The California Legislature usually gets it wrong on public education

The California Legislature usually gets it wrong on public education because it listens to corporate sponsored lobbyists rather than teachers.
I was talking with a legislator at our Labor Day Picnic about his lack of support for our efforts to amend on small part of SB 1209 last year. He opposed our position. But, when I spoke with him it became clear that he had not heard our position. He was in favor of many of the items in SB 1209. He did not know that one provision imposed a crude accountability system on California Teacher Preparation. He did not understand that we were only trying to change one item out of nineteen.
Reflecting on this conversation led me to consider the several times when I have worked with legislators and their staffs. Usually they do not understand public schooling. This is a major problem since most school budgets, policies and curriculum decisions are now highly controlled at the state level by boards, commissions, and the legislature. And, their staff understand school policies only through the lens of lobbyists. Like others in California I lack confidence in the California Legislature and with the Democrats in the legislature.
When working on education bills you quickly encounter a number of lobbyists representing interests- none of them are teachers. Or, they may have been teachers but got out of teaching to make more money.
Since 1994 California legislature has been dominated by the concepts of accountability in education as has been most states. This effort to promote accountability is funded and directed by the Business Roundtable and other corporate sponsors. ( Emory, 2007) The best evidence is that this 13 year trip on the accountability train has not improved the schools ( Fuller, et al,2007, Nichols and Berliner, 2007, NAEP 30 year study, Laitsch, 2006 Lee, 2006)
Outsiders to education note that the California Teachers Association is one of the most powerful lobbies in the state- and they are. They, however, use this influence primarily on budget and working conditions issues. They do not typically join with teachers on policy initiatives. One exception was this year when they pushed hard for universal Kindergarden and to postpone testing until grade 3. These are valuable initiatives, but they leave the main agenda of accountability unscathed.
Beyond CTA, there are a number of other professional groups who try to influence legislation such as the California Reading Association, California Bilingual Association, Calfornia Council for the Social studies, etc. And there are a series of advocacy groups such as Ed Trust West and others.
The basic reality is that the legislature does not assist teachers- they respond to lobbyist with varying agendas.
One example of this is the way the legislature and the CDE has gone along with the destruction of programs for English Language Learners. In spite of the evidence, and in spite of a 26 person Hispanic Caucus, the legislature sits and watches as another generation of Latino students are failed. Ten years after the prohibition of bilingual education, there has been no improvement in English language scores nor Latino drop out rates. Here are some of the literature reviews:

1. Slavin, R. and Cheung, A. 2005. A synthesis of
research of reading instruction for English language
learners, Review of Educational Research 75(2):
247-284.
2. Rolstad, K., Mahoney, K., & Glass, G. 2005. The big
picture: A meta-analysis of program effectiveness
research on English language learners. Educational
Policy 19(4): 572-594.
3. Genesse, F., Lindolm-Leary, K., Saunders, W., and
Christian, D. 2005. English Language Learners in U.S.
Schools: An Overview of Research. Journal of
Education for Students Placed at Risk, 10(4), 363–385.
4. Francis, D., Lesaux, N., & August, D. 2006.
Language of instruction, In D. August & T. Shanahan,
(Eds.) Developing literacy in second-language
learners, pp. 365-413. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

In my experience the most fundamental problem of all is the arrogance of most legislators and their staff. They do not listen to teachers. They are approached by lobbyists all of whom have adopted the accountability mantra- even though the data does not support these positions. When teachers and others who work in classrooms try to be heard they are ignored. I assume from the legislator’s perspective this refusal to listen is due to their over busy schedules, but that is what they are elected for.

Jim Schultz in the Democracy Owner’s manual describes well the problems of lobbyists:
"At the local level, in the state legislatures, in elections for Congress and the presidency, campaigns are being dominated by the flow of contributions made by wealthy special interest groups to politicians. These same groups later come calling on those same politicians seeking public favors. The conflict is a clear one. If the money given were in the form of a bribe. Stuck in the politicians pocket, the act would be illegal and we would be aghast. Because those funds instead go into the candidates' campaign coffers, the transaction is legal and accepted, but the effect is the same.”

