Politicians (Particularly in Texas) Leave the Children Behind

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Will 2011 be the year of fiscal austerity? At the federal level, it’s still not clear: Republicans are demanding draconian spending cuts, but we don’t yet know how far they’re willing to go in a showdown with President Obama. At the state and local level, however, there’s no doubt about it: big spending cuts are coming.

And who will bear the brunt of these cuts? America’s children.

Now, politicians — and especially, in my experience, conservative politicians — always claim to be deeply concerned about the nation’s children. Back during the 2000 campaign, then-candidate George W. Bush, touting the “Texas miracle” of dramatically lower dropout rates, declared that he wanted to be the “education president.” Today, advocates of big spending cuts often claim that their greatest concern is the burden of debt our children will face.

In practice, however, when advocates of lower spending get a chance to put their ideas into practice, the burden always seems to fall disproportionately on those very children they claim to hold so dear.

Consider, as a case in point, what’s happening in Texas, which more and more seems to be where America’s political future happens first.

Texas likes to portray itself as a model of small government, and indeed it is. Taxes are low, at least if you’re in the upper part of the income distribution (taxes on the bottom 40 percent of the population are actually above the national average). Government spending is also low. And to be fair, low taxes may be one reason for the state’s rapid population growth, although low housing prices are surely much more important.

But here’s the thing: While low spending may sound good in the abstract, what it amounts to in practice is low spending on children, who account directly or indirectly for a large part of government outlays at the state and local level.

And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.

But wait — how can graduation rates be so low when Texas had that education miracle back when former President Bush was governor? Well, a couple of years into his presidency the truth about that miracle came out: Texas school administrators achieved low reported dropout rates the old-fashioned way — they, ahem, got the numbers wrong.

It’s not a pretty picture; compassion aside, you have to wonder — and many business people in Texas do — how the state can prosper in the long run with a future work force blighted by childhood poverty, poor health and lack of education.

But things are about to get much worse.

A few months ago another Texas miracle went the way of that education miracle of the 1990s. For months, Gov. Rick Perry had boasted that his “tough conservative decisions” had kept the budget in surplus while allowing the state to weather the recession unscathed. But after Mr. Perry’s re-election, reality intruded — funny how that happens — and the state is now scrambling to close a huge budget gap. (By the way, given the current efforts to blame public-sector unions for state fiscal problems, it’s worth noting that the mess in Texas was achieved with an overwhelmingly nonunion work force.)

So how will that gap be closed? Given the already dire condition of Texas children, you might have expected the state’s leaders to focus the pain elsewhere. In particular, you might have expected high-income Texans, who pay much less in state and local taxes than the national average, to be asked to bear at least some of the burden.

But you’d be wrong. Tax increases have been ruled out of consideration; the gap will be closed solely through spending cuts. Medicaid, a program that is crucial to many of the state’s children, will take the biggest hit, with the Legislature proposing a funding cut of no less than 29 percent, including a reduction in the state’s already low payments to providers — raising fears that doctors will start refusing to see Medicaid patients. And education will also face steep cuts, with school administrators talking about as many as 100,000 layoffs.

The really striking thing about all this isn’t the cruelty — at this point you expect that — but the shortsightedness. What’s supposed to happen when today’s neglected children become tomorrow’s work force?

Anyway, the next time some self-proclaimed deficit hawk tells you how much he worries about the debt we’re leaving our children, remember what’s happening in Texas, a state whose slogan right now might as well be “Lose the future.”

NYC Parents and Teachers fight for their schools

Some 2,000 parents, teachers and students demonstrated against school closures at the Panel for Educational Policy meeting at Brooklyn Tech HS on Feb. 3 before walking out in protest.

Calling the process a sham, some 2,000 parents, students and educators on Feb. 3 stormed out en masse from a meeting of the mayor’s Panel for Educational Policy before it voted to shutter 12 struggling New York City public schools.

Equipped with whistles and a foghorn, they also delayed the meeting’s start and at various points before their walkout brought the proceedings to a standstill, drowning out the panel chair’s calls for order with chants of “save our schools” and “Black must go.”

Met with tremendous applause and enthusiastic chants of “UFT” from the crowd, UFT President Michael Mulgrew in his testimony challenged the legitimacy of the school closure process.

