If you ask professional educators in a public forum whether they view parents as assets or liabilities, the answers will vary only in decibel level: “Assets,” “Our greatest asset,” “invaluable partners,” and so forth.  But what if you caught them off guard, late at night after a few drinks, say?

Or, better yet, what if you simply examined how most schools treat parents?

In my experience, most administrators and many teachers hold parents in low regard, and their behavior and policies reflect that.

Perhaps that’s an inevitable consequence of attempting to elevate education to a high-status profession.  “After all, you wouldn’t expect a heart surgeon to consult with a child’s parents before replacing a ruptured valve and saving the child’s life,” the thinking goes, as if the work of educating a child were the equivalent of complex surgery.

It seems to me that most schools push parents away in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.  There’s the once-a-year “Back to School Night” and perhaps a “Parent Involvement Committee’ or a “Parent Advisory Board” that meets occasionally with the Principal.  Many schools expect parents to hold bake sales, auctions and fundraising drives (which can be a large chunk of a school’s budget these days) but that doesn’t treat parents as partners in their children’s education.

Unfortunately, it’s the rare educator who says “We cannot do a good job of educating your child without you,” actually means it–and then proves it by his or her actions.

Why this negative attitude toward parents?  Some educators feel that low income parents do not have the time or energy to get deeply involved in their children’s schooling.  But even if their dismissal of parents is rooted in empathy or sympathy, it adds up to the same thing: the exclusion of parents.  Unfortunately, however, plenty of administrators and teachers are genuinely disdainful of parents and apt to dismiss them as uncaring, uninvolved or ignorant.  “Just leave the education to us” is how I would characterize their attitude.

As evidence of parental detachment, these administrators and teachers often cite the low turnout at ‘Back to School Night,’ concluding from the large number of no-show parents that they don’t care.  But I suggest we look carefully at how ‘Back to School Night’ is structured: a quick series of show-and-tell presentations by teachers, one-off lectures that make parents feel like visitors or strangers who happened by. The educators will tell the parents to make sure their kids do their homework assignments and don’t watch much TV.  Why would most parents bother to attend more than once?  What’s inviting about being talked down to?

The problem of ‘summer learning loss,’ sometimes called ‘summer slide,’ offers an insight into what might be labeled the professional arrogance of educators.  Summer slide is a real and significant phenomenon that is more pronounced among lower income children whose parents do not take them on big trips or provide a wide range of stimulating experiences in the summer.   When school begins again in the fall, poor kids tend to have regressed, while middle- and upper-income kids have either gained or not lost ground.  The cumulative effect of many summers of sliding is a significant achievement gap.

Cure ‘summer slide,’ and graduation rates would improve, et cetera, et cetera.  But what to do?

Educators, naturally, see ‘more education’ as the solution to ‘summer slide,’ and so they propose to extend the day, extend the year, send kids to summer school–or all of the above.  After all, when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail….

But suppose the achievement gap is the symptom of something else, the result of a different problem?  If educators are misdiagnosing the problem, then their solution (‘more school’) is not likely to be effective in the long term.

We’re editing a story for the PBS NewsHour about a young man, a first grade teacher, who–probably because he’s not a professional educator–looked at summer learning loss very differently.

Perhaps summer slide happens, he hypothesized, because parents (who spend far more time with their children than do teachers) are not involved in the nitty-gritty of their kids’ schooling.  What if parents were taught the skills to help their kids become better readers and treated as partners in the education process?  No lectures, no ‘parent involvement committees,’ no window-dressing, but a genuine partnership that required openness and commitment from everyone?

Suppose the root problem is education’s failure to recognize that parents want their children to succeed but may not know how to contribute?  Suppose the real problem is education’s failure to treat parents as assets?

But could parents be treated as valuable assets?  Would teachers–long accustomed to holding parents at arm’s length–learn humility and acknowledge that parents were essential?  And would parents accept this responsibility (because, after all, many have become accustomed to educators saying ‘leave the education to us.’)?

He’s had some success in Philadelphia over the past couple of summers, and it’s intriguing to speculate about what might happen: could this radical idea—parents matter–spread to regular (September-June) school? What would that look like?  How much change would be required, and by whom?

You may learn more about this young teacher, Alejandro Gac-Artigas, and Springboard, the promising program he established in Philadelphia, at springboardcollaborative.org.  Or wait a few weeks and watch our report on the NewsHour.  Or weigh in with your insights here…which might help us with our reporting.

