there. School reform will have driven him from cultural memory.

I’ve written frequently about the corrosive influence of the rich on public education and the unexamined assumption in the mainstream media that because people like Bill Gates have billions of dollars they possess special knowledge about the ills of public education and how to fix them.
This morning’s New York Times started my day off with a rush of anger as I read about billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself locked in a war with the United Federation of Teachers over teacher evaluation, and his million dollar contribution to an organization created to support candidates for the Los Angeles school board who are pledged to the kinds of business oriented reforms championed by Bloomberg. They mayor has been joined by Michele Rhee whose organization is a bundler of high roller contributors who are bent on destroying public education.

Most galling is the equation in the article of the Bloomberg contribution and others like it with the funds raised by the United Teachers of Los Angeles, the union representing the teachers in the nation’s second largest school district. It takes a somewhat slanted perspective to see the million dollar contribution of one billionaire as the equivalent of the contribution of 35,000 union members who actually do the work of the district.

Money is speech in the United States, and as wealth and income continue to be disproportionately distributed to the top one percent, the speech of the rest of us matters less and less.

What does it say about us that we allow teenagers to attend school for seven hours straight without a break? If students came under the state’s labor law, they would have to be given a break after four and a half hours. What does it say that we encourage young people to take as many Advanced Placement courses, supposedly college level courses, as they can? If they are ready for college, why don’t we send them for the real thing? Why are our community’s children talking to their teachers and counselors about how they have no time to sleep – how they are “stressed out”? Why are we giving kids more and more homework to do after a long school day? Surely we know that increasingly the work they submit is a group enterprise. Why does allowing children to have free time, free of school work, free of sports teams, free of clubs, free of lessons, free of tutoring seem to us inimical to their future academic and business endeavors? Why do the streets of our community not ring with the joy and laughter of children as the streets I played on did? Why does the bitch goddess SUCCESS lure young, fragile children, urging them to work harder and harder, never happy until the marrow is sucked out of their bones? Why? Oh why?