“There cannot be a legitimate process for anything unless there is a plan for schools to succeed first,” Mulgrew declared. “All we see is a plan for failure. So as far as the UFT is concerned, this panel and this process are illegitimate.”

Mulgrew took aim at the DOE’s failure to support struggling schools, which union officials and educators claim have been intentionally starved of resources.

“Every school, no matter how they are performing, should be getting support from the Department of Education,” Mulgrew said. “If you cannot do that, then we do not need a Department of Education.”

Also speaking before the walkout, politician after politician took aim at the panel, the mayor and the DOE.

Brooklyn Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries said he could not decide whether to give the Department a “D for disaster” or an “F for failure.”

“Mayoral control is out of control,” he said. “It has not done justice for our students.”

The Bee's faulty campaign on teacher layoffs

The Bee's editorial position is strange. Jan.27. here.here They  assert that the lay off priority process for teachers is wrong. They  argue that students have a constitutional right to quality education. At the same time they  accept without push back the massive lay off of teachers. These lay offs increase class size and degrade the rights of the students. The Bee should address the bigger picture, how can we stop these massive layoffs? Its the state budget. Governor Brown’s central argument that the money is not there is inaccurate.  The money is there if the state is willing to collect the revenue.  Here is a list of sources for at $26 billion dollars. http://choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/01/california-budget-crisis-sources-of.html
It is a major mistake to make deep, immediate budget cuts in the middle of recession. This will make the recession worse. Instead,  we need to build the promise of California.
  That promise is a good education for all, a good  job for all,  the opportunity to have  a rewarding career, and the chance for a life that is more than simply the workplace.  The austerity paradigm underlying the tax and budget cut mania, which the Bee  accepts,   does not promote good jobs nor  rewarding   careers for teachers, police, firefighters, nurses.    It will make the recession worse.

California Budget problems grow !

Legislative Analyst’s Office;  Budget Projections

$25 Billion Budget Problem Needs to Be Addressed in Coming Months
Our forecast of California’s General Fund revenues and expenditures shows that the state must address a budget problem of $25.4 billion between now and the time the Legislature enacts a 2011–12 state budget plan. The budget problem consists of a $6 billion projected deficit for 2010–11 and a $19 billion gap between projected revenues and spending in 2011–12.

2010–11 Deficit. We assume that the state will be unable to secure around $3.5 billion of budgeted federal funding in 2010–11. This assumption is a major contributor to the $6 billion year–end deficit we project for 2010–11. We also project higher–than–budgeted costs in prisons and several other programs. In addition, our forecast assumes that passage of Proposition 22 will prevent the state from achieving about $800 million of budgeted solutions in 2010–11.

2011–12 Deficit. The temporary nature of most of the Legislature’s 2010 budget–balancing actions and the painfully slow economic recovery contribute to the $19 billion projected operating deficit in 2011–12. This gap is $2 billion less than we projected one year ago. Actions taken during the 2010–11 budget process to reduce Proposition 98 education spending are a major contributor to the decline.

Additional Savings From Proposition 98 [ Schools] Will Be Very Difficult

Our forecast indicates that General Fund revenues and transfers will decline by over $8 billion in 2011–12 due to the expiration of the temporary tax increases adopted in 2009. Because the Proposition 98 minimum school funding guarantee is affected by this drop, our budget forecast already reflects a $2 billion fall in the minimum guarantee between 2010–11 and 2011–12. This reduction would come at the same time that school districts exhaust the billions of dollars of one–time federal money they have received through the stimulus program and other legislation. For these reasons, it may be very difficult to achieve substantial additional budget reductions in Proposition 98 in 2011–12, compared to the levels already reflected in our forecast. In other words, if the Legislature funds schools at our projected minimum guarantee in 2011–12, it would mean billions of dollars in programmatic cuts to education but not contribute a single dollar to closing the $25 billion budget problem.

Reforming Education

Whitman's plans for California schools

 

Go Figure - Whitman’s Plan For Education Doesn’t Add Up…

CTA’s new TV ad calls out gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s plan that could cut another $7 billion from our schools. The question to her is how will she cut $15 billion from the state budget without taking nearly half or more from our schools. Whitman should know that education accounts for nearly half the state budget and in the last round of state budget reductions, public education took 53% of the cuts.

