Obama’s state of dissension
He can legitimately claim some success
One of President Obama’s sustained, bipartisan applause lines in the State of the Union address was his call for giving teachers the level of respect they get in South Korea. Applause faded when he then said, “We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones.” And there was just polite patter when he said, “And Race to the Top should be the approach we follow this year as we replace No Child Left Behind with a law that’s more flexible and focused on what’s best for our kids.”
If the applause meter is the measure, President Obama faces a tough task weaving compromise between those who equate any criticism of teacher unions as teacher bashing and those who see any retreat from No Child Left Behind as catering to the status quo. The former are hyper-sensitive and end up defending the worst union practices: rote performance reviews, overprotective tenure laws, and pay scales that discourage initiative among young teachers. The latter are obtuse and end up defending a federal law that has narrowed the curriculum for poor students, obsessively focused on badly designed standardized tests, and imposed rigid sanctions without crediting success.
With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (a.k.a. No Child Left Behind), Obama must keep the pressure on districts that are failing their children – including minority kids in suburban schools – while inviting and supporting seriously committed teachers to be involved in the solutions. If he can bring the polarized sides in education to agree to that, it will be a big breakthrough.
In his speech last night, Obama cited an example of what’s possible, with the dramatic improvements, in only three years, at the Bruce Randolph school in Denver. As Andrew Rotherham, well-known blogger and a cofounder and partner at Bellwether Education Partners, noted in his post-speech commentary for the New York Times, Obama made a fascinating choice. “The president singled out a Denver school that was turned around only after its teachers took on their own union to get out from under the standard collective bargaining agreement.”
And Rotherham added this sobering note, “Needless to say, that’s a strategy the two national teachers’ unions don’t want to see replicated around the country.”
The Obama administration has made mistakes in its rush to reform during its first two years. Its turnaround strategies for bad schools relied too much on firing principals and, in some cases, teachers. Its Race to the Top criteria egged on states to adopt pay-for-performance schemes relying way too much on standardized test results.
But, while hyperbolic in claiming Race to the Top as “the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation,” the president is right to cite its success. For 1 percent of federal spending on education, Race to the Top encouraged 41 states and Washington, D.C., to adopt Common Core standards and to join together to create new, broader assessments to address critics of narrow standardized tests. States like California changed restrictive data laws, while others removed restrictions on charter schools.
In the aftermath of losing two rounds of the competition, seven California districts that are committed to innovation, including Long Beach, Fresno, Sanger, San Francisco, and, yes, Los Angeles Unified, formed a non-profit, California Office to Reform Education, to move ahead with the work they started on Common Core and teacher and principal evaluations. If Race to the Top were only about scrounging for money, they would have cursed their loss and quit.
Give Obama credit for what he’s achieved, while demanding that he, Education Secretary Arnie Duncan and Congress take a more mature and nuanced approach to education reform in the coming year.
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John, creating straw men is not sound journalism.
I don’t “equate any criticism of teacher unions” with “teacher-bashing,” and most defenders of teachers — such as Anthony Cody and Gary Ravani, who write occasional guest posts here — don’t either.
They, and I, and many others observe a steady theme of teacher-bashing in the current political discourse, aside and apart from “any criticism of teacher unions.”
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Always remember there are applauses that are not heard from may of us in our living rooms. Let’s not gauge the applauses of one room to represent an entire nation.
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I have commented before on this site and about teachers and teacher unions. It appears still that the easy way out of some schools failing is to blame the teachers union! Why don’t we admit that no one really knows what it cost to improve a low performing school–really. What is the formula? If we have low performing schools/hard to staff schools that are doing well let’s duplicate that school. I will repeat again–teacher unions do not want bad performing teachers in our schools and in their unions. We do want fair and equitable treatment.
What about parent responsibilities? Every aspect of education has been through some kind of reform-administrators, teachers, curriculum, etc. The parent responsibility and envolvement piece has not faced reform. What would happen if industry had to excuse parents or guardians from work at least twice a year to see how x student is doing in school? What if parents were mandated to attend open house to meet the teachers of their child, sit in the class room to see what their child is doing, to conference with the teacher?
Parenting is no longer voluntary! So what are the penalties for parents who don’t do these things? What the powers that be have done is give parents the right to collect signatures to close down a school that supposedly is not performing without looking at unintended consequences.
Other areas affecting the quality of teachers are college educatiion programs. When students in college enter the college prepatory programs for teachers why don’t we give them classroom experience at an early stage(Sophomore year) with a mentor teacher? This would help them decide early if they really want to be a teacher and if not, they would have time to move on to something else before spending 4-5 years preparing for teaching.