As we celebrate our nation’s independence, it might be worth recalling that the first stanza {{1}} of our National Anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” poses two questions but answers only the first, leaving the second for each generation to wrestle with.

Some of you may now be singing the song to yourselves, figuring out just what the anthem poses. Let me save you the trouble. The first question is presented in the song’s opening lines:

O, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?”

In other words, did our flag survive the bombardment of Fort McHenry in what is known as the Battle of Baltimore in 1814? It was still flying, the lyrics assure us:

And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.

However, Francis Scott Key poses a second question–which he does not answer–in the last two lines of the first stanza:

Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

I suspect that most of us do not think of it as a question. We sing it, loudly and proudly, telling the world that we are the land of the free and the home of the brave. But Key wrote it as a question, not an exclamation. So let’s ask Key’s question–about the America we live in now.

Can we describe America as ‘the land of the free’ when one quarter of our children are growing up in poverty, when the richest one-tenth of one percent of our population controls more wealth than the bottom half, when politicians in dozens of states are maneuvering to keep groups of people from voting, and when millions of college graduates are in debt and millions more leave college without a diploma but with a heavy debt burden? {{2}}

Can we call America ‘the land of the brave’ when we no longer call on our young people to serve but rely instead on a professional military–which our leaders send, over and over and over, to serve tours of duty in hostile environments and then fail to provide for when they return home?

This Independence Day we might want to think about how easily we can lose what we prize. We might ask if the America envisioned in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is slipping away because we lack the lift of a driving dream and because we ask almost nothing of our young people…and very little of ourselves.

Could it be time to revive the idea of national service and reinstitute the military draft? What if all young people were obligated to give two years of their lives in service to our country? Serving in the military could be one choice, but it should be just one of a menu of options that we could come up with. In return, we taxpayers would commit to paying for two years of post-secondary education or training for young people after they serve..

Living in the land of the free should not be a free ride, nor should patriotism be an empty word.

What is your answer to Francis Scott Key’s second question?

—-

[[1]]1. Who knew that Francis Scott Key wrote four stanzas? I did not. http://www.usa-flag-site.org/song-lyrics/star-spangled-banner.shtml[[1]]

[[2]]2. Each of these issues can be addressed (and is being addressed by good and earnest people), but I think this is akin to repairing lifeboats at a time when the ship of state may be off course.  We need to debate bigger changes.[[2]]

How much does a sign reading “CHARTER SCHOOL” reveal about the education being offered inside the building? My answer: About as much as a ’RESTAURANT’ sign reveals about the food it serves. That is, nothing at all. This sad state of affairs makes me wonder whether the charter school movement has been hijacked or, at a minimum, has strayed off course. If it has lost its way, whose responsibility is it to restore order and integrity?

I posed that general question to a number of leaders in the charter school arena and will share some of their answers below, but let me explain why I am bringing up the subject.

I’ve been following the story since 1988, when a number of educators convened near the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Minnesota to develop an idea that had been put forth–separately–by Albert Shanker, the teacher union leader, and Ray Budde, a Massachusetts educator. You will recognize the names of some of those who participated: Mr. Shanker, Joe Nathan, State Senator Ember Reichgott, Ted Kolderie and Sy Fliegel. (I was there as the moderator.)

The basic idea that emerged was than any school district could create a ‘charter school’–essentially free of nearly all regulations–that would allow exploration of new models of teaching and learning. These charter {{1}} schools, people hoped, would incubate and then spread innovations.  Taking risks would be OK because only a small number of willing parents, students and teachers would be involved.

In the era of great enthusiasm for parental choice, the planners didn’t want people to be allowed to open charter schools just because they were ‘enthusiastic’ or public-spirited.  As Ted Kolderie explains in his new book, the planners insisted on an authorizing body that would scrutinize applicants and grant charters only to those who had the qualifications to run a school. {{2}}

Three years later Minnesota passed the first charter school law, and in 1992 the nation’s first charter school opened {{3}}.  Today at least 5,000 charter schools {{4}} in 41 states enroll about 2.4 million students–but almost none of these charter schools are ‘incubators of innovation’ working with a school district, as the planners had envisioned.