 

Background:

·        View Economist see flaws in Whitman’s policy proposals

·        View Education and California’s Budget

·        View Preparing for the Next Round of Budget Adjustments: How Education Might Fare

How You Can Help:

Contact Whitman and ask her to explain how she plans on cutting $15 billion from the state budget without cutting schools and colleges.

·        Call her at 408.400.3887

·        Email her at Communications@MegWhitman.com

·        Engage her on Twitter

·        Respond on her Facebook page and her Talk to Meg Website.

CTA

 

Sacramento City School budget woes

An excellent piece by a local teacher.  It will  be followed by an outburst of anti teacher writing. Readers might want to write in and support him.
http://www.sacbee.com/2010/06/12/2816935/pay-cuts-wont-solve-city-schools.html

Testing and How to Destroy the United States

Interesting essay: Click on the title above to read the entire piece.

How to Destroy the United States

by zoniedude

   

Sun Mar 07, 2010 at 12:14:03 PM PDT

To destroy the United States it is first necessary to undermine the popular conception of democracy in the modern world. As long as the citizens feel they have a duty to protect democracy it will be almost impossible to destroy the United States. However, if the citizens can be convinced of the futility of democracy then there will be less opposition to its destruction. So the primary thrust of any attempt to destroy the United States must be to convince the citizenry that their democratic government is the source of their problems.

In addition, you absolutely must suppress any idealistic portrayals of democratic government. When you discredit popular democracy there must be no countervailing effort to convince citizens of the ideals of democracy. For the average citizen this is simple, but for parents of school children that are constantly reminded by their children’s schoolwork of how the struggle for democracy evolved in the United States, it can be problematic.

Thus to destroy the United States it is absolutely crucial to stop the teaching of the fundamental principles of democracy to children. At the same time, it would be helpful to destroy any knowledge of how democracy came to exist in the first place, and that would mean to stop the teaching of the American experience.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/3/7/843837/-How-to-Destroy-the-United-States

In defense of public school teachers

Henry Giroux.  

There has been a long, though declining, tradition in the United States in which public school teaching was embraced as an important public service. It was assumed that teachers provided a crucial foundation for educating young people in the values, skills and knowledge that enabled them to be critical citizens capable of shaping and expanding democratic institutions. Since the 1980s, teachers have been under an unprecedented attack by those forces that view schools less as a public good than as a private right.  Yet, teachers are being deskilled, unceremoniously removed from the process of school governance, largely reduced to technicians or subordinated to the authority of security guards. Underlying these transformations are a number of forces eager to privatize schools, substitute vocational training for education and reduce teaching and learning to reductive modes of testing and evaluation.

Indications of the poisonous transformation of both the role of the public school and the nature of teacher work abound. The passage of laws promoting high-stakes testing for students and the use of test scores to measure teacher quality have both limited the autonomy of teacher authority and devalued the possibility of critical teaching and visionary goals for student learning. Teachers are no longer asked to think critically and be creative in the classroom. On the contrary, they are now forced to simply implement predetermined instructional procedures and standardized content, at best; and, at worst, put their imaginative powers on hold while using precious classroom time to teach students how to master the skill of test taking. Subject to what might be labeled as a form of bare or stripped-down pedagogy, teachers are removed from the processes of deliberation and reflection, reduced to implementing lock-step, time-on-task pedagogies that do great violence to students, while promoting a division of labor between conception and execution hatched by bureaucrats and "experts" from mainly conservative foundations. Questions regarding how teachers motivate students, make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative, work with parents and the larger community or exercise the authority needed to become a constructive pedagogical force in the classroom and community are now sacrificed to the dictates of an instrumental rationality largely defined through the optic of measurable utility.

http://www.truthout.org/in-defense-public-school-teachers-a-time-crisis58567

Budget crisis in Sacramento schools

The Bee writes today  as if the  budget crisis  of Sacramento City Unified, and 17 other local school districts is a problem of teachers being unwilling to take pay cuts. (They already receive are paid less than teachers in the surrounding districts.)

This  economic crisis was created by finance capital and banking, mostly on Wall Street particularly  Chase Banks, Bank of America, Citi Group, AIG, and others – not by teachers and not by students. Finance capital produced a $ 2 trillion bailout of the financial industry, the doubling of America’s unemployment rate and the loss of 2 million manufacturing jobs in 2008.  Fifteen million people are out of work.

