Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
CPS Parent Matt Farmer Puts Penny Pritzker on Trial at CTU’s Stands Strong Rally
Rahm Emanuel promised to “shake up the Windy City’s schools” when he campaigned for mayor of Chicago in 2011. One of his main goals was to change the teacher evaluation process. He is a big proponent of using students’ standardized test scores in determining the effectiveness of classroom practitioners.
On September 12th, Mike Klonsky wrote the following on his blog SmallTalk:
It appears this morning that our autocrat mayor has decided to stonewall the negotiations. While he’s moved on compensation issues, he’s refusing to even discuss teacher evaluation and the power of principals to hire and fire teachers at will.
Rahm is operating here without the benefit of knowing much about education. He’s that just-right combination of street-thug ward politician and Wall St. hustler who thinks that because he believes something to be true, he has the right (power) to force it on the public. First case in point was his notion that more seat time in school necessarily produces better results. It doesn’t. Now he’s convinced that you can evaluate a teacher based wholly or largely on their student’s score on a standardized test. You can’t.
Yesterday Rahm hauled a few of his pet principals, (including Ethan Netterstrom, principal at Skinner North) in front of the TV cameras, to claim that in order to be “successful” they need the unchecked power to hire and fire whoever they choose, regardless of qualifications and experience and without any due process. This is a recipe for City Hall-style patronage and going back to the days when teachers (and principals) worked at the pleasure of ward politicians. It is also a recipe for principals getting rid of teachers who may be the wrong color or political persuasion. It’s interesting to note here that principals already have lots of authority over faculty hiring and that black and Latino teachers have been the victims of these kinds of hiring practices. Today, just 19 % of the teaching force in Chicago is African American, down from 45 % in 1995.
This is what happens when you make the school system a wing of City Hall, weaken collective bargaining, take power away from popularly-elected school boards and Local School Councils, and dismantle public space and public decision making.
This strike really represents a last stand for teachers and all public employees against moves by Tea Party governors and their Democratic Party counterparts in urban districts like Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, to eliminate teachers collective bargaining rights altogether. This was the original idea behind SB7 which made it illegal for teachers in Chicago (nowhere else in the state) to bargain over anything except salary and benefits — two issues that could easily be reneged on after the contract was signed for budgetary reasons. Remember, the board agreed to a 4% raise in the last contract only to take it back once the contract was signed.
All this leaves Chicago’s teachers with only one option. Dig in and fight back with the only tactic left to them under SB7 — the power to withhold their labor and put their bodies on the line in defense of their profession and of democracy. What happens here in Chicago will ultimately determine the fate of teachers and public worker unions everywhere.
Emanuel’s children do not attend public schools. They are enrolled at an elite private school—the University of Chicago Lab School, where the tuition is said to be more than $20,000 a year. According to Mike Elk, the conditions at the school Emanuel’s children attend are far different from those one finds in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS).
Elk provided information about the U of C Lab School:
The Lab School has seven full-time art teachers to serve a student population of 1,700. By contrast, only 25% of Chicago’s “neighborhood elementary schools” have both a full-time art and music instructor. The Lab School has three different libraries, while 160 Chicago public elementary schools do not have a library.
“Physical education, world languages, libraries and the arts are not frills. They are an essential piece of a well-rounded education,” wrote University of Chicago Lab School Director David Magill on the school’s website in February 2009.
Magill also wrote the following in his Director’s Address to Returning Faculty in 2010:
I believe that the “business model” of improving education will fall on its own sword.
It is unfortunate that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation developed primarily by politicians and enacted in 2002 morphed into what many refer to as a “business model” of improving education. Measuring outcomes through standardized testing and referring to those results as the evidence of learning and the bottom line is, in my opinion, misguided and, unfortunately, continues to be advocated under a new name and supported by the current administration.
In the past decade, there have been many critics of the educational policies promoted by the so-called corporate reformers. Only recently have some voices been taken seriously—in particular, the voice of educational historian Diane Ravitch. Her recent book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, provides a compelling argument to examine the data that tells us that reforms of the past ten years are not working and are actually degrading the intellectual potential of students. And this comes from one of the early architects of many of those reforms. This is a book worth reading, authored by a person who admits she was wrong yet is forceful when advocating for change. Listen to this from Ms. Ravitch:
“We must honor those teachers who awaken in their students a passionate interest in history, science, the arts, literature, and foreign language. Such teachers (if acting today under NCLB) would be stifled not only by the data mania of their supervisors, but by the jargon, the indifference to classical literature, and the hostility to their manner of teaching that now prevails in our schools.