I am not naïve about the actual functioning of the legislature. I have spent over 35 years teaching young people- teachers and future teachers- to work toward democracy. I worked as a volunteer for the United Farmworkers Union for 7 years and lobbied on behalf of the UFW in the difficult fights to establish an Agricultural Labor Relations Board. I know the experience of being defeated by corporate power.
And, I have worked in electoral campaigns at all levels; Assembly, Senate, Governors, Presidents, propositions.
Yet, today, based upon my own direct experience, I have less confidence in California elected officials that ever before. I understand completely when students tell me that the government and the legislature lacks legitimacy. ( More on this in my book, Choosing Democracy) Most recent democratic theory recognizes that governments in electoral democracies depend upon their legitimacy as their primary source of power.
We, the voters, and we as teachers, retain control the vital issue of government legitimacy. No legislature can long stand that loses its legitimacy.


Unfortunately, in my view, the California legislature has given away most of its legitimacy. We elect representatives. The elected officials, who are supposed to be representing us, are now a significant part of the problem.
As an example, lets look at teacher preparation in California. The legislature has created a system where the state must continually train new teachers to replace those driven out by inadequate working conditions and the imposition of a failing accountability system. A recent report by Ken Futernick for the CSU system described how the current teaching conditions in schools drive new teachers out ( 2007)
An August 2007 report by Merrow on PBS newshour described nationally how skilled and experienced teachers ar now be driven from the classrooms. (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/july-dec07/nclb_08-16.html)
Having failed to provide adequate resources and working conditions to improve public schools, the legislature instead turned to accountability systems. Now, with over ten years of experience, those systems are not producing gains on normed national tests. In a typical non thinking manner, since the accountability mandates failed, the legislature in 2042 (2000) and SB 1209 (2006) imposed the accountability model earlier- to teachers during their preparation period.
This system, known as performance assessment under SB 2042, will cost each future teacher $300 - $400, is shaping their teacher preparation curriculum toward a very limited view of teaching, and de values the student teaching experience and the current system of on-site coaching and evaluation.
As reported on prior posts, a group of faculty tried to make one small amendment in SB 1209 to require that if the legislature imposed this accountability system they must fund that work. Our group represented 6 campuses in the CSU system. We had the support of the California Faculty Association and their Teacher Education caucus which represents the faculty of the university.
We were opposed by two lobbyists from the CSU administration who have never worked in classrooms nor with teachers and CTA took a neutral position. We were also opposed by former staff of the Commission on Teacher Preparation (CTC). These advocates too have never taught in public schools. Another strong source of opposition was the office of Senator Scott who chairs the Senate Education committee and enjoys the support of both teacher unions.
The provision which we sought to amend out of SB 1209 imposes a low quality accountability system on teacher preparation in place of the performance assessments which currently exist. Campuses who have tried early pilot versions of this system – known by its acronym PACT- have found that the system angers students, frustrates students and encourages many students and faculty to leave the profession. In spite of this, we were unable to get a hearing on this developing crisis in teacher preparation in the legislature. For details on this specific issue see the paper “ Problems with California Legislation on Teacher Preparation” at (http://coefaculty.csus.edu/campd/index.html)