Rather than blame the teachers,  an appropriate response would be to tax the banks  and the financial trades.  We pay a 8% sales tax in California.  There should be at least a 3% tax on sales of stocks and derivatives and financial instruments. Such a tax could fund the schools and slow down the excesses of  casino capitalism.  

Duane Campbell

Budget crisis in Sacramento school districts

In the Bee of March 29, there is an article, Union Divided over giving ground, by Melody Gutierrz on the current budget conflict in Sacramento City U. Here is my response.

The Bee writes as if the  budget crisis  of Sacramento City Unified, and 17 other local school districts is a problem of teachers being unwilling to take pay cuts. (They already receive are paid less than teachers in the surrounding districts.)

This  economic crisis was created by finance capital and banking, mostly on Wall Street particularly  Chase Banks, Bank of America, Citi Group, AIG, and others – not by teachers and not by students. Finance capital produced a $ 2 trillion bailout of the financial industry, the doubling of America’s unemployment rate and the loss of 2 million manufacturing jobs in 2008.  Fifteen million people are out of work.

Rather than blame the teachers,  an appropriate response would be to tax the banks  and the financial trades.  We pay a 8% sales tax in California.  There should be at least a 3% tax on sales of stocks and derivatives and financial instruments. Such a tax could fund the schools and slow down the excesses of  casino capitalism.  

Duane Campbell

http://www.choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com

Sacramento

Robert Reich: Bail out the schools

by: Robert Reich  | 

Any day now, the Obama administration will announce $4.35 billion in extra federal funds for under-performing public schools. That's fine, but relative to the financial squeeze all the nation's public schools now face it's a cruel joke.

The recession has ravaged state and local budgets, most of which aren't allowed to run deficits. That's meant major cuts in public schools and universities, and a giant future deficit in the education of our people.

Across America, schools are laying off thousands of teachers. Classrooms that had contained 20 to 25 students are now crammed with 30 or more. School years have been shortened. Some school districts are moving to four-day school weeks. After-school programs have been cancelled; music and art classes, terminated. Even history is being chucked.

Pre-K programs have been shut down. Community colleges are reducing their course offerings and admitting fewer students. Public universities, like the one I teach at, have raised tuitions and fees. That means many qualified students won't be attending.

Last year the nation committed $700 billion to bail out Wall Street banks, the engines of America's financial capital, because we were told we'd face economic Armegeddon if we didn't.

We've got our priorities backwards. Our schools are the engines of our human capital, and if we don't bail out public education we face a bigger economic Armegeddon years from now.

Financial capital moves instantly around the globe to wherever it can earn the best return. Human capital – the skills and insights of our people – is the one resource that's uniquely American, on which our future living standards uniquely depend.

Starting immediately, the federal government should give states and local governments interest-free loans to make up for all school and university budget shortfalls. The loans can be repaid when the recession is over and local and state tax revenues revive.

Over the longer term we must shift incentives away from financial capital toward human capital. A tiny one half of one percent tax on all financial transactions would generate about $200 billion a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That might put a crimp on Wall Street bonuses but it's enough to fund early childhood education, smaller K-12 classes, and lower tuitons and fees for public higher education.

The Street's financial capital is important to the American economy, but over the long term the classroom's human capital is absolutely crucial.

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

Kansas City may close 50% of schools

The economic crisis in the states.

Kansas City Public Schools: Bankruptcy May Force 50% Of Missouri City's Schools To Shut Doors

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/07/kansas-city-public-school_n_489145.html

A Climate of False Crisis

Dear Diane,

Leisure is an essential ingredient for a successful working democracy. We need time to think and unbundle some of the contradictions by which we live. If "elitism" is wrong for charters, why is it okay for public schools? Why do we presume that poor kids need a more rigid and authoritarian school climate than "ordinary" kids? How can I both believe in the importance of local decision-making where possible, and also support choice in schooling? My list is long.

But my time for discussing such issues isn't enough.

Then add to it the climate of false crisis that is whipped up by those who are quite sure of their agendas and have learned that giving citizens more time will only cause trouble, for them.

David Berliner and Bruce Biddle wrote a book on the topic: The Manufactured Crisis, in 1995. Richard Rothstein has continued the theme in most of his work, but rereading The Way We Were?, one realizes that public schools have always been driven by crises. Albert Shanker once acknowledged to me that he realized the crisis was a fiction, but that it was a useful fiction without which no one would take public education seriously.