Both school districts and teacher unions ended up opposing the idea. The ‘authorizer as means of setting a high standard’ was diluted to the point of meaningless when some states decided to allow just about anybody to authorize the opening of charter schools. And in some states, authorizers have in turn allowed every Tom, Dick and Harry to set up charter schools.

Some states banned charter schools outright, while others set limits, often low ones, on the number that would be allowed.  Some states appeared to approve charter schools but added a crippling condition: no state funds could be used for facilities. That meant would-be charter school operators had to first raise enough money to acquire a building before they could enroll students or hire teachers and quality for state funds.

A few states–notably Michigan, Ohio and Florida–specifically encouraged for-profit charter schools. To see how disastrously that’s turned out in Michigan, you must read the results of a 1-year investigation by the Detroit Free Press.  It’s a stunning story of greed, mismanagement and failure of oversight that is being reported this week.

Earlier this year the left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education published “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud and Abuse,” its title taken from a report by the U.S. Department of Education’s Inspector General.

This report charges that $100 million in taxpayer funds have been lost, stolen or misspent. it cites six areas of abuse:

Charter operators using public funds illegally for personal gain;
School revenue used to illegally support other charter operator businesses;
Mismanagement that puts children in actual or potential danger;
Charters illegally requesting public dollars for services not provided;
Charter operators illegally inflating enrollment to boost revenues; and,
Charter operators mismanaging public funds and schools.”

Overall, charter schools have not been a smashing success academically speaking.  Several studies (.pdf) have indicated that about one-third of charter schools significantly outperform their traditional counterparts, while another third underperform them.

These waves of bad news threaten to obscure the movement’s successes. Over the years a number of Charter Management Organizations (called that to distinguish them from the for-profit charter groups, which are known as “Education Management Organizations”) have established successful chains of charter schools. The best-known CMO is KIPP, for Knowledge is Power Program, but Yes Prep, Achievement First, IDEA Public Schools and a few others have attracted a strong following among parents dissatisfied with traditional public schools…and have demonstrated significant academic gains.

The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools will be meeting soon in Las Vegas, which is why I raise the issue of the movement’s future at this point. In fact, I posed my questions to Nina Rees, the Executive Director of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, Reed Hastings, the Californian who strongly supports charter schools, Joe Nathan and Ted Kolderie, two who were key players at that 1988 meeting, and Greg Richmond, the leader of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.

Greg Richmond and Reed Hastings were quick to point out that the influence of the profit-seekers was diminishing. Here’s part of Greg’s response:

The share of charter schools run by for-profit companies appears to have been flat for the past few years. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools shows a range of 11% to 13% over their most recent years of data (2008 to 2011) with a decrease in for-profits as a percent of the whole sector from 13% to 12.3% for the most recent year. The National Education Policy Center, no fan of charter schools, in its most recent report (released November 2013 with 2011-12 data) states “we estimate that the actual number of EMO-managed public schools has remained relatively stable over the past few years, and that large companies are diversifying into supplemental educational services rather than expanding in the full-service management area.

However, Richmond believes that the profit-seeking 100% virtual charter schools, which are growing in number, are a big problem in the charter community.

Their results are uniformly bad, and they have undue political influence in state capitols. Some important charter advocates would like to figure out a way to “kick them out” of the charter school movement.

My colleague John Tulenko did a piece for the NewsHour about one cyber-charter in Pennsylvania that you may have seen. Shortly after John’s piece aired, the founder was indicted.

I also asked about the influence of ideologues on the charter school movement. Some dismissed this, but Greg Richmond believes that those with blind faith in the free market–complete deregulation and parental choice–have been hurting the charter movement.

What I saw in New Orleans {{5}} supports Richmond’s point about the need for some regulation, because Recovery School District Superintendent Patrick Dobard learned that the independent charter schools had to be regulated and supervised or else some of them would play fast and loose {{6}} with the system and weed out (or not admit) students who might not do well academically or who were more expensive to educate.  Dobard saw it happening and worked to create universal standards on behavior, suspension and expulsion.

Richmond cites an activist group, the Center for Education Reform (CER), as the leading voice of this free market philosophy but adds,

The CER is much less influential than it used to be. After two decades of experience, few people in the charter movement believe that choice and deregulation are guaranteed to produce superior results. Those are good things, but talented teachers, great school leaders, adequate funding, facilities and high standards are just as important, if not more so.

