A Teachable Moment

PCT President Morty Rosenfeld periodically attempts to make sense of the increasingly senseless world of public education.
05
Jun

A Regent on Our Side

Some of my fellow union presidents and I met with Regent Roger Tilles on Monday. The meeting offered further confirmation for what I have been saying for some time – there is a political groundswell developing to end New York’s preoccupation with high stakes testing and that parents are in the vanguard of this movement. Tilles, a Regent who clearly gets out to talk to the people he represents, has been meeting with parent groups on Long Island and is heartened by their growing determination to curtail the damaging effects of the state’s testing regime on their children. He even went so far as to praise the work of Jeanette Deutermann, the founder of the Long Island Opt-Out movement, although he was quick to point out that he wasn’t encouraging opting out. He pointed to her Facebook page which in a very short period of time has gotten almost 9000 people to join her group.

Though mindful that Governor is dug in on the Race to the Top reforms and is therefore a major barrier to testing reform, Tilles sees the need to pressure our state senators to end the testing obsession in our state. Long Island’s Senator John Flanagan, Chair of the Senate Education Committee, is a logical target for pressure. If Flanagan doesn’t see the need to change the state’s testing system, he can keep any bills that would improve things from coming to a vote.

There was only one point in Mr. Tilles’ presentation with which I take issue. Tilles counseled against attacking the Common Core initiative in the process of trying to fix New York’s testing problem, the Common Core being an approach that he believes has great promise if implemented correctly. Putting aside my problems with the age inappropriateness of much of the common core, what I believe Tilles fails to recognize is that building the political coalition necessary to end the testing nightmare will require the energy of the anti-Common Core folks, who for whatever reasons see testing and the Common Core as two aspects of an intrusive government trying to usurp local control of education. The question I didn’t get to ask Tilles is whether he hates what testing is doing to New York’s schools enough that he will risk losing the Common Core. I believe that is the direction of the political wind.

Tags: , , , , , ,
posted by Morty in Uncategorized and have No Comments
13
May

Taking a Risk for Justice

A couple of days ago, at a union meeting of leaders from adjacent school districts, I listened to Jeanette Deutermann, the leader of the Long Island Opt-Out movement, parents who will not allow their kids to be subjected to New York’s obsessive testing. Deutermann spoke eloquently of how the upsetting experience of her child during the state exams led her to start asking questions about them, the answers to which were deeply disturbing. She shared her concerns with some friends, tied into what opt-out movements in other states were doing, and the Long Island movement was born.
Deutermann is clearly looking for a way to work with teachers. She doesn’t want to get them in trouble, but she knows that it is only through a close alliance of parents and teachers that the powers in Albany will be more fearful of an enraged public than the corporate leaders sponsoring the current testing regime as a tool to discredit public schools.

In response to Deutermann’s remarks, I spoke about the need for teacher unions to support the Opt-Out movement if we are to maintain our credibility with our parent communities. At the very least, I maintained, we ought to be encouraging our own members to opt their kids out of a testing regime that we often claim is tantamount to child abuse. Addressing the concerns of several leaders that there were risks associated with defying the education department both for individuals and school districts, I tried to bring my colleagues back to their roots.

I observed that the brave souls who started our teacher union movement took far greater risks than I was talking about. That, for example, the brave teachers who undertook the first strike on Long Island did so with a law on the books that permitted the state to terminate them for striking. However, they knew what all who strive for social justice know – that there is always risk in confronting injustice, but the risk of tolerating it is greater. Those who take the battle on are not fearless. They get scared, but they do what they have to anyway.

I don’t know if I convinced anyone. I do know I’m sick and tired of union meetings where leaders find an assortment of excuses to avoid taking action. Too many of our unions have adopted a service model instead of an organizing one, the one that brought us from what was essentially serfdom to economic security. I know too that if we rise up and use our numbers to unite with pro-public education citizens and confront the privatizers, the testocrats and the plain stupid, we can save public education and our profession.