“Without a comprehensive liberal arts education, our students will not be prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy, nor will they be equipped to make decisions based on knowledge, thoughtful debate, and reason. . . . Not everything that matters can be quantified. What is tested may ultimately be less important than what is untested, such as a student’s ability to seek alternative explanations, to raise questions, to pursue knowledge on his own, and to think differently.”
And to that, I say AMEN and thank you, Ms. Ravitch, for seeing the light and for cracking the armor of the “business model.” Because of her and others like her, I believe this disturbing chapter in American education history is coming to a close.
I must admit that I am not as hopeful as Mr. Magill is that this chapter in American education history is coming to an end. What I hope is that the teachers’ strike in Chicago will awaken many Americans to what has been happening to our public schools over the past decade in the name of school reform…to how high stakes testing of students has perverted the educational process in this country…to the narrowing of the curriculum because everything is focused on prepping children for tests and not on helping them to become critical thinkers and doing what is best for each individual child…to the elimination of art and music teachers and school librarians.
Matt Farmer, the speaker in the first video that I posted, is a lawyer, musician, local school council member, and a CPS parent. He stands with and supports the striking teachers. He wrote the following in an article for the Huffington Post titled Teachers Don’t Like Bullies last May:
Teachers and their union representatives are simply gearing up — outside of the classroom, mind you — to fight for their professional lives this summer, and I’m glad they’re finally getting engaged.
I say that both as a longtime CPS parent and as a local school council member. I talk to a lot of teachers around the city, and from Rogers Park to Gage Park they’re angry.
They’re tired of being made scapegoats for the devastating effects of the generational urban poverty that Emanuel and his aides would rather not talk about. They’re tired of having their students used as over-tested lab rats by an ever-changing cast of out-of-touch, out-of-town “reformers” who specialize in “public education by press release.” But what really angers the teachers I’ve talked to is the absolute lack of respect that this mayor and his hand-picked team have shown them during the last year.
In fact, I’d fear for my fourth-grade daughter’s next eight years in the CPS system if her teachers were not mentally and emotionally invested in the ongoing contract negotiation process.
Make no mistake — I want my kid in class next September. But if her teachers ultimately vote to go on strike, my daughter will know why.
She may not have a deep understanding of tenure issues, pension contributions, or “step and lane” increases, but (like most kids I know) she has a solid grasp on the basic concept of “fairness.”
Even a 10-year-old can understand that if 75 percent of the CTU’s membership ultimately concludes that our charter-school-loving mayor is trying to give them (as Emanuel might say) “the shaft,” then those teachers need to stand up and fight, not only for their individual jobs and their profession, but also for the well-being of the kids in the classrooms in which they now teach.
The deck is undeniably stacked against the teachers in their current negotiations with the Board of Education, and a strike vote is the only leverage teachers have to secure a fair contract.
You want to call mock strike votes a scare tactic, be my guest. But don’t forget to call out Emanuel and his high-priced media machine the next time the mayor starts talking about putting 55 kids in a classroom, or complaining that CPS teachers enriched themselves for years while “cheating our children,” whom, he claims, teachers effectively “left on the side of the road.”
It’s easy, I suppose, to make a habit of dumping on CPS teachers if the only parent-teacher conferences you ever have to attend take place at a private school.
Chicago Public Teachers Stage Historic Strike in Clash with the Mayor on Education Reforms
Striking Teachers, Parents Join Forces to Oppose “Corporate” Education Model in Chicago
Chicago Teachers Strike Could Portend Referendum on Obama Admin’s Education Reform Approach
CTU President Karen GJ Lewis Speech May 23 Rally
Addendum: The Worst Teacher in Chicago (This is a true story.)
CHICAGO. In a poorer city school, one English teacher–I won’t use her name–who’d been cemented into the school system for over a decade, wouldn’t do a damn thing to lift test scores, yet had an annual salary level of close to $70,000 a year. Under Chicago’s new rules holding teachers accountable and allowing charter schools to compete, this seniority-bloated teacher was finally fired by the principal.
In a nearby neighborhood, a charter school, part of the city system, had complete freedom to hire. No teachers’ union interference. The charter school was able to bring in an innovative English teacher with advanced degrees and a national reputation in her field – for $29,000 a year less than was paid to the fired teacher.
You’ve guessed by now: It’s the same teacher.
It’s Back to School Time! Time for the editorialists and the Tea Party and Barack Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan to rip into the people who dare teach in public schools.
And in Arne’s old stomping grounds, Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is stomping on the teachers, pushing them into the street.