Could the threat to the charter school movement come from the non-profits, not the profit-seekers?  It’s possible.  The non-profit Charter Management Organizations (CMO) are the fastest growing component of the charter movement. They represented just 11.5% of charter schools in 2008, but jumped to 20.2% in 2011.

In his new book, Ted Kolderie bemoans the division between these ‘franchise’ operations and the stand-alone charter schools, which detractors dismiss as “Mom and Pop” operations. In turning its back on individual charter schools,the charter movement is losing its way, Kolderie believes.  It’s in those individual schools that innovation is more likely to occur, he told me, because the franchises stress sameness, just like Burger King and McDonalds.

Greg Richmond sees the same divide as a threat. He wrote, in part,

The people who run these (stand alone) schools are interested in running their one school, not growing a network. Many of them came out of their local districts. They don’t like how the district was run, but they don’t inherently hate the district. They want the district to succeed too. These folks have real philosophical differences with the pro-growth, charter network people, while the network people believe that the stand-alone people are naïve.

Governmental and foundation policies support the CMO’s, whether it’s funding from the U.S. Department of Education or the newly established Broad Prize for Charter Schools, a cash award of $250,000 that goes to a CMO.{{7}}  There is no equivalent award for a stand-alone charter school.

How painfully ironic would it be if the dominance of networks stifled the innovation that the founders of the charter school movement saw as the fundamental advantage of chartering in the first place?

If the clash of philosophies between charter networks and the stand-alone schools is real, relevant and threatening to the stand-alone schools, whose responsibility is it to make sure that the playing field is level?

Nina Rees, the executive director of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, suggested that the responsibility for keeping the movement on course rests with authorizers and, should they fail, politicians. Perhaps, but shouldn’t the Alliance itself support even-handed treatment of networks and stand-alone charter schools? Shouldn’t the Alliance be speaking out against too-easy authorization of would-be charter operators?  Shouldn’t the Alliance stand firmly in favor of more effective and transparent ways of holding failing charter schools accountable?  Shouldn’t it be praising effective state charter school laws, and criticizing those laws that hurt the charter movement by opening the door to unscrupulous people?

I believe the charter movement is off course for another reason: Like the rest of public education, it is hostage to our obsession with test scores as the bottom line measure of school quality.  Charter schools could be leading the conversation about multiple measures of school and teacher effectiveness, but it seems to me that many of them have bought into the bubble test mania.

Charter schools were conceived of as pockets of innovation and cooperation.  We finally found {{8}} a school district that has welcomed charter schools and is striving to learn from them. Sometime in the next week or two the PBS NewsHour will carry our report about Spring Branch, Texas, where Superintendent Duncan Klussman has invited KIPP and Yes Prep to open schools inside two of his middle schools.  As you will see, the relationship is, so far at least, mutually beneficial, although it appeared to us that the charter schools are having a stronger impact on the traditional schools, not vice-versa.  But that’s as it should be, if charter schools are pushing the inside of the envelope.

The term “Charter School” has to stand for something; right now its meaning is in doubt, and that’s not good. I cannot be in Las Vegas for the annual meeting of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, but I hope some of the ideas above will be part of the conversations there.

—-

[[1]]1. Ted Kolderie and others call them ‘chartered schools.’[[1]]

[[2]]2. “The Split Screen Strategy: Improvement and Innovation,” Beaver’s Pond Press, 2014. Joe Nathan, who was at the 1988 meeting, sent me a note with the following information: The authorizer function was included in part because of research I had done on the GI Bill and some of the scandals at that time.  It was clear that just offering choice was not enough.  There needed to be an organization that would review proposals and determine which represented coherent, good ideas presented by people who had the skills & experience needed to carry them out.  We knew from the beginning that the authorizer role was vital.  Joe’s 1996 book, Charter Schools: Creating Hope and Opportunity, has more on this point.[[2]]

[[3]]3. In Saint Paul. Some charter opponents doubted that advocates would support closing ineffective schools, or those where there was corruption.  It’s widely known that the first charter to open was in Minnesota.  What’s not so widely known is that the first charter to close was also in Minnesota.  Joe Nathan testified (against the wishes of some people) in favor of closing. The Minnesota State Board of Education closed the school.
[[3]]

[[4]]In recent years numbers of Catholic parochial schools have converted to charter schools. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/06/11/35catholic_ep.h33.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1 [[4]]