Tags: , , , ,
posted by Morty in Uncategorized and have No Comments
02
May

A Hopeful Note

Eleven hundred or so people gathered yesterday at the local wedding hall to hear Diane Ravitch speak about the corporate agenda to privatize our nation’s public schools, the subject of her soon to be released book. She was invited to speak by a group called Take Action Long Island (TALI), a group of mostly Nassau County teacher union leaders who are valiantly trying to take the teacher union movement back to its organizing roots. The event brought together teacher union activists, parents and public school administrators in what is emerging as a coalition of pro-public education forces who seem to have finally learned that their mutual respect for the centrality of public education to the health of our democracy is far more important than any of the issues that have historically divided them.

Ravitch broke no new ground in her analysis, except during the question period. Much of her speech methodically took the audience through chapter and verse on what obsessive testing is doing to our schools and how it is clearly a tool of those who wish to privatize the institution. In response to a question from the audience, however, a question about her thoughts on the Opt-Out movement, Ravitch startled the audience, particularly some of the assembled union leadership. She paused before answering, an impish smile coming to her face and said, “I have a dream. I dream that Long Island will opt out!” Thunderous applause greeted her call to action, after which she reminded us of a good union truth. If a few defy the state and opt their children out, there can be unpleasant consequences both for the individual students and the school district in which they reside. But if we all opt our kids out, there is nothing they can do except change the system.

While I have some issues with the remainder of yesterday’s program, I’ll save those for tomorrow’s post. I’ll close on the hopeful note that yesterday’s TALI sponsored event is but the latest evidence that the tide is turning against the so-called reformers. My thanks to TALI for their efforts to resuscitate a teacher labor movement that’s been gasping for air.

Tags: , , , ,
posted by Morty in Uncategorized and have No Comments
08
Apr

A Movement Matures

Saturday, April 6 was a great day in my community of Plainview-Old Bethpage (POB). Co-hosting a legislative breakfast were the PTAs of POB and neighboring Syosset as well as the teacher unions in both districts. Two issues brought these organization together – issues that threaten the future of public education in our state – the 2 percent property tax cap and the state’s obsession with high stakes testing.

For two hours Congressman Israel, State Senator Marcellino, Assemblyman Charles Levine, a representative from Senator Kemp Hannon’s office, County Councilwoman Judi Jacobs and Town Board member Alesia listened as over 200 teachers and parents told stories about the impact high stakes testing is having on the children in our schools. Passion for relief from the State’s regime of high state tests was so strong that the dialogue between legislators and constituents never really got to the tax cap issue. At one point, in response to a question from a parent about the legality of parents opting their children out of the tests, the audience broke into a rhythmic chant of, “Opt out! Opt out! Opt out!”
All of the assembled legislators agreed that New York’s testing program has gotten out of control. All agreed that it is having a very negative impact on our schools – some of the best in the entire state. Senator Marcellino said it best when he observed that the Regents and Education Commissioner King are treating failing schools and highly successful schools the same. He urged the State Education Department to recognize that Long Island has some of the best schools in the nation. He further urged them to focus on what could be done for the failing schools in the state and to leave our most successful ones free to do what they always have – provide an excellent education.

I’ve been a witness to education politics for 40 years. The politicians ignore the testing issue at their peril. In communities throughout the nation, teachers and parents are working together to protect children from the excesses of high stakes testing. They demand and will ultimately get a balanced testing system that recognizes the needs of children, their parents and their teachers. Here in New York, the testocracy will soon launch its new state tests, a launch that will surely provoke even greater fury from parents and teachers as students get the results of exams that have been designed to produce lowered scores. Give everyone a sense of failure. That will motivate them. It certainly will, but not in the way Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner King imagine.

I’m off tomorrow to the NYSUT Representative Assembly, the annual convention of my state union. My posts this week may therefore be intermittent.

Tags: , , , , ,
posted by Morty in Uncategorized and have No Comments
04
Apr

Opting Into the Fight Against Obsessive Testing

On a union presidents bulletin board I belong to, a colleague posted a very serious question. Should we as education unionists join the movement to encourage parents to keep their children from taking the state’s high stakes tests? She went on, should we additionally withhold our own children from these tests? Here is the answer I gave her.

