An Open Letter to Nick Hanauer from Bill Lyne, President of United Faculty of Washington State

This post has been burning up the internet and I finally slowed down enough to read this brilliant piece thanks to my co-editor Sue Peters who suggested that we publish it.

To follow is a post written by United Faculty of Washington State President Bill Lyne titled Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon a Wheel to Nick Hanauer, founder of the League of Education Voters and financial backer of all things ed reform in the state of Washington.

An Open Letter to Nick Hanauer

Our friends over at Publicola have recently been hosting a rousing debate between big bucks Democrat Nick Hanauer and WEA President Mary Lindquist on teachers’ unions and K-12 schools.  Here at the blog, we have a hard time resisting sticking our nose into issues we don’t know much about, so we decided to join the fun with our own open letter to Mr. Hanauer:

Dear Mr. Hanauer,

I’ve been reading your recent Publicola colloquy with WEA President Mary Lindquist with interest.  I appreciate the way that you have genuinely engaged the question of what you call school reform and that you took the time to respond to Mary’s letter to you.  That’s unusual—most rich people who appoint themselves experts in something don’t usually engage with the people they criticize.  You seem like a guy who might be willing to listen, so I’d like to take the presumptuous step of joining the discussion.

In the full disclosure department, I am a professor at Western Washington University and the president of the United Faculty of Washington State, which represents the faculty at Washington’s four regional comprehensive universities.  We are affiliated with WEA and I sit on the WEA Board of Directors.  But, while I have learned a lot about K-12 education from the teachers and staff at the WEA, my union work deals almost exclusively with higher education, so I’m probably as much out of my depth as you are when it comes to K-12 education.  This letter is from one uninformed outsider to another and is not in any way an official response from the WEA.

In your letter to Mary you say that it’s not the hard-working, dedicated teachers who are ruining education but rather their nasty, child-hating union.  I grew up as an upper middle class white boy in the American South, where all of the white grownups had their favorite Black people—the cook, the person who looked after the kids, the guy who took care of the cattle for a share of the corn crop.  But God forbid that one of those favorites be seen gathering on a street corner with Black people from out of town, or at an NAACP meeting, or having coffee with a union representative.  At the first hint of any organized activity, our grownups would turn on their favorite Black people faster than a summer squall could dump an inch of rain on the pasture.  Suddenly the individuals who had been so tender, wise, and trustworthy were scary, too stupid to know better, and not to be let into the house.  Everybody loved the solitary black person, nobody liked it when they started to bunch up and talk crazy.

That’s kind of the way it is with teachers.  Everybody loves a teacher, nobody likes the big, bad teachers’ union.  As long as they’re staying after school to give the extra help to the kids who need it or reaching into their own pockets to pay for the supplies that the state doesn’t anymore, teachers are saints.  But when they collectively advocate for decent wages, adequate health care, and working conditions that don’t erode by the minute they’re a threat to the moral fabric of the state.

Perhaps it is this construction of a teachers’ union that isn’t composed of teachers (the same way my southern relatives always believed that organized black people were put up to it by uppity Northern Blacks or communists) that leads to some of the difficult constructions in your letter to Mary.  You say that “the vast majority of Washington’s teachers care deeply about student outcomes, work incredibly hard, and are constantly working to improve their instructional practices.”  But in the very next paragraph you talk about the “elements that are largely missing from our State’s public education system: relentlessly high standards, a culture of excellence, and a systemic commitment to innovation.”  For both of these things to be true, you have to imagine the deeply caring, hard working, forward looking teachers you describe coming together in their democratically elected union and suddenly losing all interest in excellence and innovation.

The truth is that teachers in this state and across the country are concerned about the “reforms” so relentlessly pursued by well-funded corporate interests (from Arne Duncan to the Gates Foundation to the League of Education Voters) because many of them will do to public education what the same kind of privatizing “reform” did to health care.  Education is what Wall Street has called “the big enchilada,” the last big public sphere (after health care) available for private exploitation and profit.  And if we privatize education while trotting out euphemisms like reform, efficiency, and excellence, we’ll get exactly what we have now with health care.  Rich people will have access to the best education in the world and everybody else will get education that is extremely profitable but below the standards of many developing countries.

There is something deeply disingenuous about the arguments that you and other business elite school reformers make when you say things like “I am not a teacher and would not presume to tell you how to teach . . . but in my experience as a business leader and entrepreneur . . . .”  The education foundations and leagues and task forces that people like you fund are full of non-teachers who are constantly telling teachers how to teach, but even if that weren’t true, the evidence of your steel-eyed business sense is hard to see in the education “reforms” you’re pushing.  I’m not a business leader and entrepreneur, but it isn’t a stretch to imagine that if education were a company you were trying to turn around, you wouldn’t be focusing on the stuff that’s always a part of education “reform.”

• If you had a company that was as desperately underfunded as public education, you probably would make that funding your first priority.

• If you had a company that needed more workers as desperately as public education needs more teachers, you wouldn’t spend all your time worrying about the order in which you were going to lay off the workers you have.

• If you had a company that desperately needed the most trained and qualified workers the way that our schools need the most trained and qualified teachers, you wouldn’t turn to a temp agency like Teach For America (whose freshly scrubbed and earnest young charges make up for their lack of qualification with lots of well-meaning white liberal racism).

• And you certainly wouldn’t spend your time writing complicated and lugubrious evaluation policies that only the most committed HR bureaucrat could love.

To read this post in full, go to the United Faculty of Washington State blog.

Dora

A must read: Mass hysteria in New York City after test scores are released

I cannot believe that the ed reform movement has come down to this, releasing teacher evaluations based on test scores and then the New York Post selecting one teacher as the worst teacher in NYC and posting her photo and information on the cover of their rag. Is this what education is supposed to be about?

There is a post in Living Beyond the Gates that is a must read and describes what led up to this unfathomable situation and what the fallout is now and will continue to be. The post is The Crucible – NYC and The Department of Education’s Mass Hysteria.

Dora

Video: The Occupy Seattle Public Education Work Group Invites the Gates Foundation to a Policy Throwdown

Seattle Protest and March for Public Education

March 1 National Day of Action for Education

Banks got bailed out, students and teachers got sold out!