[[5]]5. Our film, “Rebirth: New Orleans,” is available on Netflix. It’s the result of six years of filming there.[[5]]

[[6]]6.  For evidence ot that in other places: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/from-portfolios-to-parasites-the-unfortunate-path-of-u-s-charter-school-policy/ [[6]]

[[7]]7. This year it will go to KIPP, IDEA Public Schools or Achievement First.  The award will be presented in Las Vegas. Joe Nathan and I are among those who have voiced the opinion that there should be a significant monetary award for outstanding independent charter schools.[[7]]

[[8]]8. I learned about the experiment from Richard Whitmire’s new book about charter schools, On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools are Pushing the Envelope (Wiley, 2014) After I published the blog, Joe Nathan offered other examples of district/charter collaboration, including his own city of St. Paul, where, he reports, the two have been working together to increase the number of low income students taking dual (High school/college credits), and Massachusetts, where the charter law has helped encourage creation of Pilot Schools within the district.  He added, “The existence of chartering in Minnesota helped encourage the Forest Lake district to open a Montessori district school; it helped encourage the Rochester district to open a Core Knowledge option, and it has encouraged the Minneapolis teachers union to propose (and the legislature to adopt) a “site governed” district school option.”[[8]]

Why did thousands and thousands of students opt out of standardized testing this spring? Which tests did they choose to skip? And how did school leaders react? Did they punish, ignore, or–horrors–reward the protesting students?

Opt out numbers are hard to come by. I have seen estimates ranging from 30,000 to 300,000 in just one state, New York. Even though the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data,’ it’s pretty clear that the opt-out phenomenon is tangible, real and growing.

Identifying the adult players in this battle is an interesting challenge. Some are Tea Party types who are opposed to anything–not just in education–that smacks of ‘big government.’ Here’s one website. This faction of “opt out” is way out on the right politically.

The left has an “opt out” faction as well, albeit less organized. For them, opting out is a way of protesting what they see as the excessive influence of large corporations in our schools, with the testing company Pearson often being singled out for criticism and scorn.{{1}}

With the blessing of the New York State Department of Education, Pearson has been “field testing” questions at about 4,100 schools. For those students it’s another day of testing, in addition to the six days of state-mandated, high-stakes tests. Some parents have refused to let their children take these additional tests, as Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News has reported.

Gonzalez believes that the extra tests won’t produce any reliable data because the kids know these extra tests don’t count and therefore don’t take them seriously.

When New York State signed with Pearson to let that company try out its tests on certain students, it reminded some critics of an earlier time in America’s history when landowners could assign their workers as they saw fit. Back then, they could rent their workers out to other landowners or to mills and factories when those industries needed workers. That infamous practice–slavery–became illegal with the passage of the 14th Amendment after the Civil War. {{2}}

Since these tests are being given to help Pearson, it seems to me that the student workers ought to be rewarded for their efforts or offered the option of alternate activities. They are not chattel.

Many “opt out” supporters believe that excessive standardized testing is hurting genuine learning.{{3}} These parents, teachers, principals and school board members support opting out as a way of slowing down or limiting testing. The parents tell grim stories about their kids vomiting, not sleeping and crying all the time. Some school boards (including hundreds in Texas alone), teachers, principals and other educators want to limit standardized testing, and a few publicly support opting out. In Rochester, NY, school board member Willa Powell informed her child’s school that she would not be taking the new state test, for example.

When veteran teacher Gerry Conti of Westhill, NY, publicly disclosed his reasons for opting out of teaching by retiring early, it caused something of a sensation. Too much testing and an overemphasis on data collection–to the exclusion of creativity–were his chief complaints. In his resignation letter, which he posted on Facebook, he spread the blame around to include legislators, his union, and local school administrators. Here’s an excerpt:

In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars, our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education. The New York State United Teachers union has let down its membership by failing to mount a much more effective and vigorous campaign against this same costly and dangerous debacle. Finally, it is with sad reluctance that I say our own administration has been both uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian.

What I find intriguing are the targeted “opt out” protests aimed at the new Common Core exams, which are being rolled out around the country in trial runs.