The problem is growing. All campuses in the CSU system must use one of two systems of performance assessment by July 2008, and the legislature has provided no money for the implementation. The best guess is that the costs of the system will be passed on to college students just as the students have been charged a 10% tuition and fees increase for three of the last four years.
Schools fail due to conditions in schools and conditions outside the schools.
Corporate funded advocacy groups like Education Trust have their reason for existence in convincing the media and elected officials that the problem is with “teacher expectations’ and the achievement gap. This focus allows the groups to be funded to continue to produce reports and position papers – and they have been successful. This focus has not improved learning conditions for students.
Few new teachers want their students to fail. When teachers accept low expectations it is primarily a result of their experience of working in under funded – under staffed schools. They learn from the teaching conditions provided and not provided. It is not from lack of in-service workshops on expectations and the achievement gap.
I am not yet ready to give up on the political process. See my book, Choosing Democracy (2004) on the critical importance of democracy and multicultural education for the survival of this society. But- working with the elected officials and their staffs is more than frustrating. The problem is legislative insularity –distance from the public and the voters. I have been defeated by corporate power before, but this was defeat by corporate framing of the debate and by legislative inertia.
The issue is not simply one of the small bill AB 750 which we ran last year to make an adjustment to SB 1209. The more basic problem is how the legislature deals with- or refuses to deal with- teachers, schools, and school children. The lack of respect for teachers – or even willingness to listen to teachers- is revealed in the legislatures commitment to “accountability” without measuring whether accountability has worked.
BTW. A broad coalition of teacher forces are presently trying to be heard on the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind. Initial drafts of the amended legislation do not indicate that the Democratic majority is listening to those who do the work in the classrooms. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2007/08/ells_in_the_house_education_co.html

So, if our elected system Is failing us, what do we do? I am not willing to give up on democracy.
We can work for public finance of elections, we can support legislative re districting so that there are competitive legislative districts. But, what can we do to get the legislature and a future governor to listen to the students and the teachers?
Currently the legislature, ensconced in its strange version of accountability, is failing our schools and our teachers. To be fair and balanced, there are some legislative staffers who are well prepared – open- and willing to listen, but far too few.
Perhaps we will have to get tougher. The Democrats in the legislature want to amend term limits. Term limits have increased the influence of paid lobbyists not brought the legislature closer to the voters. The Democrats want us to defeat the Republican initiative to re distribute electoral votes. Our support should come at a price. I am interested in other options. One step would be to elect more ex teachers as legislators like Jackie Goldberg (and fewer lawyers). You will not always agree with her, but at least teachers will be heard.

Duane Campbell

Legislatue whistles while schools lack teachers

August 27, 2007
With Turnover High, Schools Fight for Teachers

By SAM DILLON
GREENSBORO, N.C. — The retirement of thousands of baby boomer teachers coupled with the departure of younger teachers frustrated by the stress of working in low-performing schools is fueling a crisis in teacher turnover that is costing school districts substantial amounts of money as they scramble to fill their ranks for the fall term.

Superintendents and recruiters across the nation say the challenge of putting a qualified teacher in every classroom is heightened in subjects like math and science and is a particular struggle in high-poverty schools, where the turnover is highest. Thousands of classes in such schools have opened with substitute teachers in recent years.

Here in Guilford County, N.C., turnover had become so severe in some high-poverty schools that principals were hiring new teachers for nearly every class, every term. To staff its neediest schools before classes start on Aug. 28, recruiters have been advertising nationwide, organizing teacher fairs and offering one of the nation’s largest recruitment bonuses, $10,000 to instructors who sign up to teach Algebra I.

“We had schools where we didn’t have a single certified math teacher,” said Terry Grier, the schools superintendent. “We needed an incentive, because we couldn’t convince teachers to go to these schools without one.”

Guilford County, which has 116 schools, is far from the only district to take this route as school systems compete to fill their ranks. Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit policy group that seeks to encourage better teaching, said hundreds of districts were offering recruitment incentives this summer.

Officials in New York, which has the nation’s largest school system, said they had recruited about 5,000 new teachers by mid-August, attracting those certified in math, science and special education with a housing incentive that can include $5,000 for a down payment.

New York also offers subsidies through its teaching fellows program, which recruits midcareer professionals from fields like health care, law and finance. The money helps defer the cost of study for a master’s degree. The city expects to hire at least 1,300 additional teachers before school begins on Sept. 4, said Vicki Bernstein, director of teacher recruitment.

Los Angeles has offered teachers signing with low-performing schools a $5,000 bonus. The district, the second-largest in the country, had hired only about 500 of the 2,500 teachers it needed by Aug. 15 but hoped to begin classes fully staffed, said Deborah Ignagni, chief of teacher recruitment.