Narratives are easier to remember, and so we invent them. And, we always insist that at this moment we cannot move with caution because—it's a crisis in need of an immediate fix.

Noted education historian Lawrence Cremin is quoted by Michael Goldenberg in a blog I just received, as saying:

"American economic competitiveness with Japan and other nations is to a considerable degree a function of monetary, trade and industrial policy, and of decisions made by the President and Congress, the Federal Reserve Board. ...Therefore, to conclude that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by education reforms, especially educational reform defined as school reform, is not merely utopian and millennialist, it is at best a foolish and at worst a crass effort to direction attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the blame instead on the schools. It is a device that has been used repeatedly in the history of American education."

Read Rothstein (above) for evidence of the latter. It's in keeping with a point that Paul Krugman made in his Feb. 4 New York Times column about fiscal policy, entitled "Fiscal Scare Tactics." He argues that the deficit hysteria is built not on facts but opinions. And, the opinions are not neutral in their self interests. "Fear mongering on the deficit may end up doing as much harm as fear-mongering on weapons of mass destruction," he says. And, I might add, "and as the fear-mongering about low test scores."

In my more active socialist youth, we used to argue about who would take out the garbage under socialism. In fact, of course today it's not a bad-paying job, thanks to unions. But we had our own solutions—like a reverse pay scale, with jobs no one wanted paying the most, and jobs everyone wanted the least; or making the young do the dirty work of society while the old basked in its benefits. Which, even if we were young, we didn't see as unfair. And, I still don't, of course.

But what's missing from all the debates about education, including the current preposterous committees deciding what the uniform national curriculum should be, is the fifth "habit of mind" that we invented for Central Park East: "Who cares? Why does it matter?" Until we get that right, or at least in the conversation at all, we'll not engage the hearts and minds of the young, nor have a truly well-educated public that can demand better explanations.

Yes, schools are to be blamed. But for something quite different. For the fact that our democracy is floundering from an easily conned citizenry. Lots and lots of money is a great advantage to the purveyors of distorted facts. The art of the con is the enemy of democracy. But it takes time—leisure—and a different set of habits than a world ruled by advertising slogans and sound bites, in the company of others to untangle some of the contradictions.

Incidentally, read the linked documents for a few examples of items being proposed for the kindergarten curricula of the future. The draft kindergarten ELA standards can be found on pages 14-21. The draft kindergarten math standards can be found on pages 7-9.

Deborah Meier, On the Education Week blog.   Bridging Differences: A dialogue between Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch.

Why School ?

For some time now, our national discussion of education has been dominated by a language of test scores and economic competitiveness.   To be sure, a major goal of American education is to prepare the young to make a living. But parents send their children to school for many other reasons as well: intellectual, social, civic, ethical and aesthetic.  Historically, these justifications for schooling have held more importance.  Not today.

…

It matters a great deal how we collectively talk about education, for that discussion both reflects and, in turn, affects policy decisions about what gets taught and tested, about funding, about what we expect schooling will contribute to our lives. It matters as well, how we think about intelligence, how narrowly or broadly we define it.  Our beliefs about intelligence affect everything  from the way we organize school and work to how we treat each other .  And,  it surely matters how e think about opportunity. “

Mike Rose.  Why School.  Reclaiming Education for All of Us. (2009)

Why School ?

"For some time now, our national discussion of education has been dominated by a language of test scores and economic competitiveness.   To be sure, a major goal of American education is to prepare the young to make a living. But parents send their children to school for many other reasons as well: intellectual, social, civic, ethical and aesthetic.  Historically, these justifications for schooling have held more importance.  Not today.

…

It matters a great deal how we collectively talk about education, for that discussion both reflects and, in turn, affects policy decisions about what gets taught and tested, about funding, about what we expect schooling will contribute to our lives. It matters as well, how we think about intelligence, how narrowly or broadly we define it.  Our beliefs about intelligence affect everything  from the way we organize school and work to how we treat each other .  And,  it surely matters how e think about opportunity. “

p.5. 