Protests against these computer-based tests are creating problems for local administrators. The question some administrators seem to ask themselves is, “Should I punish or reward these non-participating students?” When they pose it that way, it strikes me that they are taking the protest personally, making it about THEM, not the kids. Bad idea…

The education establishment, which does not want “opt out” to spread, has been straightforward in its response: If you let (or make) your kids opt out, you are hurting them. You may think you are helping, but you actually are doing them a disservice. Testing, they explain, is in your children’s best interests because it tells you where they stand academically.

Among those campaigning against opting out is former DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who mocked those who have chosen to keep their kids from taking the tests:

Opt out of measuring how well our schools are serving students? What’s next: Shut down the county health department because we don’t care whether restaurants are clean? Defund the water-quality office because we don’t want to know if what’s streaming out of our kitchen faucets is safe to drink? {{4}}

Some school districts have adopted a punitive “Sit and Stare” policy meaning that the opting out kids have to sit at their desks while other students take the tests.{{5}} The protesters are not allowed to read books, thus ‘sit and stare’ for 60-90 minutes. This is apparently designed to humiliate the protesters. In some cases, the test booklets and pencils are put on the protesting students’ desks, probably with the hope that they will cave in to the pressure.

A poster child for what NOT to do might be Dr. Stacey Gross, principal of Ridgefield (CT) High School, where only 35 juniors–out of more than 400–took the new Common Core tests. That’s right: more than 90% of the high school juniors in this wealthy Connecticut town opted out of the test, which was given over several days.

Why did so many juniors opt out? One explained to a reporter: “I find this time of the year to be just as stressful as before APs,” Kristin Li said. “Now that APs are over, I’ve simply shifted my focus to SATs and ACTs. On top of that, I’m studying for my national registry exams to become a certified EMT, I’m becoming increasingly involved in my school clubs, and I dance four to five days a week. I can’t speak for everyone, but my life is just as busy as it was earlier in the year.”

In response to the opting out, Principal Gross decided to punish the protestors by prohibiting learning! She wrote an email to the parents of the juniors–protestors and test-takers alike– to ‘reassure’ them that (her words) “NO NEW LEARNING” can occur in a class where a Junior is absent for testing.” {{6}}

Teachers, she added, would not be covering any new material for the 365 students, at the expense of the 35 who toed the line and took the Common Core tests. The 365 students would have to go to their scheduled classrooms, she announced. She wouldn’t mess up the school’s patterns just to accommodate the 90%!

It seems to me that educators like Dr. Gross should be helping to identify useful alternative behaviors that would benefit the students who weren’t taking the tests. What might she have said? How about: “To ensure that students who are taking the test do not fall behind, their teachers will not be covering new material during the testing periods. And I’ve asked those who are opting out to come up with some alternative activities that are educational in nature or somehow contribute to our HS community.”

Michelle Goodman, who pulled her daughter out of the testing, told reporter Dani Blum of the Ridgefield Press that the administration’s insistence on “no new learning” was “absolutely ludicrous.” “Where are the priorities here, with the students who want to succeed or with the school system who is forcing their policies to the detriment of our children’s education?” she asked.

Giving young people choices while they are still in school? Allowing or even encouraging them to take responsibility for their own lives? These are dangerous concepts that threaten the established order of things in schools. Stuff like that may be fine for adults in a democratic society, but choices and personal responsibility are out of place in our schools.

—-

[[1]]1. The New York State Department of Education’s $32M contract with giant testing company Pearson did not include sufficient funds for field testing, so, with the State Department’s approval, Pearson embedded items for future tests in its regular testing, sparking more protest from parents, who felt their children were being used as guinea pigs.[[1]]

[[2]]2. In the deep South, the shameful practice continued up to the beginning of World War Two, as Douglas A. Blackmon shows so powerfully in “Slavery by Another Name.” [[2]]

[[3]]I count myself as a member of that group. My own take on excessive testing is a play on Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” which I call “Mending School.” It includes these lines:
“Before I gave more bubble tests,
I’d ask to know
What I was testing for, and why
And to whom I was like to do harm.”[[3]]

[[4]]4. This is a rhetorical straw man, because the tests are not designed to measure school effectiveness.  If that were our goal, we would use a more complex (and expensive) test but give it to only a carefully drawn sample of students–just as your doctor draws only a few drops of your blood, not all of it, to evaluate your body, and just as political pollsters survey only a carefully drawn random sample of likely voters to make predictions about elections.[[4]]

[[5]]5. Here’s one story: http://www.13wham.com/template/cgi-bin/archived.pl?type=basic&file=/news/features/top-stories/stories/archive/2014/03/ovbProS5.xml#.U6Fv241dVeM [[5]]

[[6]]6. Does anyone, let alone an educator, really believe that learning can be prohibited? Aren’t young people going to figure out the foolishness of that prohibition? Aren’t they going to learn something pretty basic about a person who feels she can prohibit learning? Prohibiting learning seems to me to be akin to telling someone not to think about a pink elephant–the opposite happens.