Thursday, March 1

2:45pm – Gather at Westlake Park

3:30pm – March to the Gates Foundation Headquarters (5th & Mercer)

4:15pm – Rally, teach-in, and grade-in led by the Seattle Education Association and UW professor Wayne Au

4:30pm – ‘Policy Throwdown’ with the Gates Foundation (if they have the guts to show) – a General Assembly style open discussion of education and charter schools facilitated by Garfield High teacher Jesse Hagopian

RSVP on Facebook

Students and teachers should not have to pay for the crisis created by the 1%. We refuse to accept the dismantling of our schools and universities, while the banks and corporations make record profits. We refuse to accept budget cuts, educational re-segregation, attacks on teacher unions, rising class sizes, massive tuition increases, outrageous student debt, and increasing privatization and corporatization.

They got bailed out and we got sold out – but through nationally coordinated mass action we can and will turn back the tide of austerity.

The Washington State Supreme Court recently ruled that the State is out of compliance with its “paramount constitutional duty” to fully fund education. K-12 education’s share of the state budget has been in decline since 1981. Since the “Great Recession”, Washington State has cut $10 billion from public education and social services, with over $3 billion slashed from K-12 funding alone. Washington State now ranks 42nd in the nation in per-pupil spending and has the 3rd highest class sizes in the country. State universities have raised tuition by over 47% in the last three years.

But rather than devote more funding to providing quality public education, state politicians are putting forward legislation that would open the door to charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately owned and run. These unaccountable schools are exempt from state standards and union contracts. The Gates Foundation is a leading backer and promoter of charter schools nationwide, despite the fact that their own Stanford University study showed that charters, on average, perform worse than public schools. Charter schools are nothing more than a stepping stone toward privatization of education.

This article in the Washington Post, Gates spends millions to sway public on ed reform, and the leaked secret memo it excerpts, describe the Gates Foundation’s plans to secretly manipulate public opinion by taking advantage of the dire financial condition of the national school districts.

We call on all students, teachers, workers, and parents from all levels of education — pre-K-12 through higher education in public and private institutions — and all Occupiers, labor unions, and organizations of oppressed communities to mobilize on March 1st to tell those in power:

The resources exist for high-quality education for all.

We demand:

- Full funding for public education and social services

- Tax the 1%

- No budget cuts

- No tuition hikes

- No attacks on teacher unions

- No privatization of public education

Organized by the Occupy Seattle Public Education work group. For more info, contact ospubliceducation@gmail.com.

Endorsed by:

Occupy Seattle Labor Caucus

Parents Across America

Parents for Skateparks

Social Equality Educators

To get involved in helping to plan and organize the Seattle day of action, come to an OS Public Education work group meeting — every Tuesday, 6pm, east-side of the 2nd floor of the Washington State Convention Center, Pike between 7th & 8th.

Hope to see you there!

Please RSVP on Facebook

Flyer available here

To endorse the Seattle day of action, please contact: ospubliceducation@gmail.com.

Teacher Evaluation Bill SB 5895 and why it should be opposed vehemently

There is a Teacher Evaluation Bill SB 5895 which ties test scores to teacher evaluations. At this time the teachers union in the state of Washington has been working with OSPI on an evaluation system that was set forth to be developed in last years legislation. Now certain legislators want to ratchet it up a notch and tie a large percentage of the evaluation to student test scores.

Let’s start with a great video that distills this issue down to the point where even a politician who knows nothing about public education could understand it. This video describes why merit pay isn’t a good idea but more importantly describes why the idea of teacher evaluations based on test scores is flawed.

In Seattle we have the MAP test that was instituted at the cost of millions of dollars thanks to our former Broad superintendent who was on the board of directors of the NWEA which produces the MAP test. This test, as NWEA has stated, was not designed to be used to evaluate a teacher’s performance but that is exactly what the intention is or at least was when Goodloe-Johnson was our superintendent.

Since the pilot program that all the ed-reformers in our state applauded, it has now been instituted in our schools. Then last month NWEA “re-calibrated” all of the test scores that had been taken for the last year and guess what? The administrators within SPS stated to use the term “negative growth” when describing test scores. Now I don’t know about you but, I have never seen anyone have “negative growth” in terms of a knowledge base unless there was an unfortunate accident or disease affecting mental ability but that’s how it was phrased. All test scores went down. Hmmm. Now if this was New York City today, everyone would be blaming the teachers and starting the witch hunt of who should be placed on the pyre first.

To read a discussion regarding this testing snafu, check out Seattle Schools Community Forum.

In New York a similar teacher evaluation bill was passed last week to the applause of corporate ed reformers. Diane Ravitch termed it firing our way to the top in her article A Dark Day for New York:

In New York, the politicians, the union leaders, and the media are all exchanging high fives over last week’s agreement about teacher evaluation. Gov. Andrew Cuomo took credit for forcing the parties to settle. But it’s a dark day when politicians impose an untested scheme on educators, despite a wealth of evidence that these schemes are inaccurate, unstable, and have negative consequences and no evidence that they improve education. See this and this. If we were serious about improving education for all children, we would take a broader view of the causes of and remedies for low achievement.But the politicians have decided to solve our education problems not by looking at root causes but by firing teachers. They feel certain that we can fire our way to the top. In 2010, New York won a Race to the Top award of $700 million. To obtain this money—very little, if any, of which will ever reach any classroom or student—New York said it would devise a teacher evaluation plan that was based in part on student test scores. Although this idea finds little support among testing experts, it is an obsession with the current U.S. Department of Education. The winning New York proposal, in order to get the support of the teachers’ unions, said that 20 percent of teachers’ evaluations would be tied to student scores.

When states determine that test scores should count for 20 percent or 40 percent or 50 percent or some other percent, this is a purely arbitrary decision. There is no research, no experience, no evidence whatsoever that identifies what portion, if any, of a teacher’s evaluation should be based on the increase in their students’ test scores.

And then this:

But back to the politics: In addition to the parties involved, charter school supporters hailed the agreement, which was odd because teachers in charter schools will not be subject to its provisions.

The New York Principals, a group that formed in response to the ongoing emphasis on test scores as an evaluation tool, responded with this position paper An Open Letter of Concern Regarding New York States APPR Legislation for the Evaluation of Teachers and Principals. Many of the points in this paper can be used to explain to our legislators exactly why SB 5895 is not what we want for our children.