“If we are serious about building union/ community coalitions to defend public education, we will do everything we can to support the growing national movement against the obsession with high stakes testing. If our concern for the children we teach is sincere and deeply felt, we will do whatever it takes to stop the corporate testocracy’s attack on public education. How can we who know better than anyone what testing is doing to narrow educational possibilities for students while demeaning the teaching profession – how can we sit on the sidelines , sending our kids to take these tests, leaving it to braver others to fight our battle? I think we know that the time to waver is over. We will never beat the enemies of public education with our money. They have more than we can ever dream of raising. Our salvation must come from the strength of our numbers and our ability to organize ourselves and others in common cause. It’s time for us to opt into the fight. “

By the way, here’s one of the more eloquent parent pieces on why opting kids out of high stakes tests makes sense.

Tags: , , , ,
posted by Morty in Uncategorized and have No Comments
02
Apr

A Dirty Little Secret

The dirty little secret in the debate about the role of testing in our public schools is that the more we rely on tests to evaluate teachers, the more truly ineffective teachers we will have in our nation’s classrooms. That’s because the easiest teaching there is to do is teaching to a test. It requires very limited knowledge and even less imagination. Get the students convinced that the “must” pass the test, and by and large they will accept the drill and kill that is becoming increasingly standard fare. It’s probably even true that we could get very similar test results with high tech devices and a security guard watch over the students as they follow endless links on the road to mastery scores on their tests.

In the old Soviet Union there was a joke among workers that went, “The government pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work.” In the education world of the testocracy, we will increasingly pretend to teach, and our students will pretend to learn. After a brief period, nobody will even know we are pretending.

Tags: , , , , , ,
posted by Morty in Uncategorized and have No Comments
13
Mar

The Changed Meaning Of Educate

“Ed”u*cate (?), v. t. [imp. & p. p. Educated (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Educating (?).] [L. educatus, p. p. of educare to bring up a child physically or mentally, to educate, fr. educere to ed forth, bring up (a child). See Educe.] To bring or guide the powers of, as a child; to develop and cultivate, whether physically, mentally, or morally, but more commonly limited to the mental activities or senses; to expand, strengthen, and discipline, as the mind, a faculty, etc.,; to form and regulate the principles and character of…”

The above definition of the verb to educate comes from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. We would be wise to take it as our public school reform agenda, offering it as a humanistic, sensible alternative the current “reform” model which is the stuffing of age inappropriate curriculum down the throats of our children, testing the endlessly to make sure they’re “growing” to the satisfaction of the corporate world – more like the making of foie gras than rearing children to be healthy, thoughtful ethical citizens of our society.

Tags: , ,
posted by Morty in Uncategorized and have No Comments
11
Jan

Will Seattle Be the Spark?

I’ve written many times that the only way many of the so-called education reforms that are destroying our good schools are going to be defeated is through the civil disobedience of educators and parents. Parents have been in the vanguard of fighting the plague of high stakes testing. Growing numbers of them are keeping their kids home on the days that the tests are administered. Today the first teachers joined the battle. The teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle have announced their refusal to administer the state tests that are used to evaluate instructors. Their press release is contained in this blog post I found. The writer calls upon teachers and their unions to support these courageous teachers. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve written the following to them:

The members of the Plainview-Old Bethpage Congress of Teachers support your efforts to end the scourge of high stakes testing that is destroying public education in the United States. We hope that your courage sparks teachers and their unions throughout the country to defend their profession from the data driven drones who seek to measure us out of existence.