Let’s stop kidding ourselves. This is what Mitt Romney and Obama and Arne Duncan and Paul Ryan have in mind when they promote charter schools and the right to fire teachers with tenure: slash teachers’ salaries, bust their unions.
NOTE: Chicago Teachers Strike May Near End As Union Releases Deal (Huffington Post)
SOURCES
Autocrat Rahm draws a line in the sand on test-based evaluation (SmallTalk)
Director’s Address to Returning Faculty 2010 (University of Chicago Lab School)
Director of Private School Where Rahm Sends His Kids Opposes Using Testing for Teacher Evaluations (In These Times)
Teachers Don’t Like Bullies (Huffington Post)
The Worst Teacher in Chicago (Chicago Tribune)
What would be definitely worse than a Chicago Public school is the prep school that The Willard went to.
Detroit Charter High Schools Underperform Public Counterparts, Analysis Shows
By Joy Resmovits
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/08/detroit-charter-high-schools-underperform_n_893327.html
Excerpt:
The majority of the Motor City’s charter high schools underperform the city’s traditional public schools, according to an analysis published Thursday by Detroit News.
The report found that just six of 25 Detroit charter schools had higher math or science proficiency rates on the Michigan Merit Exam than those in Detroit’s traditional public schools. The analysis notes that charter schools only surpassed Detroit Public School performance in social studies.
“We were not surprised in that we have consistently believed and said that there are both excellent charter schools and low-performing charter schools as there are both excellent and low-performing public schools,” Steve Wasko, a spokesman for Detroit Public Schools, told The Huffington Post.
Charter schools, which are publicly funded but can be privately run, have gained momentum around the country. A surge of laws passed this legislative session expanded the number of charter schools that allowed to open. According to data from the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, 1.8 million students attended 5,277 charter schools in the 2010-2011 school year — an increase of 11.8 percent over the previous year.
Supporters laud charter schools’ flexibility and the proliferation of options for parents, while critics condemn them for sucking resources out of public schools and underserving high-need populations. Beyond those objections, the overall efficacy of charter schools is in question. The most authoritative study on the issue — out of Stanford University in 2009 — found that only 17 percent of the charter schools studied outperform public schools and that 37 percent “deliver results that are significantly worse” than those expected of traditional public schools.
What Does Mayor Rahm Want?
September 11, 2012
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/09/11/what-does-mayor-rahm-want/
The real difference between the CTU and Mayor Rahm Emanuel is not money. By all accounts, the union and the mayor are close on compensation.
The real differences are about the corporate reform agenda. The mayor wants merit pay, more charters, evaluation of teachers by test scores, and all the other components of the national corporate reform agenda.
But little noticed by the national media is that none of these so-called reforms works or has any evidence to support it. Merit pay has failed wherever it was tried. Teacher evaluation by student test scores is opposed by the majority of researchers, and practical experience with it has led to confusion and uncertainty about whether student scores can identify the best and worst teachers. The charters in Chicago and elsewhere do not get better test scores than the regular public schools. Even in Detroit, only 6 of 25 charter high schools got better scores than the much-lamented Detroit public schools.
Chicago Teachers Union vs. Mayor Rahm Emanuel (The Democrats’ Scott Walker?)
By Joseph A. Palermo–Associate professor, historian, author
9/11/12
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/chicago-teachers-strike-democrats_b_1875598.html
Excerpt:
The 29,000 striking Chicago teachers are sending the message to Mayor Rahm Emanuel (and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan) that their teacher bashing and privatization schemes for public education have become so onerous and destructive to the teachers’ mission and profession that they have no choice but to fight back.
In this epic struggle to save a profession that is vital to the long-term wellbeing of the nation Mayor Emanuel finds himself in a role similar to that of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin: an anti-union corporate politician who is more than ready to play hardball with a public employees union. Unfortunately for him, his fellow Chicagoan, President Obama, for whom Emanuel served as Chief of Staff, is in the fight of his political life right now trying to win four more years. The timing of the strike couldn’t be worse for the Democrats, and therefore packs a potent punch nationally because it lays bare how toxic the relationship between teachers and Democratic Party leaders has become in recent years.
This strike is not about wages or benefits or any other matter that might concern unionized workers in more prosperous times, this is a fight for the very survival of a profession (and a highly feminized one at that) that has been under relentless attack from sharks posing as “reformers.” Emanuel and his fellow travelers appear to be more concerned about busting the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and turning over quick profits to education corporations poised to make a bundle on their privatization than they are on any common sense solution to the crisis they’ve manufactured.