This testing mania and basing teacher ratings on student test scores has gotten out of control as in New York City where teacher’s ratings based on test scores has been released in the New York Times and other news outlets. Mass hysteria has broken out in New York where parents are already wanting to take their children out of classrooms and schools. One interesting point in all of this is that the test scores of teachers in charter schools have not been published. Hmmm.

The ratings of public school teachers were released on Friday and already, there is talk of releasing teacher ratings based on test scores throughout the state. Will charter schools be included in this McCarthy era witch hunt? Inquiring minds want to know.

Is this the sort of insanity that we want in Seattle or in our state?

There are a few articles that I would like to draw your attention to in terms of this ultimate form of teacher bashing. The first article is A principal at a high performing school explains why she is “absolutely sick” about the public release of the TDRs”. Here is an excerpt:

Having seen the TDRs when they first came out, I can say that they are extremely inaccurate, both in terms of actual mistakes and in how data is interpreted, particularly for teachers of high performing children.   Here is some more detail on that:

                1.       The amount of data that is simply wrong is staggering.  In my school alone, the first year of the TDRS, for just two grades (since of course that is all we have getting TDRs) 4-6 teachers have inaccurate data as follows:
·         One teacher who taught in 08-09 but was on child care leave for years before that time has data for a previous year-impossible…it must be data from someone who was in that same room the previous year.
·         For both of my upper grade CTT (inclusion) classes, the special education teacher has a data report that is for all 29 kids; the general education teachers in those classes have no TDRs. (This does appear to be corrected for 2010.)

And on the blog With a Brooklyn Accent, Shame of a Nation:

 This morning, when they return to work after vacation, teachers at more than twenty New York City public schools will face a gauntlet of reporters asking them about the Teacher Data Reports that were published during their winter vacation. Some will be singled out for personal humiliation, others will be asked to comment on their colleague’s abilities. What began as effort to quantify teacher performance has ended up as a spectacle of public humiliation of individual teachers unparalleled in the City’s history, the moral equivalent of the Salem Witch Trials or the purge of Hollywood Communists, with all the power and ruthlessness of commercial media unleashed. Some of the city’s best teachers – whom this ridiculous system assigned low scores-are going to be treated as though they were politicians caught frequenting Hookers or baseball stars caught using steroids, all in front of the children they teach.

Again, is this what we want for our teachers in Seattle or our state? Or for that matter, anywhere!? And don’t think for a minute that this couldn’t happen here. It occurred in Los Angles last year which was hailed as a real step forward in education reform by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama. It has now happened in New York City and will continue until enough parents, students, educators and concerned citizens stop this test crazed teacher evaluation insanity.

Call or write your legislators today and let them know what you think about this bill.

Dora

Parents Across America on corporate interests in education: One year ago

Early last year the Founding Members of Parents Across America met in New York City for the first time together in one place to begin the task of organizing Parents Across America.

We will be celebrating our first year as an organization in March and I am thrilled to say that in the state of Washington we now have four chapters and one affiliate as well as a new chapter in Oregon.

We are growing literally everyday. People are joining via Facebook or contacting us on an individual basis just asking how to join or what they can do in their communities.

This is an exciting time for the organization. The more we grow, the more there is to share in terms of information and support. We are truly a grassroots organization made up of parents, teachers and students committed to keeping public education public and strengthening our educational system.

I wanted to share with you interviews that were done last year when we all met for the first time in NYC.

You might recognize Sue Peters, Parents Across America Founding Member and Founding Co-Editor of this blog.

Dora

PAA Founding Member and Founding Co-Editor of Seattle Education

March 1st National Day of Action for Education in Seattle

Seattle Protest and March for Public Education

March 1 National Day of Action for Education

Banks got bailed out, students and teachers got sold out!

On Thursday, March 1st, Seattle will join cities across the country taking action to support Public Education.

The Seattle events will start with a rally at Westlake Center at 2:45 p.m., followed by a 3:30 p.m. march to the Gates Foundation to support a Grade-In conducted by teachers from the Seattle Education Association and a Teach-In about charters by UW Professor Wayne Au. At 4:30 p.m., members of the group plan to challenge Gates Foundation policy analysts to a Policy Throwdown — a General Assembly style open discussion of education and charter issues facilitated by Jesse Hagopian.

Thursday, March 1

2:45pm – Gather at Westlake Park

3:30pm – March to the Gates Foundation Headquarters

4:15pm – Rally, teach-in, and grade-in led by the Seattle Education Association

4:30pm – ‘Policy Throwdown’

Students and teachers should not have to pay for the crisis created by the 1%. We refuse to accept the dismantling of our schools and universities, while the banks and corporations make record profits. We refuse to accept budget cuts, educational re-segregation, attacks on teacher unions, rising class sizes, massive tuition increases, outrageous student debt, and increasing privatization and corporatization.

They got bailed out and we got sold out – but through nationally coordinated mass action we demand FULL PUBLIC FUNDING and FULL PUBLIC CONTROL.

The Washington State Supreme Court recently ruled that the State is out of compliance with its “paramount constitutional duty” to fully fund education. K-12 education’s share of the state budget has been in decline since 1981. Since the “Great Recession”, Washington State has cut $10 billion from public education and social services, with over $3 billion slashed from K-12 funding alone. Washington State now ranks 42nd in the nation in per-pupil spending and has the 3rd highest class sizes in the country. State universities have raised tuition by over 47% in the last three years.

But rather than devote more funding to providing quality public education, state politicians are putting forward legislation that would open the door to charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately owned and run. These unaccountable schools are exempt from state standards and union contracts. The Gates Foundation is a leading backer and promoter of charter schools nationwide, despite the fact that their own Stanford University study showed that charters, on average, perform worse than public schools. Charter schools are nothing more than a stepping stone toward privatization of education.

This article from the Washington Post, Gates spends millions to sway public on ed reform, and the leaked secret memo it excerpts, describe the Gates Foundation’s plans to secretly manipulate public opinion by taking advantage of the dire financial condition of the national school districts.

We call on all students, teachers, workers, and parents from all levels of education — pre-K-12 through higher education in public and private institutions — and all Occupiers, labor unions, and organizations of oppressed communities to mobilize on March 1st to tell those in power: The resources exist for high-quality education for all. We demand:

- Full funding for public education and social services

- Tax the 1%

- No budget cuts

- No tuition hikes

- No attacks on teacher unions

- No privatization of public education

- Full public control of education policy

Organized by the Occupy Seattle Public Education work group. For more info, contact ospubliceducation@gmail.com.