Growing up, we learned about King Canute, who famously stood on the beach and commanded the tide not to rise.  The sea disobeyed him, as he knew it would, because the wise King was trying to teach his subjects of the futility of some human laws.  Alas, Dr. Gross does not seem to possess the wisdom of Canute.[[6]]

“Sh*t, Sh*t, Sh*t!!!”

I wasn’t present when AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA President Dennis van Roekel heard about “Vergara vs California,” but it’s easy to imagine them uttering an expletive (or two or three).

Understand, I’m not talking about their reaction to the judge’s decision earlier this week. I’m imagining how they might have reacted when the lawsuit challenging California’s tenure and seniority rules was filed in May 2012, more than two years ago.

Why might they have cursed when the lawsuit was filed? Because, I suspect, they knew that the three California rules were indefensible. These rules are not based on anything remotely connected to pedagogy or the needs of students but were political decisions made by the state legislature, heavily influenced by the powerful California Teachers Association, the CTA{{1}}.

Consider the three provisions:

1) Tenure after TWO years? How can any organization, let alone something as complex as a school function that way? And by the way, the ‘two year’ rule actually means that a school principal has to make that ‘lifetime’ decision about halfway through the teacher’s second year on the job, after he or she has been in charge of a classroom for perhaps 14-15 months at most.
2) Slavish devotion to “Last Hired, First Fired,” as if the profession of teaching were labor’s equivalent of sanitation workers or pipefitters. 100% seniority! Nothing else matters, not a principal’s judgement, not student performance, not the teacher’s contributions to the school, and not student evaluation. Just years on the job!
3) A convoluted and complex process to remove inadequate teachers that reportedly involves about 70 discrete steps, takes years and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The case against those three provisions, “Vergara{{2}} vs. California,” was decided this week: “A California judge ruled {{3}} Tuesday that teacher tenure laws deprived students of their right to an education under the State Constitution and violated their civil rights. The decision hands teachers’ unions a major defeat in a landmark case, one that could radically alter how California teachers are hired and fired and prompt challenges to tenure laws in other states.”

Editorial pages of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal praised the decision. How often do those two papers agree on something?

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan applauded the ruling: “For students in California and every other state, equal opportunities for learning must include the equal opportunity to be taught by a great teacher. The students who brought this lawsuit are, unfortunately, just nine out of millions of young people in America who are disadvantaged by laws, practices and systems that fail to identify and support our best teachers and match them with our neediest students. Today’s court decision is a mandate to fix these problems.”{{4}}

Teacher union foes like Whitney Tilson and RiShawn Biddle could hardly restrain themselves, while union leaders Weingarten, van Roekel and New York City’s United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew complained that the decision diverted attention from social unfairness{{5}} and then attacked the man behind the lawsuit. Here’s part of Mulgrew’s statement: “What shocks the conscience is the way the judge misread the evidence and the law, and sided with a Silicon Valley millionaire who never taught a day in his life.”{{6}}

Judge Treu stayed the decision pending appeal and urged the legislature to fix the problems, but how likely is it that the California legislature will act to make earning tenure a more reasonable process, perhaps after three or even four years of teaching, instead of two?

That’s probably not going to happen because the CTA still wields great power. But if California needs a model, New York City’s approach to granting tenure seems to work well, as Chalkbeat explains here.

“Last hired, first fired”–using seniority as the sole factor in layoffs–is as indefensible as 2-year tenure, but it is also counter-productive because it alienates young teachers, some of whom are showing their displeasure by declining to support their national and state unions. That’s happened in Modesto, California and Wicomico, Maryland, where local chapters want to disaffiliate with their state association and the NEA itself. In neither case has it been pretty.

Tenure and due process are essential, in my view, but excessive protectionism (70+ steps to remove a teacher?) alienates the general public and the majority of effective teachers, particularly young teachers who are still full of idealism and resent seeing their union spend so much money defending teachers who probably should have been counseled out of the profession years ago.