Mike Rose.  Why School.  Reclaiming Education for All of Us. (2009)

The Right to a great public education; California

We've got to stop cutting public education. To ease the budget crisis, one state after another is taking an ax to higher education. This is cruel and shortsighted.

Cruel because it denies students the right to a decent education. Shortsighted because how will this generation of students get prepared to compete globally or even to clean up the financial mess brought about by Wall Street?

I'm a product of the worst and best public education California has to offer. I grew up in an East Los Angeles housing project in the 1970s and 1980s. I attended overcrowded public schools in the inner city. Like many racial minorities from America's barrios and ghettos, I received an inadequate education.

While I excelled in mathematics, I was never taught to read or write at a competent level throughout my K-12 schooling. To complicate matters, the longest paper assigned to me in high school was two pages long.

I taught myself how to properly read and write while going through college to compensate for my poorly funded K-12 education. But what will happen to those without this same self-drive that I learned from my Mexican immigrant mother? Fortunately, I also benefited from affirmative action and from numerous educational outreach programs and policies like Occident College's Upward Bound - a preparatory program for students from disadvantaged communities.

If not for such programs, I wouldn't have made it to UCLA as an undergraduate. I wouldn't have earned a master's degree in urban planning there. And I wouldn't be pursuing my doctorate at Berkeley.

So I worry about those who grow up in poor neighborhoods without the same educational safety nets that allowed for me to attend some of the best universities in this country. I can't help but be concerned about the plight of my wife's elementary school students in East Los Angeles today.

Those who fight affirmative action and against government-sponsored early educational outreach programs conveniently wash their hands of any responsibility toward those who lack the financial resources and access to human capital to go to college.

And fewer and fewer have those resources, with one state after another raising tuition and other fees. These fee hikes couldn't come at a worse time.

If we care about equality of opportunity, if we are concerned about our ability to compete in the global economy, it's time to give everyone, including those from America's barrios and ghettos, a shot at a great public education.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Alvaro Huerta is a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley and a visiting scholar at UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center. He wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine. Readers may write to the author at: Progressive Media Project, 409 East Main Street, Madison, Wis. 53703; e-mail: pmproj@progressive.org; Web site: www.progressive.org. For information on PMP's funding, please visit http://www.progressive.org/pmpabout.html#anchorsupport.

This article was prepared for The Progressive Media Project and is available to MCT subscribers.

California Legislative Report Card

Report Card

2009.
Funding for California k-12 public education.

Senator Pro Tem. Darrell Steinberg.
Democratic Legislators D.

Republican Legislators F.

Governor Schwarzenegger F.

Funding for California Higher Education

Democratic Legislators D.

Republican Legislators F.

Governor Schwarzenegger F.

National Standards?

Posted in Education Week.

To the Editor:

The national-standards- development timeline of the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association, and Achieve Inc., a key player in the endeavor, is a dead giveaway to the closed, predetermined nature of the process ("Openness of Common-Standards Process at Issue," Aug. 12, 2009).

July 2009: Work groups are named.
July 2009: Three weeks later, draft college- and career-readiness standards are complete.
December 2009: The entire draft K-12 standards in language arts and math are complete.
January 2010: The standards are approved, and the effort to blackmail the states into signing on begins.

Anyone who has ever done curriculum- or standards-developme nt work knows immediately that this timetable signals a process in which the end product has already been decided upon at the beginning.
This project is entirely closed off from educator and citizen engagement. And, as usual, there is not a single person on either development team who actually interacts with children or adolescents—just a bunch of directors, managers, and associates.

It is typical of the arrogance and stupidity of American educational policy development in our time that we have the policy developed exclusively by people who have no personal engagement with the institutions of schooling, people who are bureaucrats and paper-pushers and wouldn’t know how to engage a child if their ample salaries depended on it.

Of course, this is the logical conclusion of modernist consciousness, to which living wisdom is irrelevant. And this negation of wisdom is one of the key reasons that all of our modernist institutions are collapsing.

No doubt national standards and national tests will be shoved through, which will lead inevitably to ever-greater efforts to transform our schools from places with real educative purposes into test-prep factories.

David Marshak
Bellingham, Wash.

Marty Hittleman: CFT, on Race to the Top ?