This strike also shines a light on the deep and bitter conflict that’s been tearing apart the Democratic Party since Arne Duncan launched his “Race to the Top” campaign. If Mayor Emanuel comes off as being too Scott Walker-esque, the repercussions of this battle, since President Obama is personally so connected to Chicago and Emanuel and Duncan, could cost him a lot votes and enthusiasm in the 2012 election.
The privatizers and profiteers from “Stand for Students” had a hand in lobbying the Chicago City Council to raise the threshold to three-quarters of teachers voting for a strike action before they could go out. But last June’s strike approval vote of nearly 90 percent put that scheme to silence teachers to rest.
President Obama appointed his own “Chicago Boy” to run his education policy in the form of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who was largely to blame for putting the Chicago school system on the terrible road it now finds itself. Duncan, in turn, appointed a gaggle of education entrepreneurs, corporate-minded “reformers” and privatizers to key posts inside the U.S. Department of Education, including Joanne Weiss, who was a partner and chief operating officer of the NewSchools Venture Fund, who had previously headed several education businesses that sold products and services to schools and colleges. (Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, p. 218)
Elaine:
First, I apologize for not congratulating your reporting of this issue before I commented. It was well presented and credit is due.
I recognize that it is more difficult to measure success in education than with manufacturing widgets but what I take exception to is the abandonment having some form of responsibility for making things better. One person commented before about holding police accountable for the murder rate of a city. I know everything is not the responsibility of the police or the teachers in this topic, but there has to be some form of standard and it cannot necessarily by measured by only those who are to be evaluated, in this case the teachers.
There should be accountability. As the other commenter pointed out witth Mr. Emmanuel being held accountable for plugging the budget gap. Well if it is not met, it should be a factor in whether or not he is re-elected.
Let’s say for example perhaps a reasonable measurement is being applied. If the drop out rate is 40% for example and the test scores say come to 100 units and the students who go on to college or trades is 50% for example. Then three years later nothing changes budget wise, class room sizes wise or any other significant distraction. Would it not be fair to call into question of the numbers were 50% worse that the teachers should not be at least held into question as to why? And by the same token shouldn’t it also be acceptable for the teachers to receive some form of benefit if all the scores were 5% better? I say certainly yes.
I believe it sholdn’t only be a numbers game, but how does one empirically measure progress and be as objective as possible?
If it is also the case where perhaps (I am just speculating here) so many funds were diverted to these charter schools, and that maybe the charter schools took a large portion of the better students, leaving the regular schools with the more difficult students it changed the baseline of the measures of success that disadvantaged the teachers in the extent the test scores were lower. If this was the case, it certainly would have been unfair to the teachers to rate them prior to the standard prior to the cuts and the charter school influence.
Perhaps it would be good to measure this by someone who is not politically involved in the issue.
Maybe it would also be of benefit to rate the teachers by efforts and make the policy and curiculum measured by success of the students.
What Real Education Reform Looks Like
By David Sirota
Dec 8, 2011
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_real_education_reform_looks_like_20111208/
As 2011 draws to a close, we can confidently declare that one of the biggest debates over education is—mercifully—resolved. We may not have addressed all of the huge challenges facing our schools, but we finally have empirical data ruling out apocryphal theories and exposing the fundamental problems.
We’ve learned, for instance, that our entire education system is not “in crisis,” as so many executives in the for-profit education industry insist when pushing to privatize public schools. On the contrary, results from Program for International Student Assessment exams show that American students in low-poverty schools are among the highest-achieving students in the world.
We’ve also learned that no matter how much self-styled education “reformers” claim otherwise, the always-demonized teachers’ unions are not holding our education system back. As The New York Times recently noted: “If unions are the primary cause of bad schools, why isn’t labor’s pernicious effect” felt in the very unionized schools that so consistently graduate top students?
Now, at year-end, we’ve learned from two studies just how powerful economics are in education outcomes—and how disadvantaged kids are being unduly punished by government policy.
The first report, from Stanford University, showed that with a rising “income achievement gap,” a family’s economic situation is a bigger determinative force in a child’s academic performance than any other major demographic factor. For poor kids, that means the intensifying hardships of poverty are now creating massive obstacles to academic progress.
Because of this reality, schools in destitute areas naturally require more resources than those in rich ones so as to help impoverished kids overcome comparatively steep odds. Yet, according to the second report from the U.S. Department of Education, “Many high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and local funding.” As if purposely embodying the old adage about adding insult to injury, the financing scheme “leav(es) students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers.” In practice, that equals less funding to recruit teachers, upgrade classrooms, reduce class sizes and sustain all the other basics of a good education.