Endorsed by:

Social Equality Educators

Occupy Seattle Labor Caucus

Parents Across America

Parents for Skateparks.

To get involved in helping to plan and organize the Seattle day of action, come to an OS Public Education work group meeting — every Tuesday, 6pm, east-side of the 2nd floor of the Washington State Convention Center, Pike between 7th & 8th.

To endorse the Seattle day of action, please contact ospubliceducation@gmail.com.

Washington State Democratic Party Chairman Dwight Pelz speaks up on ed reform

To follow is an open letter from Washington State’s Democratic Party Chairman Dwight Pelz:

A Democrat For Education

Count me as a Democrat opposed to the most strident elements of so-called Education Reform. Let me be clear that I am not opposed to high standards, high achievement, or accountability. What I reject is the culture of scapegoating teachers for the failures of society to protect families and kids, the hypocrisy of defunding schools while corporations bank record profits, and the focus on the latest fads instead of long term, structural improvements.

MY WIFE THE TEACHER

First, let me point out that my wife is a teacher. She leaves the house every morning at 5:30 and comes home around 4:30. She works every Saturday. She teaches in an alternative Seattle Public High School, with two teachers and 50 students. Three years ago they had three teachers, but with budget cutbacks, her class size is now much higher.

My wife saves lives. She is a nationally recognized teacher. Her students are a wonderful mix of kids who have left the traditional high schools. Many have tough home lives, learning disabilities, jobs, and/or substance abuse issues. She nurtures them to graduation – for many their greatest success in a difficult life. (For some of these kids, graduation is the first time their parents have attended a school event.) For some graduation will be the sole success they might have for some time, as they go out into a world of limited job opportunities and unaffordable college.

Some recently adopted reforms limit my wife’s creative teaching to inflexible standards and inflexible curricula, as she focuses on the tests which will now measure her students, and purportedly measure her effectiveness as a teacher. This “accountability” means more paperwork, so that my wife can document her children’s success and her performance. A major part of her time is now committed to data collection, test preparation, and test taking, which means less time for teaching. Since teaching is really her job, some have chosen to increase her accountability but reduce her productivity.

She is expected to deliver higher test scores at the same time the Legislature delivers less support to our schools. My wife is facing a classic “industrial speed-up” at work due to the reduction in school budgets. The Seattle School District is doing its best, but forced to make tough budget decisions. In addition to a 50% increase in her class size, she has fewer support services such as counseling or health services for the students. School lunch has been reduced, so some of the kids are hungry during the day, and bus passes have been reduced, so attendance becomes more sporadic.

My wife is expected to achieve more each year in terms of student achievement. We don’t hold Congress, corporations, the Legislature, or parents accountable for supporting student achievement – just teachers. Many Ed Reformers would have us believe that the weak link in public education is the teachers – those adults who have committed their careers to their students.

There are clearly teachers who should not be in a classroom–most teachers will tell you there are weak links in their schools in need of professional development, mentoring, or outright removal. The current evaluation bill–a compromise that only proves the point that Democrats can and do lead collaboratively on reform measures–is a good step forward, assuming funding is available to make it work.

HB 1209 – THE WASL

My other vantage point is that in 1993 I was Chair of the Senate Education Committee, and current Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn was Chair of the House Education Committee. Together we wrote HB 1209, the Last Great Education Reform Bill, the one which created the WASL.

I was, as many are today, a legislator with ZERO understanding of the classroom who was challenged to reform public education. Kerry Killinger would lecture us on how to run the schools like a business. (Perhaps we were supposed to securitize the kids and sell their education futures on a secondary market?) I remember one business leader who sat in my office, looked me coldly in the eye and asked, “Do you have the courage to change public education?”.

The problem is that it does not take courage so much as knowledge and humility for a Legislature to change public education. I now know that too many of today’s “reforms” are short term fads, fueled by poorly understood clichés, supported by well-meaning individuals, intent on revolutionizing our education system, at no additional cost.

In 1993 we said that not every child should attend college. This year every child should be college ready.

In 1993 we acknowledged that poverty and hunger influenced child learning and promised a package of wrap around social services for at-risk students. This year citing poverty is cynically considered an excuse put forward by poor teachers.

Critics dismiss a child’s race or poverty background with the cliché “nothing influences a child’s learning within the confines of a school more than his or her teacher and principal”. In other words, great teachers can transform children with tough home lives, learning disabilities, jobs, and/or substance abuse issues. If the child falls asleep during class because her alcoholic parents are fighting each night, the teacher will be fired if the child does not show academic progress.

As a nation we have abandoned the fight against poverty, but some would promise that all poor children can go to Harvard if they just have a great teacher.

In the 90′s, one prominent ed reform fad was to have higher standards for teachers: “Science teachers should have science degrees.” We told teachers to get Masters Degrees and advance credits, but then Bill Gates decreed in 2010 that master’s degrees are unrelated to teachers’ ability to teach. Gates says class size does not affect student learning – my wife does not agree.

Congress loves fads, and passed the bi-partisan No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, and decreed, incredulously, that by 2014 every child would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. This led one observer to say, “The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average.” President Obama just granted ten states waivers from these requirements, calling NCLB an admirable but flawed effort that hurt students instead of helping them.

Ed Reform is like the weather, if you hang around, it will change. A teacher with a 30 year career will find the Legislature coming around every eight or ten years knocking on the classroom door, saying the teacher does not understand teaching, and that they have to follow the latest edicts. Senator Dwight Pelz did it in 1993. Shame on Senator Pelz for his hubris.

REPUBLICANS LOVE ED REFORM–BUT FOR THE WRONG REASONS

In the ’60′s when I was in high school America had the strongest middle class and the greatest public education system in the world — K-12 and higher ed. Americans loved their schools, took pride in their government, and the ultra-wealthy paid their fair share in taxes.

In 1980 Reagan said in his Inaugural Speech, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Grover Nordquist famously said in 2001, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Republicans understood that a government the public mistrusted was a government that did not deserve their taxes. Reagan said that the best way to control the government was to starve it. Over the past 30 years Republicans have been attacking government at all levels, and slashing taxes in America, with the benefit accruing to the top one percent.