“Race To The Top:” Feds Demand Too Much, Too Soon, For Too Little

By Marty Hittelman
President
California Federation of Teachers
The California Federation of Teachers has a number of serious concerns regarding Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s proposed “Race to the Top” competition for state education funding. The proposed regulations for federal funding would require changes that could harm California students, are not based on research, and won't turn around struggling schools. There are two rounds of application, and no need to be panicked by the governor into rushing into the first one without proper discussion. Following are concerns, excerpted from a letter I wrote to the Education Secretary. For the complete text of the letter, go to www.cft.org.
Student Data
The California Federation of Teachers believes that student achievement and student growth data may be worthwhile tools in helping to improve school instruction when the data instruments contain information that is useful to the teacher. We do not believe that current standardized tests being administered as part of the No Child Left Behind Act meet those criteria. In terms of the “firewall” between student and teacher data, California has no restrictions on the use of such data at the local level, where it matters, for such evaluations. California should be judged to be in compliance with this requirement.
We need the right reforms
It takes more than the ability to fill in bubbles to be considered an educated person. We thought President Obama understood that. With the proposed requirements of “Race to the Top,” we are led to believe that he subscribes to the No Child Left Behind ideology of narrow testing and one-size-fits-all education. We are disappointed.
I am concerned that the governor and legislators of California will succumb to the temptation of increased funding while, at the same time, giving up traditional state and local autonomy in the area of education. We believe that many of the requirements of Race to the Top will be detrimental to our students’ education. We believe that it is unwise for California to accept, and for the federal government to impose, changes that have not been shown through research and practice to be productive. It is one thing to try new ideas, another to impose them before they’ve been proven to work.
Our experience indicates that schools improve when teachers are provided: relevant professional development; support such as mentoring and induction and manageable class sizes; supportive principals and qualified and trained support staff; a voice in school-level decisions; and safe schools in which to work. Firing or moving staff en masse hasn’t been proven a successful solution. Closing a school has the devastating effect of disrupting communities and displacing children, disruptions that weigh most heavily on minority communities.
Charter Schools
The CFT believes that the heavy emphasis in favor of charter schools in The Race to the Top is misplaced. Most charter schools do not do better than regular public schools, and many of them do worse. A recent study has shown that only 17 percent of charter schools produced higher academic gains than the traditional public schools and 37 percent did worse. The rest were about the same.
If charter schools are to become labs for new directions they should be required to serve English-language learners, students with disabilities, and very low income students. They should be held accountable for academic achievement the same way that our traditional public schools are. They should be financially sound and based on the same state standards as those proposed for traditional public schools.
Standardized Testing, Student Assessment, and Teacher Evaluation
The CFT believes that the emphasis on standardized tests, and their linkage to teacher evaluation, is misplaced and destructive. Multiple-choice tests in math and reading do not address the real goals of education. Teaching to the test not only narrows the curriculum but also tends to destroy any love of learning. When tests drive the curriculum, instruction suffers. It is not fair to teachers, students, and schools to have standardized test scores as the main determinant of teacher and school quality. It is not fair to base high stakes decisions on these test scores.
Anyone who has spent much time in the classroom will tell you that one day’s performance in not a valid indicator of a student’s mastery of his or her school year curriculum and growth. That is why educators use ongoing quizzes, tests, written assignments, and portfolios to determine how much a student is growing. Not only are children’s performances on one standardized test not a valid measure of quality, but it also is unfair to determine things like teacher compensation and dismissal based on these test scores. Such an approach will cause some teachers to fight for the easiest group of students to teach in order to maximize pay. This is just not a productive approach.
In addition, it is unclear how the proposal would base teacher evaluation, compensation, promotion and dismissal on standardized tests, when most teachers teach grades and subjects not captured in standardized tests or repeated. We are also concerned that the use of data may violate student and educator privacy rights. We are concerned that the programs being proposed have no track record in turning around schools while proven programs are not under consideration.
Making Progress in Closing the Achievement Gap
Any effort to close the achievement gap in our schools that does not address the conditions that children grow up in is doomed to failure. Schools can only do so much in the time that they work with students. Until this country closes the gaps in job opportunities at a livable wage, health care, and affordable housing, efforts for improvements in the schools will have limited success. In addition, you can develop all the best tests in the world but if you don’t improve the conditions in the schools that students and teachers operate in, the test scores will not improve. As the famous farmer said, “weighing my hog doesn’t help it to grow heavier.”
Posted on August 28, 2009