In Kansas, Alexa Posny, the state’s education commissioner, said the schools had been working to fill “the largest number of vacancies” the state had ever faced. This is partly because of baby boomer retirements and partly because districts in Texas and elsewhere were offering recruitment bonuses and housing allowances, luring Kansas teachers away.

“This is an acute problem that is becoming a crisis,” Ms. Posny said.

In June, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a nonprofit group that seeks to increase the retention of quality teachers, estimated from a survey of several districts that teacher turnover was costing the nation’s districts some $7 billion annually for recruiting, hiring and training.

Demographers agree that education is one of the fields hardest hit by the departure of hundreds of thousands of baby boomers from the work force, particularly because a slowdown in hiring in the 1980s and 1990s raised the average age of the teaching profession. Still, they debate how serious the attrition will turn out to be.

In New York, the wave of such retirements crested in the early years of this decade as teachers left well before they hit their 60s, without a disruptive teacher shortage, Ms. Bernstein said.

In other parts of the country, the retirement bulge is still approaching, because pension policies vary among states, said Michael Podgursky, an economist at the University of Missouri. California is projecting that it will need 100,000 new teachers over the next decade from the retirement of the baby boomers alone.

Some educators say it is the confluence of such retirements with the departure of disillusioned young teachers that is creating the challenge. In addition, higher salaries in the business world and more opportunities for women are drawing away from the field recruits who might in another era have proved to be talented teachers with strong academic backgrounds.

“The problem is not mainly with retirement,” said Thomas G. Carroll, the president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. “Our teacher preparation system can accommodate the retirement rate. The problem is that our schools are like a bucket with holes in the bottom, and we keep pouring in teachers.”

The commission has calculated that these days nearly a third of all new teachers leave the profession after just three years, and that after five years almost half are gone — a higher turnover rate than in the past.

All the coming and going of young teachers is tremendously disruptive, especially to schools in poor neighborhoods where teacher turnover is highest and students’ needs are greatest.

According to the most recent Department of Education statistics available, about 269,000 of the nation’s 3.2 million public school teachers, or 8.4 percent, quit the field in the 2003-4 school year. Thirty percent of them retired, and 56 percent said they left to pursue another career or because they were dissatisfied.

The federal No Child Left Behind law requires schools and districts to put a qualified teacher in every classroom. The law has led districts to focus more seriously on staffing its low-performing schools, educators said, but it does not appear to have helped persuade veteran teachers to continue their service in them.

Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a group that helps urban districts recruit teachers, said attrition often resulted from chaotic hiring practices, because novice teachers are often assigned at the last moment to positions for which they have not even interviewed. Later, overwhelmed by classroom stress, many leave the field.

Chicago and New York are districts that have invested heavily and worked with teachers unions in recent years to improve hiring and transfer policies, Mr. Daly said.

“But most of the urban districts have no coherent hiring strategy,” he said. Many receive thousands of teacher applications in the spring but leave them unprocessed until principals return from August vacations, when more organized suburban districts have already hired the most-qualified teachers, he said.

“There isn’t any maliciousness in this,” Mr. Daly said, “it’s just a conspiracy of dysfunction.”

In Guilford County, Washington Elementary School, which serves students from a housing project, had churned through several principals and most of its teachers several years ago, and had repeatedly failed to make federal testing goals, said Dr. Grier, the superintendent.

“Teachers were worried it was becoming a failing school,” Dr. Grier said. To rebuild morale, he recruited a principal from Chicago, Grenita Lathan. Her first year at Washington was a nightmare, Ms. Lathan said, because her predecessors had been so panicked to fill classroom vacancies that they had hired “just anybody.”

“All they wanted was warm bodies in the classroom,” she said. At job fairs, qualified teachers she tried to hire shunned her, she said.

Under Guilford County’s incentive program, math or reading teachers who sign on at any of 29 high-poverty schools receive bonuses of $2,500 to $10,000. They can earn additional bonuses if they raise achievement.

Those incentives helped Ms. Lathan recruit solid teachers last year, she said, and after much tutoring and hard work, students met federal testing targets. This summer all but one teacher signed up for another year.

Other Guilford County schools have also used the incentives to hire promising people.