The assault on public education is a corollary to the Republican assault on the government. Schools that you do not trust do not deserve your taxes. Schools do not need more funding, they need reform, or they need to be privatized as Charter Schools, dissolved into voucher subsidies for religious schools, or abandoned as simply failing. This narrative plays perfectly for Grover Nordquist, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, John Boehner, and Rob McKenna.

Recently, Republican Senator Steve Litzow and Democratic House member Eric Pettigrew signed onto a formulaic op-ed in the Seattle Times that unfortunately reinforces the Republican narrative that schools can be improved with no increase in funding.

“Without breaking the bank, can the Legislature do anything during its 60-day session to move toward the world-class K-12 system. . . “

“A pair of bipartisan bills filed last week would, at relatively little cost, help state government comply with its constitutional mandate to “make ample provision” for basic education — which includes but is not limited to funding.”

“Senate Bill 6203 recognizes that, and would cost taxpayers nothing while offering a return that is incalculable.”

“SB6203. . . . should lead to a great teacher in every classroom. . ” (If every teacher is great, then what does “great” mean?)

Democrats support efficient, accountable government and the services that maintain and enhance our communities. We support higher taxes on wealthy families and corporations, we support funding education, we support teachers, we support unions, and we think that it is our society that is failing low income and minority students, not their teachers. A fair discussion about education in America — which many Democrats in Olympia and Washington, DC are helping lead– will make long term progress by holding Congress, corporations, the state legislatures, and maybe even parents accountable for supporting student achievement – not just teachers.

THE TRUE CRISIS FACING EDUCATION IN AMERICA

I beseech the Ed Reformers to turn their focus from short term, and largely unproven “fixes” like charter schools and merit pay to join Democrats at all levels willing to address the true crisis facing public education in America: In a global economy, the United States has no national commitment to fund quality education.

While China and India and other competitors are investing massively in their education systems, the United States is openly allowing our schools to deteriorate. We had the world’s best education system in the 30 years after the War, when ironically we did not need it as much as we do in today’s highly competitive global economy.

We need a federal policy that guarantees that education funding maintains and grows despite economic cycles. Today the 50 states fund K-12 and their public universities. Thankfully state governments cannot borrow money. Congress can. If we are to have a national commitment to quality education we need to hold Congress accountable for a federal policy to fund education in America, particularly during a recession. Rick Santorum said in the Arizona debate “I believe the federal government should get out of the education business. . . and put it back to the state.” Education must not be a local issue, but rather one of our highest national priorities.

Republicans oppose this, because lower taxes for wealthy people are more important to them than quality schools and universities. In 2010 Barack Obama and Patty Murray led the effort to appropriate stimulus money to backfill state revenues for teachers and classrooms. Republicans opposed it in 2010 and stopped it in 2011.

A national commitment to funding quality education will not receive bi-partisan support. Republicans, corporations, and well heeled lobbyists will support education reform if it does not require higher taxes and if it accelerates attacks on the teachers union. Until we expand the definition of true education reform to include a financial commitment to strong schools and universities nationwide, in good times and bad, then Democrats will have to go it alone.

You can contact Dwight Pelz at chair@wa-democrats.org.

What would you ask Bill Gates?

Ask Bill

Recently CNN asked their viewers to submit questions for Bill Gates for an interview that he was giving on Africa. Remember now, the more money you have, the more you know…right!?

I thought that I would pose that question to this “audience” in terms of education or any other subject for that matter since Bill does seem to know a lot about a lot of different subjects.

So think about it for a minute then ask away. Some questions might be posed at the March 1st Seattle Day of Action for Public Education event culminating at the Gates Foundation.

Dora

This Goes Under “Cashing In On Ed Reform” : K12 Inc.

I am posting this article, Virtual ed. company faces critical press and a recent lawsuit, in full because you will not be able to read it otherwise unless you subscribe to Education Week. If they sue me, I’ll start asking for donations. This kind of greed and self-interest just can’t go unnoticed.

By the way, do you think that  this guy’s son goes to a charter school?

And one other thing, this is the League of Education Voters next push. Don Neilson is waiting in the wings as well.

Dora

Ronald J. Packard, center, the chief executive of K12 Inc., and his son Chase celebrate the company’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2007, along with John F. Baule, the chief operating officer of K12. Don't they look happy.

In a scant few months, K12 Inc. and its fluctuating performance on Wall Street are proving that the combination of being a publicly traded company and operating in the school marketplace can lead to heightened levels of scrutiny in a growing but controversial sector of education.

On Dec. 12, the common stock price for the company, the nation’s largest for-profit operator of online K-12 schools, sat healthily at $28.79 per share, a dip from highs of $39.37 earlier in the year but a $10 increase from two years before.

The following day, The New York Times published a front-page article casting K12 Inc. as the center of a broken for-profit online school movement. K12, the newspaper said, yielded big profits despite data suggesting its students were performing well below average.

K12 Inc. has been able “to use education as a source of government-financed business, much as military contractors have capitalized on Pentagon spending,” the article said.

Three days later, K12 Inc. stock, which is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, had plummeted 34 percent, to $18.90 a share.

K12 at a Glance

Founded: 2000

Public Offering: 2007

New York Stock Exchange Symbol: LRN

Founders: Ronald J. Packard (formerly of Knowledge Schools, McKinsey & Co., Goldman Sachs), William J. Bennett (former U.S. Secretary of Education; no longer with the company)

FY 2011 Revenue: $522 million

FY 2011 Net Income: $12.8 million

Outstanding Shares: 36,381,336 (as of Dec. 31, 2011)

Current public school enrollment: 105,070

States with operations: 29, plus the District of Columbia

Employees: 2,500 (as of June 30, 2011)

SOURCE: Education Week

Some education experts excoriated the company, for-profit education, and online schools. Others have picked apart the criticism as one-sided and unempirical. Either way, the company occupies a complex space in education. K12 and other education providers can find it especially tricky to operate as public companies. (“Publicly Traded Ed.Companies Are Rare,” this issue.)

The Business Model

K12 Inc.’s contracts with school districts are paid for with public dollars. It must answer to taxpayers and navigate the increased focus on accountability and performance data in public schools. But as a publicly traded company, it also must answer to shareholders and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Just over a month after the New York Times article was published, a K12 Inc. shareholder filed a federal lawsuit against the company. The suit claims its executives, specifically Chief Executive Officer Ronald J. Packard and Chief Financial Officer Harry T. Hawks, pumped up stock prices by misleading investors with false student-performance claims.