The union wants better teachers and we want the things that make them better!— adequate funding of their classroom, parent envolvement/responsibility, and more training.
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Your disagreements and highlights with President Obama remarks in last night’s State of the Union Address in regards to education are valid. However, we, as a nation, must focus on how we can move forward to ensure states implement high quality curriculum and assessment standards so every student can compete with the rest of the world. The Campaign for High School Equity (CHSE), a coalition of leading civil rights organizations, agrees with President Obama in calling for meaningful public education reform. However, without vigorous federal leadership and the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, our nation’s schools will be ill-prepared to provide every student with the high-quality education needed to in a global economy. President Obama asked Congress to swiftly revamp current federal education policy, but to be effective; we must engage communities of color from the start of the reform implementation process. Since students of color represent the fastest growing population in many of the nation’s largest school districts, these students must succeed in the classroom for the nation to create the highly skilled workforce necessary to ensure the nation’s future prosperity.
The choices we make today will determine the future of the young people in whose hands we will place America’s prosperity tomorrow. For more information about what’s needed to effectively transform our education system so students will thrive in the 21st century workplace, read http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/education/139421-investing-in-tomorrows-workforce
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Your disagreements and highlights with President Obama remarks in last night’s State of the Union Address in regards to education are valid. However, we, as a nation, must focus on how we can move forward to ensure states implement high quality curriculum and assessment standards so every student can compete with the rest of the world. The Campaign for High School Equity (CHSE), a coalition of leading civil rights organizations, agrees with President Obama in calling for meaningful public education reform. However, without vigorous federal leadership and the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, our nation’s schools will be ill-prepared to provide every student with the high-quality education needed to in a global economy. President Obama asked Congress to swiftly revamp current federal education policy, but to be effective; we must engage communities of color from the start of the reform implementation process. Since students of color represent the fastest growing population in many of the nation’s largest school districts, these students must succeed in the classroom for the nation to create the highly skilled workforce necessary to ensure the nation’s future prosperity.
The choices we make today will determine the future of the young people in whose hands we will place America’s prosperity tomorrow. For more information about what’s needed to effectively transform our education system so students will thrive in the 21st century workplace, read http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/education/139421-investing-in-tomorrows-workforce
(On Behalf of the Campaign for High School Equity)
-Sarim Ngo
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John, what exactly is the problem with the California Standards Test? I administered it for many years, both in elementary and secondary,and, though it’s overused and misconstrued in some quarters (mostly the federal Dept. of Ed.), it’s not a bad assessment. Neither are the California standards bad standards. Ca.’s RTTT application was rejected and we will receive no federal money to cover the $1.5 billion projected expense of adopting the Common Core Standards (EdSource). You need either to take Economics 101 or come up with more compelling arguments for adopting CCS.
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I happen to agree with you about straw men; there are enough of them in education to burn down a barn, so I don’t want to create more of them. And I obviously respect the views of contributors Gary and Anthony, who helped write an excellent report on teacher evaluations. That said, the charge of teacher bashing is becoming automatic and unhelpful. It deflects self-reflection by teachers of work rules and union positions that need changing. So it is rewarding to see groups like NewTLA in Los Angeles Unified raising these issues.
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One problem is that the teacher-bashing is so frequent, extreme and vicious that it makes it impossible to address any issues with teachers’ unions — no decent person would want to pile on.
But because the teacher-bashing is so frequent, extreme and vicious, that means anyone determined to call it out has to do so constantly, which then leads to comments such as: “the charge of teacher bashing is becoming automatic and unhelpful.”
Catch-22.
I still can’t figure out how a political faction that loathes teachers can profess to support education, and how anyone thinks that fostering disdain for teachers can occur in tandem with improving our educational system. It’s baffling.
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Caroline: Please cite some examples.
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Are you actually unable to find examples? It seems to me that we’re showered with them. I think it violates numerous Netiquette rules to repost comments from blogs, but in a search of <45 seconds, here are two examples from the past couple of days, one from this site. This attitude and way of speaking is standard, the coin of the realm, in a lot of education discussion:
“Each and every teacher or administrator employed by McKinley elementary will take home over $4 million each in today’s dollars during their careers, on the backs of children who can neither read nor write. … This is about money. It is about their desire to lock children in failing schools across Los Angeles because it pays very well.
If the children escape to schools that deeply care about each one of them, they will probably lose their jobs. Schools are not job-mills. They exist to educate students.
Haven’t children and families in Los Angeles suffered enough. Let our children go. Unfortunately, [Ben Austin's] article does not mention the role of teacher unions in training teachers to protect their schools at any costs. And of course, the next battle will be against fully paid teacher union operatives, not just angry, job-protecting teachers.”