Rebecca Rheinheimer moved from Indiana this summer, attracted by a $2,500 bonus to teach at Oak Hill Elementary, where the teaching staff has been strengthened by the use of such bonuses. The school, in High Point, met its federal testing targets this spring for the first time in several years.

Margaret Eaddy-Busch, a veteran math teacher, moved from Philadelphia this summer to teach at Dudley High, which had become known as a hard-to-staff school. She will receive a $10,000 bonus for teaching Algebra I.

“If I survived in Philly for 10 years,” Ms. Eaddy-Busch said, “I’ll do just fine here.”

But it remains unclear whether the incentive program will retain good teachers as effectively as it attracts them.

“It’s challenging to teach in these high-needs schools,” said Mark Jewell, president of the local teachers union. “These new teachers will have a trial by fire, and then it’ll be a revolving door.”


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Last year in SB 1209 Scott , the legislature imposed a significant new cost on teacher preparation for “teacher performance assessment”, again the accountability model. No funds are in this year’s budget for this assessment. And, the budget next year looks at least as restrictive.
A group of us working with California Faculty Association tried to limit this unfunded mandate through AB 750 (Carter) which did not survive in the Assembly. We contacted Senator Stienberg’s office for assistance.
A basic issue is in a budget this tight, should the state be imposing yet another unfunded mandate? And, should the state be imposing a $6 – 9 $ million cost for a high stakes testing system of teachers when the assessment system has limited validity.
The legislature has an accountability problem. It regularly imposes accountability on the schools- but it does not impose accountability on itself.
They refuse to see the train coming at them. Like Bush- they live in their own reality.

Imposed teacher assessment reforms do not make sense

A little common sense please.
Current legislation imposes untested, invalid teacher performance assessments in California as of 2008. All future teachers will be required to pass these assessments.
It would make a lot more sense to develop the assessments. Then have 2-3 campuses test them.
After 2-3 campuses tested them, we should have a real, authentic, analysis of the value and validity of these assessments.
Then, if the assessments are valid, and they add value; then they should be implemented state wide.
We need to stop writing law by ideology and then imposing it blindly.

Duane Campbell
for more see:

http://coefaculty.csus.edu/campd/index.html


CFA Resolution

As part of a massive movement by the State Commission on Teacher Credentialing to reform credential programs in California (SB2042, 2000), new accountability measures have been implemented, some without financial funding. As part of these mandates, the State of California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing has mandated that all teacher education programs implement Teacher Performance Assessments for credentialing candidates (TPA) by July, 2008.
The TPA as an assessment tool is based on reductive, corporate-driven teacher performance expectations (TPEs). As an assessment tool, it is even more simplistic and rigid than these expectations, requiring the development of lower-level teaching skills needed to teach the scripted curriculum regulated by the high stakes tests required under No Child Left Behind. It may be inferred from the content of the TPA that programs employing this tool will lose quality in terms of equity and social justice as well as critical thinking, creativity, and the holistic growth of all participants: faculty, student teachers and teachers. These requirements imposed upon teacher education are only the beginning of state and national efforts that are currently referred to as student learning outcomes, assessment and accountability. These efforts are directed towards corporate control and standardization of all disciplines of higher education.
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Whereas, the CFA values the development of complex processes of accountability for teaching and learning if these processes are not framed in terms of reductive standards;
Whereas, the current move towards accountability contributes to the standardization of higher education from the ‘top down”;
Whereas, this standardization has serious implications for the academic freedom of all CSU faculty;
Whereas, the development and implementation of assessment tools are unfunded mandates that have serious workload implications, as well as implications for faculty, students, student teachers and teachers in terms of educational goals, practices and experiences.

Be it resolved, that CFA encourage faculty to become involved in a dialogue with others on campuses to learn more about these unfunded mandates, and
And be it further resolved that the CFA encourage faculty to decline to participate in the development and implementation of unfunded, reductionist assessment tools.

October 21, 2006

Unanimous support from Teacher Education Caucus , CFA
Majority support from the Peace and Justice Caucus