Company officials say the criticisms are exaggerated.

“I’m a big believer in transparency and accountability. I do think the more visible you are, the easier it is to try and attack you,” Mr. Packard said in an interview last week. “For reasons I don’t fully understand, there are a lot of people who don’t like for-profit companies in education.”

K12 Inc. is expected to generate around $680 million in revenue this year, from a variety of sources. It sells K-12, college-preparatory, and foreign-language curricula to school districts, individual schools, and home-schoolers; operates online and blended-learning private schools domestically and abroad; and sells education software and learning-management systems to schools.

Recently, the company has bought all or part of companies that provide similar products, including online schools operator Kaplan Virtual Education, education software maker American Education Corp., and Web International Education Group, a China-based provider of English-language courses.

But its management of public online charter schools is by far its most-scrutinized line of business. K12 Inc. is the rare company where the performance of its end-users—students—can have an impact on the bottom line. A significant portion of the income for online school operators is tied to enrollment, and if student-performance numbers are down, parents may be less likely to enroll their children and the virtual schools could risk being shut down.

Legal Claims

According to the lawsuit filed against K12 Inc., the Herndon, Va.-based company misled shareholders and inflated stock prices by not disclosing data showing that K12 Inc. students perform below state averages and by not being truthful about student-to-teacher ratios and student-recruitment practices.

“I’m more convinced than ever that there are valid claims against the company, but also the business model has questions that need to be answered,” said Richard Gonnello, a lawyer with the New York City-based firm Faruqi & Faruqi LLP. Mr. Gonnello represents David Hoppaugh, a K12 Inc. shareholder from Cado Parish, La., who filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. After a 60-day window for other shareholders to join the suit as part of a class action, a lead plaintiff and trial court will be determined.

The suit says that “additional facts supporting the allegations” will be submitted after that window.

“K12 disputes the claims and will vigorously defend itself,” company spokesman Jeff Kwitowski said about the lawsuit. He and Mr. Packard declined to comment further on the suit because it is ongoing.

Most of the allegations in court documents center around the New York Times article, but specific instances in which Mr. Packard allegedly misled investors about test scores stand out.

In separate instances in February and March of 2011, Mr. Packard told investment analysts that K12 Inc. students’ performance exceeded state averages in terms of proficiency and test scores.

In a presentation given to investors at that time, a bar chart, titled “Academic Performance Relative to State Average Across Six States,” shows a purple bar with +18 next to it and “Math” beneath it, and a green bar with +20 and “Reading.” No source is listed for the data.

Mr. Kwitowski said he could not comment further on the data because that information is related to the lawsuit.

The suit also says that in October 2011, on a conference call with investors, Mr. Packard said the Agora Cyber Charter School in Pennsylvania (mislabeled in the suit as “Aurora Virtual Charter School”) produced test scores “higher than the typical school on state-administered tests for growth.”

The New York Times article that caused stock prices to drop precipitously cited data that Agora students performed well below the average for Pennsylvania students in reading and math. Agora enrolls more than 8,000 students and, in fiscal 2011, accounted for 13 percent of K12 Inc.’s overall revenue.

“Plaintiff would not otherwise have purchased or acquired K12 stock had plaintiff known the truth,” the suit says.

Following each of the February, March, and October 2011 instances cited in the suit, K12 Inc.’s stock prices improved negligibly.

In a Dec. 13 response to the Times article, the company said the student-performance measurement used for Agora—adequate yearly progress, or AYP, mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act—was “broken” and not representative of online schools that enroll large numbers of students across states.

In an interview with Education Week, Mr. Packard admitted that test scores had slipped. But he also pointed to data showing that arriving K12 Inc. students, typically from relatively low socioeconomic backgrounds, perform better on proficiency exams the longer they enroll in its schools.

A common criticism of online schools, however, including those run by K12 Inc., is high student-turnover rates.

In individual states, the company points to the K-12-operated Florida Virtual Academy’s rating of A on its state accountability report between 2006 and 2009. (That school is not to be confused with the Florida Virtual School, the largest state-sponsored virtual school.)

K12 also cites the above-state-average proficiency levels of most grade levels at the company-run Ohio Virtual Academy last year, though the school did not make AYP.

And University of Arkansas researchers found that a cohort of about 180 students at the K12-operated Arkansas Virtual Academy achieved larger performance gains on Arkansas Benchmark exams between 2008 and 2011 than a similar group of students in traditional schools.

But in Agora’s case, the school performed poorly on the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System for 2011. The school’s average growth index, which measures performance on state tests, is minus 12.1, among the lowest in the state.

More Contracts Signed

K12 Inc. has signed 200 local contracts nationwide since December, Mr. Packard said during a conference call with analysts Feb. 7, following the release of the company’s quarterly financial report. The company reported a 29.1 percent increase in revenue from the same quarter the previous year and an increase in enrollment from 98,300 students to 143,900, but a 50 percent decrease in operating income, attributed to increased costs.

In addition to the article by The New York Times, recent reports by The Arizona Republic, the Detroit Free Press, the Tampa Bay Times, and CNN have questioned the effectiveness of virtual schools.

“Do we see questions about it? Yes,” Mr. Packard said on the conference call, referring to the bad publicity. “Is it affecting us? I think it’s too early to tell.”

Mr. Packard was asked if the company would do more to seek out independent data to counteract poor performance numbers for online schools that have been reported recently.

“We’re planning to work more with outside researchers than we’d done previously,” Mr. Packard said.

On the Feb. 7 call, analysts also focused on an $8 million reduction in fiscal 2012 expected revenue (down to $680 million in revenue), related to potential budget cutbacks and policy changes on the state level.

Mr. Packard would not disclose details on the measures, including in what states they may occur. He did say the measures were not related specifically to K12 Inc.

Trend Eyed Warily

Overall, states are cautiously embracing online schools, including those with for-profit management. Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Oregon, and Tennessee recently passed measures making virtual schools more easily established, helping to spur K12 Inc.’s enrollment growth. Mississippi is considering a virtual charter school bill.

But other states are beginning to grapple with some of the ethical considerations that come with for-profit and virtual schooling.

In Pennsylvania, superintendents are asking the state legislature to examine the per-student costs being paid to cyber schools run by management organizations versus the costs of cyber schools run by districts.