“Public school teachers, their unions, the adminstrator of these schools, and the rah-rah crowd surrounding them have zero credibility at this point. When will they be held accountable for their failures? Of course, they are never responsible; it’s always because of poverty, poor funding, poor community involvement, poor parenting. The fact that there are charters all of the US know successfully serving those same populations doesn’t matter either. Those charters are cherry picking or lying. I’m sure you’ll some excuse for why those kids have been attending shit schools that has nothing to do with the crappy training their teachers received or their poor performance, or the lack of acountability from the administrators, or the union’s resistance to any type of positive change that have trapped this kids in this school for the convience of those adults.”
If I spend more than 45 seconds I can find you reams and reams of such comments, and if I take a little more trouble, I can find them not just in civilian blog comments but in newspaper editorials written by your former colleagues and mine.
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Oh, and for an obvious mainstream media example: the Newsweek magazine cover of March 6, 2010. I’m sorry that I can’t find the EXACT words at this moment (the articles are easily available online, but I didn’t find the cover), but the design was as follows: A chalkboard with “We must fire bad teachers” written across it repeatedly, with a red square in the middle saying: “The key to fixing education” (or words to that effect).
The message, needless to say, is that ALL the problems and challenges facing U.S. schools are caused by “bad teachers.”
Here’s a quote from one of the several articles in that “it’s all the fault of bad teachers” package:
“One recent review of the evidence by McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, showed that most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound high-school students. (Finland takes the top 10 percent.)At the same time, the teachers’ unions have become more and more powerful. In most states, after two or three years, teachers are given lifetime tenure. It is almost impossible to fire them. In New York City in 2008, three out of 30,000 tenured teachers were dismissed for cause.”
To sum up, there are complexities, counter-arguments and clarifications for all the points in that paragraph. Newsweek omitted those and just stated it flatly: Newsweek told us that teaching attracts the stupidest people in the country; they have rock-solid job security and none ever get fired.
(By the way, for what it’s worth, both my husband and I, starting well before we met, had subscribed to Newsweek for literally our entire adults lives. We canceled our subscription for good because of that irresponsible and misleading issue.)
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Some people will always say nasty things. That’s the nature of the Internet. I don’t find intemperate comments about teachers, especially in the context of heated issues like the parent trigger, layoff rules, due process rights, representative of how most people feel about teachers in general or those in their own school. However, I happen to agree with you about the Newsweek cover and, for the most part, the story.
Teachers in California continue to work under intense pressure, with declining resources, amid higher expectations. Few adults have to work under these conditions. They are under-appreciated.
But money is tight, and the stakes are high, so people will show their frustrations and pick one thing to blame to support their bias. And, as you have pointed out, look for straw men. You and others do it, too, dismissing “billionaire boys clubs out to bust teachers unions” when foundations support charter schools and causes you disagree with. End of debate. Issues dismissed.
The first writer is right on one point: It is in large part about money. Teachers are a big player, through their union dues, in Washington, Sacramento and their own districts. They should advocate for their interests. But, most important, they should take a hard look at what best serves their profession — particularly looking ahead to the need to recruit, retain and pay the next generation of teachers. For their own sake, they should be satisfied that the public voice of their union is consistent with the private conversations they have in their lunch rooms and that those positions also serve the younger teachers who aren’t active in the union but are too likely to quit or be laid off for lots of reasons.
Debates will become more polarized with the entry of Michelle Rhee’s Stand for Children as a counterweight to union-supported school board candidates in local and state elections. Teachers will have to respond with more effective arguments and actions than “stop this incessant teacher bashing.” I worry they won’t.
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I agree that teachers and their unions need to be more effective at countering the negativity about them, but calling out “incessant teacher-bashing” is quite valid too. How unfair is it to tell supporters of public education that they shouldn’t speak up against a barrage of attacks from the powerful (yes, the billionaires)?
The billionaires don’t need help — they can fend for themselves. Plus if the entire billionaire profession were pulverized, no one would suffer except the billionaires themselves. (Really, au contraire.) Whereas with the teaching profession pulverized, obviously the impact on our society would (or will, as this appears to be impending) be devastating.
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We’re talking across one another, so two last quick points: First, I’m not saying the unions need to change their PR approach. I’m saying they need to change. Second, I welcome opposition choices to the unions’ candidates for school boards in places like Los Angeles and San Diego and for the Legislature. But I suspect there will be more simplistic debates and, whoever wins, officials with chits owed to their funders.
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Larry Ferlazzo questions the supposed study showing that the dumbest students become teachers, after struggling to figure out its source:
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2009/11/15/do-teachers-really-come-from-the-bottom-third-of-colleges-or-is-that-statistic-a-bunch-of-baloney/
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