Tags: , , , , ,
posted by Morty in Uncategorized and have No Comments
27
Nov

Organizing for School Sanity

Every time I have the chance to talk with a group of parents about what the testing mania is doing to their children, the question quickly turns to, “What can we do about it?” It happened last night at a showing and discussion of the film Race to Nowhere co-sponsored by our union and the Plainview-Old Bethpage PTA Audiences immediately identify with the stories of the children and parents in the film. And every audience wants a way out of a school model that they know produces unhealthy stress on children and families but which they reluctantly accept lest their children lose some competitive advantage by a parent demanding something like an end to all home work by 9 P.M. They seem to know in their bones we no longer have age appropriate education and that their children are missing out on important things that they remember fondly from their own school days. Their openness to working collectively to demand of our lawmakers that they end the war on childhood and return us to a time when schools were more joyful and children had time to be curious encourages me to believe that sanity can ultimately prevail.

I’m off to Seattle to the fall meeting of the National Council of Urban Education Associations. I’ll be back here on Monday.

Tags: , , , ,
posted by Morty in Uncategorized and have No Comments
27
Feb

Public Humiliation

The release in New York City of the ratings of teachers on the basis of their students’ performance on standardized tests, data which is know to be highly flawed, is a new low for the scumbags who believe that we can improve our public schools by shaming our teachers into doing a better job. When Bill Gates and Chancellor Meryl Tisch, two committed leaders of the testocracy, are alarmed by this event, even the diehards ought to pause. In predictable fashion, the New York Times, which litigated to obtain teacher scores, has started to showcase higher scoring teachers, giving them a dubiously deserved celebrity which will inevitably isolate them in their schools and, much worse, create the impression that the other teachers in the school are undesirable. It’s enough to make one puke. The only hopeful note is a report suggesting that city teachers have had enough and are ready to fight. We could well use their leadership in that direction! If the public humiliation of teachers doesn’t cause a militant response, there will be no hope lest for the education labor movement.

Tags: , ,
posted by Morty in Uncategorized and have Comment (1)
15
Feb

Narrower and Narrower

Although the new mandated teacher evaluation system that rates teachers in part on the performance of their students on state assessments is not yet in place on our district, its impact is already permeating the thoughts of teachers. Predictably, teachers are increasingly on guard to factors that might in any way depress their students’ scores and thereby compromise their evaluations. At a meeting I attended yesterday, a discussion that began about the inadequate budget for field trips quickly turned when a teacher made the following statement. “If my students’ test scores are to be a part of my evaluation, I’m going to fight all of you who keep taking kids out of my class to go on field trips. I’m not against field trips, but if they are going to cause my students to miss instruction and get lower scores on the Regents, then those trips could have a negative impact on me.” While I could lament the further narrowing of the curriculum taking place before my eyes, I realized that teachers will have to adjust what they do to protect their employment, as sad as that may be. They would have to be insane not to.

Tags: , , ,
posted by Morty in Uncategorized and have No Comments
29
Nov

Times Article Boosts Opponents New Evaluation System

An article in yesterday’s New York Times gave the cause of challenging the linkage of student test scores to the evaluation of public school teachers a shot of steroidal credibility. What began as an essentially local effort of the Long Island Principals Association to push back against an evaluation system that they see as degrading to both teachers and the administrators who evaluate them has begun to morph into a statewide movement with thousands of administrators and teachers signing on to the principals’ letter indicting the recently enacted evaluation system. Coverage by the Times will undoubtedly help to spread the word about the developing movement and help to recruit many more to the cause. A review of the signers of the principals’ letter reveals that local union leaders are beginning to sign on, realizing that few issues have aroused the ire of their memberships more than what they see as an unfair, opaque evaluations system that poses a significant threat to their welfare and to the welfare of their students. That Chancellor Tisch is quoted in the article referring to the evaluation system as “scientific” and “objective” is sure to further inflame the passions of educators who know that we aren’t even sure of what the tests say about our students let alone what they tell us about teachers. What Commissioner King, Chancellor Tisch and the Regents and Governor Cuomo have done to snatch the federal dollars of the Obama’s administration’s Race to the Top program is to elevate a blatant farce to the level of education policy in New York State.

Tags: , ,
posted by Morty in Uncategorized and have No Comments
© A Teachable Moment | Created by A.Pepper Designs, Inc..
Powered by WordPress