Thomas Seidenberger, the superintendent of the 8,000-student East Penn school district, in Lehigh County, said his district pays $8,800 for each student who attends a cyber school, including Agora, despite “dismal” test scores. Twenty-six East Penn students attend Agora, he said.

Along with neighboring districts, East Penn offers its own cyber school with an in-house curriculum and technology services contracted to a Pittsburgh company. Thirty East Penn students are enrolled at the school at $4,400 per student, Mr. Seidenberger said.

“I’m not opposed to choice, but we think we’ve designed a model that’s fair to parents and students and fair to taxpayers,” he said.

In response to Mr. Seidenberger’s information on costs, Mr. Packard said: “My guess is they aren’t counting all of their costs.”

In Franklin County, Ohio, Judge John F. Bender made a potentially precedent-setting ruling on Feb. 6 that White Hat Management, a for-profit, privately held operator of online schools throughout Ohio, must disclose financial records with information on how it manages its schools. Ninety-six percent of White Hat’s payments derive from public funds, the ruling says.

Many of the schools that are plaintiffs in the lawsuit against White Hat have struggled academically, and a few of them have closed, said James D. Colner, a lawyer representing the Ohio schools.

Charles R. Saxbe, a lawyer representing White Hat, said the company plans to appeal the judge’s order, which he described as using “tortured reasoning.”

Judge Bender’s ruling that “the White Hat defendants are public officials” is a “groundbreaking decision” that could serve as a model in other states, Mr. Colner said. K12 Inc. must disclose its financial documents because it is a public company, but the Ohio order may have broader ramifications.

In Michigan, a bill that would remove a cap on online schools and enrollment has narrowly passed at the committee level in the legislature, but could stall before a full vote, according to local reports.

Post Script: I have just been informed that K12, Inc. has a full-time paid lobbyist who haunts the halls in Olympia.

Weekly Update: Smart ALEC, Black Teachers Fired En Masse in Chicago and Chalk Face Radio

Glen Ford nails it in his commentary on A Black Agenda Radio Black Teachers Fired En Mass.

In his introduction Mr. Ford states:

Educational policy in the Obama era isn’t about education at all. It’s about replacing skilled, experienced teachers with rootless temps better suited to serve in the privatized holding tanks they wish to turn public schools in poor neighborhoods into, for a population on its way to low wage jobs and prisons.

“Blacks currently make up only 29 percent of Chicago’s teachers, but they comprised 43 percent of those recently fired…”

I would like to add to this that this same action also delivered a blow to African-American women in Washington DC when Michelle Rhee went about firing teachers, most of them minority women, during her tenure as Chancellor of DC public schools.

This segment is a must hear.

Next up, ALEC. In the state of Washington we have experienced over the last two years the whack-a-mole strategy of having a number of ed reform bills that are generally the same coming up all at once and overwhelming even the best of us in terms of staying up-to-the-minute on where each bill is. In addition to that, several of us believe that there was a strategy involved in introducing the charter school bill knowing that it would probably not go through but using it as leverage to pass a teacher evaluation bill that relies heavily on student test scores in terms of evaluating a teacher’s performance. More to follow on that teacher evaluation bill on Monday.

By the way, we can’t let that evaluation bill ESSB 5895 go through. Articles that follow will explain why.

The strategy that I just described is right out of the ALEC playbook.

In the Phi Delta Kappan magazine article A smart ALEC threatens public education, Julie Underwood and Julie F. Mead describe as they call it:

Coordinated efforts to introduce model legislation aimed at defunding and dismantling public schools is the signature work of this conservative organization.

To follow is an excerpt:

“A legislative contagion seemed to sweep across the Midwest during the early months of 2011. First, Wisconsin legislators wanted to strip public employees of the right to bargain. Then, Indiana legislators got into the act. Then, it was Ohio. In each case, Republican governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures had introduced substantially similar bills that sought sweeping changes to each state’s collective bargaining statutes and various school funding provisions.

What was going on? How could elected officials in multiple states suddenly introduce essentially the same legislation?

The answer: The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Its self-described legislative approach to education reads:

Across the country for the past two decades, education reform efforts have popped up in legislatures at different times in different places. As a result, teachers’ unions have been playing something akin to “whacka- mole” — you know the game — striking down as many education reform efforts as possible. Many times, the unions successfully “whack” the “mole,” i.e., the reform legislation. Sometimes, however, they miss. If all the moles pop up at once, there is no way the person with the mallet can get them all. Introduce comprehensive reform packages.

ALEC’s own “whack-a-mole” strategy also reveals the group’s ultimate goal. Every gardener who has ever had to deal with a mole knows that the animals undermine and ultimately destroy a garden. ALEC’s positions on various education issues make it clear that the organization seeks to undermine public education by systematically defunding and ultimately destroying public education as we know it.”

And speaking of undermining our public school system, starting with the teachers, Diane Ravitch writes an article in The New York Review of Books titled No Student Left Untested. This is where the teacher evaluation bill ESSB 5895 come into play in the state of Washington. Heads up Seattle, don’t think that ultimately this wouldn’t happen in our schools. It’s the goal of ALEC et al.

In the article Dr. Ravitch states:

Last week, the New York State Education Department and the teachers’ unions reached an agreement to allow the state to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. The pact was brought to a conclusion after Governor Andrew Cuomo warned the parties that if they didn’t come to an agreement quickly, he would impose his own solution (though he did not explain what that would be). He further told school districts that they would lose future state aid if they didn’t promptly implement the agreement after it was released to the public. The reason for this urgency was to secure $700 million promised to the state by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, contingent on the state’s creating a plan to evaluate teachers in relation to their students’ test scores.

The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.

But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.” What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

To read the article in full, which I would highly recommend doing, particularly for folks in the state of Washington, go to the NYR blog at the New York Review of Books.

Next up, would you send your kids to this school? Bruce Baker writing at School Finance 101 asks the question in his article Borrowing wise words from those truly market-based, Private Independent schools… To follow is an excerpt:

Lately it seems that public policy and the reformy rhetoric that drives it are hardly influenced by the vast body of empirical work and insights from leading academic scholars which suggests that such practices as using value-added metrics to rate teacher quality, or dramatically increasing test-based accountability and pushing for common core standards and tests to go with them are unlikely to lead to substantial improvements in education quality, or equity.