With the modal ‘years of experience’ of teachers dropping dramatically, from 15 years in 1987 to 1 or 2 years today, young teachers are a force to be reckoned with. If a significant number of them abandon the familiar NEA/AFT model, or if they develop and adopt a new form of teacher unionism, public education and the teaching profession will be forever changed.

These are difficult times for teacher unions: declining membership and revenue, harsh criticism from traditional allies (like the leadership of the Democratic party), and now a court decision that will undoubtedly lead to similar challenges in other states.

The effort to blame poor education results on teachers and unions is misguided and malicious. It’s scapegoating, pure and simple, but–it must be said–protectionist policies like those in California play into the stereotype.

—-
[[1]]1. I lived in California from 2000-2010 and made a film, “First to Worst,” about the decline of the state’s public school system. Just to cite one case of the CTA’s power, the union wielded its influence to get Reed Hastings bounced from the State Board of Education in 2005. The Netflix founder had been appointed by Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat, in 2000 and reappointed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. Hastings was serving as Chair of the Board, but his advocacy of bilingual education and charter schools angered the CTA and–in lockstep–many statehouse Democrats (Hastings’ own party).[[1]]
[[2]]2. The Vergara in the case is Beatriz Vergara, one of nine minors, all students, who were plaintiffs in the case. The effort, however, was funded by a wealthy Silicon Valley technology magnate named David Welch and his organization, Students Matter. A great deal of material about the case is on its website: http://studentsmatter.org/our-case/vergara-v-california-case-status/ [[2]]
[[3]]3. Here’s Judge Rolf Treu’s ruling: http://studentsmatter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Tenative-Decision.pdf [[3]]
[[4]]4. He continued: “Together, we must work to increase public confidence in public education. This decision presents an opportunity for a progressive state with a tradition of innovation to build a new framework for the teaching profession that protects students’ rights to equal educational opportunities while providing teachers the support, respect and rewarding careers they deserve. My hope is that today’s decision moves from the courtroom toward a collaborative process in California that is fair, thoughtful, practical and swift. Every state, every school district needs to have that kind of conversation. At the federal level, we are committed to encouraging and supporting that dialogue in partnership with states. At the same time, we all need to continue to address other inequities in education–including school funding, access to quality early childhood programs and school discipline.”[[4]]
[[5]]5. They have a point, it must be noted. California ranks at the bottom of all states in per-pupil spending ($8,342), which is about 30% below the national average of $11,864. [[5]]
[[6]]6. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/california-ruling-teacher-tenure-reformers-action-n-y-article-1.1826618#ixzz34S3muJC8 [[6]]

When do complaints about ‘too much’ standardized bubble testing become strong enough to bring about change?  Now that some students are spending more than 10% of their school ‘instructional’ time on test-prep and testing, have we reached the tipping point?  Now that some students are reported to be taking 20 different bubble tests during a school year, are we there?  With some students taking bubble tests in art, music and physical education, have we gone over the cliff?

Our kids are already the most tested in the world, and now the Common Core tests are on the doorstep. Is anyone in power demanding that schools swap out tests–eliminate one for every one they add?  Or eliminate two when adding one?  Or sampling a la NAEP?  Those voices are out there, but they are hard-to-hear and hardly heard.

Robert Frost is one of my favorite poets, and his “Mending Wall” inspired this effort, which I call “Mending School.”

Something there is that doesn’t love more bubble tests
And students bubbling and learning how to bubble
When they might be making robots or reading Frost.
They take test upon test in arid classrooms,
Mixing memory and guesswork, stirring
Dull anger and gnawing fear of failure.
The work of test-makers is another thing:
Teachers come after them and make repair
Where they have ground down creativity.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill,
And on a day we meet to walk and talk
Of learning, testing and hopes for children
But we keep a wall between us as we go.
To him, this is just another kind of mental game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
Now is when we do not need more tests, I tell him.
He only says, ‘More testing makes good education.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good education? Isn’t it
Where they are timely and used to help?
But here the tests punish takers and givers alike.
Before I gave more bubble tests, I’d ask to know
What I was I testing for, and why,
And to whom I was like to do harm.
Something there is that doesn’t love bubble tests,
That wants them stopped.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘More testing makes good education.’

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