Orwellian moments in state education
If only words could make inequities vanish
In George Orwell’s masterpiece, Animal Farm, a group of farm animals led by pigs take over their farm from an abusive owner and decide to run it as a collective. They begin by writing a new set of laws, starting with “All animals are equal.” Later in the book, the pigs take over the farm, enslaving the other animals. One day, the other animals notice that the first rule has been changed to read, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Orwell was making a point about the power of language and the ability of the powerful to twist language to turn night into day and black into white in order to maintain their power.
Here, in California, this approach has been perfected by those who have long run our education system and written its rules. A few months ago, one of those long-time Sacramento powerbrokers, a “consultant” to one of the largest state teachers unions, showed me the data that he had constructed to show that the state’s achievement gaps for black and Latino students had nearly disappeared. It was truly an Orwellian moment.
I’ve been having a lot of Orwellian moments lately. I especially love it when California’s achievement test results are released, and there’s a chorus of backslapping and handclapping about student performance levels and gains that should be a source of profound embarrassment. Moments after the scores are released, the education establishment crows, “Almost half of our students are performing at grade level in math and English! Two percent more are proficient than last year! The achievement gap between Latino and white students in mathematics is down to 30 points! Let’s celebrate!”
Then, there is the recent backlash against the impending release by the Los Angeles Times of data linking over 6,000 Los Angeles Unified elementary school teachers to the English and math performance of their students. The data reveals the effectiveness of each individual teacher at improving the overall English and math performance of their students in comparison to other teachers in the district.
Now, the last time I checked, it is the job of elementary school teachers to improve the performance of their students in English and Math. The only way to assess that improvement is by testing them in English and Math. And knowing how effective you are at your job relative to your peers is both professionally relevant and fundamental to your performance evaluation. Of course, you might not believe that any more after you listened to the critics of the Times.
When the scores were released, they argued, “A teacher’s performance should not be judged based on the math and English performance results of their students. The tests were not designed to assess teachers. Everyone knows what a good teacher looks like! They have the right things on their walls, and their students are engaged. Teachers should be judged on how hard they are teaching instead of the results of their teaching.”
Wow. If only our state’s students and our high school graduates could benefit from the same Orwellian logic when getting the results of their SATs or hearing back from employers about job applications.
But then, according to the powerful interests that control Sacramento on the anti-tax right and public employee union left, the problem really isn’t our education system but our “much too diverse” students and their parents. This has produced a whole new set of Orwellian laws written in stone in the corridors of power around the state. Some of my favorites are “Those children do not want to learn.” “Those parents are not invested in their children’s education.” “We must prepare those children for the lives we expect them to live instead of the lives they aspire to lead.” And for those who enter our schools speaking a different language: “One language is better than two!”
Children do not want to learn? Parents do not want the best education for their children? In our current politically polarized state, language of this sort serves both sides in their fights over resources. If the problem is the students and their parents, the answer for the public employee unions and their friends in the education establishment is paying people more money and lessening their burden at work in order to compensate them for having to teach those kids and deal with those parents. If the problem is the students and the parents, the answer for the taxpayer associations and business interests is starving the education system of money because those kids and their parents aren’t worth it, and besides we need cheap undereducated labor to keep costs down.
Either way, our state’s 6 million students – half of them poor, three quarters of them students of color – and their parents are caught in crossfire between two fundamentally “corporate” entities. The public employee unions and the taxpayers associations are locked in a zero sum game over maintaining resources for their longest tenured members and paying handsome salaries to Sacramento lobbyists to prevent any change, especially the long-term systemic change that our state’s children and their parents need. So much for the generational obligation of leaving our state and nation better off than you found it.
Of course, in Sacramento and school districts around California, some animals are more equal than others.
Well written and so close to the truth that it hurts! Unfortunately, the students are in the middle with no political power, and no voice, either.
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Clearly you are not a teacher.
When I worked in corporate America, I was elated to have my pay directly contected to my performance. I knew I was a hard working employee, eager to learn and improve and my hard work would be rewarded.
As a teacher in a urban middle school, I am still that hardworking individual who is eager to learn and improve. Does my hard work (the extra hours, the professional developments, signing up for every conference, researching better methods, staying after school to tutor, going in every Saturday from 8am-12pm) pay off? It does for the very few students who are truly motivated. Many of my students however do not care to do homework assignments, refuse to show up on Saturdays or after school, rarely complete class assignments, and (I know this is going to come as a shock to you) could care less about a standardized test.
Should my pay really be connected to assessment results if I am working under these conditions? I would certainly hope not. If that were ever to happen, I’d have to go back to corporate America where I felt my outcome truly reflected my efforts.
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Also, I’d like to add that I think too much emphasis is already being put on these test scores. Every year I get students who show up to school with their shiny new proficent or advanced test scores and they can barely read or add.
I am saying that to say, when people begin to feel PRESSURED to produce certain results, they find creative ways of MAKING it happen by any means necessary. I can only imagine the fairy tale scores I will read once pay is connected to this mess. What a joke.
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That’s a nicely made aenswr to a challenging question
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Arun I agree with most of your comments in regards to the inequities of public school services and the growing academic gaps that are documented each year. Yes it is true that Latino students continue to lag behind their peers in California public schools. The data reported to the Media does not examine the contributing factors. The Latino student population contains both native born and immigrant Latinos. This Latino group contains both English only and English learners. This Latino group represents students whose parents have no high school diploma and also those who have college degrees. This same group contains students who are on free or reduced lunch due to severe economic hardships. When one evaluates student performance and teacher performance we need to be mindful that students who have few resources and limited English have a more difficult time acquiring academic success in English. Teachers who choose to work with the most needy students should not be penalized when students do not reach the benchmarks within the same time frame. Dedicated teachers will find creative ways to accelerate the learning and academic achievement for each student. They can not however do what our own government fails to do – compensate for all the issues that poverty and economic hardships cause within a home, community, state or nation. If our elected college educated political representatives can not find a way to adequately meet the physical, social and mental health issues of their communities when they control the budget then how do we expect public school teachers to meet all these basic needs for their students? Research clearly states that students who suffer mental illness, physical learning disabilities, poverty and poor health have a statistically higher rate of failure in school. This does not mean that these students can not learn. It only means that they may not reach the state determined “bench marks of literacy and math” in the same time frame. It takes longer to teach and learn skills and lessons when the student is still acquiring the second language. I urge parents to understand that students are entering our classrooms with a broad range of abilities and needs. Join with teachers to support the teaching and learning goals. Teachers are penalized and students are penalized too when our state officials can not properly fund a free and appropriate public school education that provides the resources and the student -teacher ratio to meet the diverse needs of the diverse student populations we serve!
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Very well stated Teresa. I am right there with you!
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We stopped counting after the fifth strawman. Mr. Ramanathan’s inability to do any other than paint petty caricatures of the opponents of his brand of corporate reforms shows intellectual laziness we would expect from someone with a doctoral degree from Harvard.
Taken with his other essays, the vicious anti-educator tone isn’t surprising.
It is somewhat amusing that Ramanathan continually refers to communities. Given his whopping six figure salary, he certainly isn’t familiar with any of the communities we work with.
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Hi Arun. I think your dichotomy is too simplistic. Teachers’ “interests” are students interests. Saying that non-school factors matter isnt intended to discount a child’s capacity to learn, rather to make sure the system’s methods take those factors into account to avoid underserving those kids.
Put another way, how do you expect to control the output of a system if you cannot understand the needs of the input to the system?
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