Rather than review relevant empirical evidence or provide new empirical illustrations in this post, I’ll do as I’ve done before on this blog and refer to the wisdom and practices of private independent schools – perhaps the most market driven segment and most elite segment of elementary and secondary schooling in the United States.

Really… if running a school like a ‘business’ (or more precisely running a school as we like to pretend that ‘businesses’ are run… even though ‘most’ businesses aren’t really run the way we pretend they are) was such an awesome idea for elementary and secondary schools, wouldn’t we expect to see that our most elite, market oriented schools would be the ones pushing the envelope on such strategies?

If rating teachers based on standardized test scores was such a brilliant revelation for improving the quality of the teacher workforce, if getting rid of tenure and firing more teachers was clearly the road to excellence, and if standardizing our curriculum and designing tests for each and every component of it were really the way forward, we’d expect to see these strategies all over the home pages of web sites of leading private independent schools, and we’d certainly expect to see these issues addressed throughout the pages of journals geared toward innovative school leaders, like Independent School Magazine.  In fact, they must have been talking about this kind of stuff for at least a decade. You know, how and why merit pay for teachers is the obvious answer for enhancing teacher productivity, and why we need more standardization… more tests… in order to improve curricular rigor?

To read the answers to his posed questions, go to School Finance 101. I think that you’ll enjoy his remarks.

To follow is an e-mail that was sent to the Washington State PTA (WSPTA) list serv last week and is an introduction to my last piece regarding Chalk Face radio.

The WSPTA is pushing hard on the teacher evaluation bill unfortunately, as they have on all other ed reform bills that have gone through Olympia in the last two years. In fact a few of the LEV/SFC/PTA members have been participants in writing the bills.

This is what PTA member John Cummings had to say about the teacher evaluation bill:

Hi Everyone,

My name is John Cummings and I am new to this list-serv. Before I share my perspective on this legislation I just wanted to say thank you to the WSPTA for all the hard work that you folks are doing for our kids.

I am currently a stay-at-home dad but prior to that I taught Special Education here in Washington and also in New York and Vermont. I have worked in a variety of settings and have seen the good, the bad and the ugly (it’s not just a spaghetti western ).

Now, while I don’t doubt the good intentions of the people who are advocating for the new evaluation system that would be put into place if the compromise legislation becomes law, I do have some concerns about the legislation and the effect it would have in our schools if it passes.

As it stands right now, the Federal Government mandates that students with IEP’s are to be educated in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) because these kids have a Civil Right to a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). I agree not only with this mandate itself but the spirit behind it. The placement of a child with an IEP in a general education class is not a gift or privilege for that child. It is their right to be in that gen.ed class. The problem with this is that, Special ed kids may benefit greatly from being Included in a regular education class but the benefits may not be apparent even when allowing for multiple measures. Sp.ed kids don’t test well compared their classmates and they may not experience the same rate of growth over the course of time as their grade-level peers. How will this be accounted for when a teacher is being evaluated/? In the best of situations, placing a sp.ed kid in a gen.ed class can be met with resistance from the gen.ed teacher and administration as well. I can see the potential for even more resistance from faculty if their evaluations will suffer as a result of this new system.

Special Education and the inherent difficulties of evaluating special education teachers has not been mentioned much in the debate over this legislation. What criteria will be used to evaluate sped teachers? How do you chart the progress of some of our most challenged kids? How does an administrator who may have little background in Special Education gain the knowledge necessary to be able to evaluate a sp.ed teacher’s effectiveness? Considering that special education students make up roughly 12% of the student body in most schools, this is not a trivial matter.

I wanted to make sure to highlight the special education piece, but really I actually have only 1 issue with this legislation and it is this;

The legislation itself is based upon a myth that is being sold as truth to folks (many of them elected officials) who don’t know better. While a teacher can have a profound and life-changing influence on a student, to say that the Teacher is the most important in-school factor in a child’s education is a gross oversimplification and there is no objective tool that can be used to show the validity of such a claim. This assertion overlooks the myriad of experiences that a student has over the course of a day, week, month and year.

Furthermore, school is just one aspect of a child’s life. A person’s life cannot be neatly sliced up and placed into compartments with each component examined exclusively. One piece influences and is influenced by the others. This is true of all of us. How many of us have had moments when we have been overwhelmed by something that has occurred in our lives? It happens in both good and bad situations. I remember being at work when my wife was pregnant and her due date was near. I had that pager glued to me and checked it constantly because I swore I felt it vibrate. When it finally did go off I almost jumped out of my skin! I will admit that I was not the most effective teacher that day. And what about 9/11? Where were you? How did you do on the job that horrible day? I point out these two obviously important yet different life-events because what holds true for us is especially true of children who haven’t developed the coping methods that healthy adults have.

Now, compound this inability with the reality of Washington 2012. We have more poverty, more kids going hungry and living in the chaos and turmoil that is inevitable when the people who care for them are going through the fear and anxiety of not being able to provide for them. They have more pressure in school as we march toward the Great Land of Assessment. There is less time for play, for art, for music and if the kids are ‘behind’ they have more and more remediation. I could go on about how it is impossible, considering all of this, to hold the teachers up as the ones who are responsible for the success of a child, but if you have spent any time in a school in a poverty-stricken area anywhere in this state (and I don’t mean on tour with the principal) you would see how messy lives can be. You would also see teachers doing their best in the absolutely impossible situation that has been handed to them by a legislature that refuses to fulfill its constitutional obligation to our children.

I would support this legislation if it were proposed after we restored the Billions that have been taken out of education, social and health services, after we fully funded k-12 education, after we reduced class sizes (remember that vote?) and after we had a chance to let these positive steps take effect. To do so now is premature to say the least. It seems almost irresponsible to me because the teachers and students are working in conditions that are unacceptable.

Teachers as a group are really bad at one thing and that is standing up for themselves as individuals and saying that the job has become too hard and that it must change. No, instead they will simply walk away from their careers, silent scapegoats for a system that has been broken and starved by the people they counted on to do the right thing.

John Cummings

I will leave you with a Chalk Face radio episode with Bill Ayers on teachers and the question “What will it take for a teacher to say that ‘enough is enough’ “?

The bonus is at the end of the three segments, Tim Slekar and Shaun Johnson speak to Diane Ravitch.

Enjoy

Dora