Put all this together and behold the crux of America’s education problems in bumper-sticker terms: It’s poverty and punitive funding formulas, stupid.
Thus, we arrive at the factor that decides so many things in American society: money.
As the revelations of 2011 prove, students aren’t helped by billionaire-executives-turned-education-dilettantes who leverage their riches to force their faith-based theories into schools. Likewise, they aren’t aided by millionaire pundits sententiously claiming that we just “need better parents.” And kids most certainly don’t benefit from politicians pretending that incessant union-busting, teacher-bashing and standardized testing represent successful school “reforms.”
Instead, America’s youth need the painfully obvious: a national commitment to combating poverty and more funds spent on schools in the poorest areas than on schools in the richest areas—not the other way around.
Within education, achieving those objectives requires efforts to stop financing schools via property tax systems (i.e., systems that by design direct more resources to wealthy areas). It also requires initiatives that better target public education appropriations at schools in low-income neighborhoods—and changing those existing funding formulas that actively exacerbate inequality.
Policywise, it’s a straightforward proposition. The only thing complex is making it happen. Doing that asks us to change resource-hoarding attitudes that encourage us to care only about our own schools, everyone else’s be damned.
In America’s greed-is-good culture, achieving such a shift in mass psychology is about the toughest task imaginable, but it’s the real education reform that’s most needed.
rafflaw,
You got that right!
*****
The bait and switch of school “reform”
Behind the new corporate agenda for education lurks the old politics of profit and self-interest
BY DAVID SIROTA
http://www.salon.com/2011/09/12/reformmoney/
Excerpt:
In recent weeks the debate over the future of public education in America has flared up again, this time with the publication of the new book “Class Warfare,” by Steven Brill, the founder of American Lawyer magazine. Brill’s advocacy of “reform” has sparked different strands of criticism from the New York Times, New York University’s Diane Ravitch and the Nation’s Dana Goldstein.
But behind the high-profile back and forth over specific policies and prescriptions lies a story that has less to do with ideas than with money, less to do with facts than with an ideological subtext that has been quietly baked into the very terms of the national education discussion.
Like most education reporters today, Brill frames the issue in simplistic, binary terms. On one side are self-interested teachers unions who supposedly oppose fundamental changes to schools, not because they care about students, but because they fear for their own job security and wages, irrespective of kids. In this mythology, they are pitted against an alliance of extraordinarily wealthy corporate elites who, unlike the allegedly greedy unions, are said to act solely out of the goodness of their hearts. We are told that this “reform” alliance of everyone from Rupert Murdoch to the Walton family to leading hedge funders spends huge amounts of money pushing for radical changes to public schools because they suddenly decided that they care about destitute children, and now want to see all kids get a great education.
The dominant narrative, in other words, explains the fight for the future of education as a battle between the evil forces of myopic selfishness (teachers) and the altruistic benevolence of noblesse oblige (Wall Street). Such subjective framing has resulted in reporters, pundits and politicians typically casting the “reformers’” arguments as free of self-interest, and therefore more objective and credible than teachers’ counterarguments.
This skewed viewpoint becomes clear in this excerpt of a C-Span interview with Brill about “Class Warfare,” in which Brill is talking about a group called “Democrats for Education Reform” — a group financed by major hedge fund managers:
“[The group] was created by a small group of frustrated education reformers … They happen to be well-to-do frustrated education reformers who were Democrats and they had an epiphany … And the epiphany they had was that the Democrats, their party, their party that they thought stood for civil rights, were the political party that was most in the way. And what frustrated them was they consider education reform to be the civil rights issue of this era. And they really couldn’t believe it was their party that was blocking their idea of reforms that are necessary. So they describe it repeatedly … as a sort of Nixon-to-China gambit in which Democrats are going to reform the Democratic Party and they’ve made lots of progress.” (emphasis added)
Though self-billed as a work of objective journalism, Brill’s book reads like an overwrought ideological manifesto because — like much of the coverage of education — it frames the debate in precisely these propagandistic terms.
As Brill and most other education correspondents tell it, those most aggressively trying to privatize public schools and focus education around standardized tests just “happen to be” Wall Streeters — as if that’s merely a random, inconsequential coincidence. Somehow, we are to assume that these same Wall Streeters who make millions off of “parasitic” investment schemes to leech public institutions for private profit couldn’t have ulterior motives when it comes to public schools.
No, in the standard fairy tale sold as education journalism, these “reformers” are presented as having had an honest, entirely altruistic “epiphany” that led them to discover that “the reforms that are necessary” (ie., only the policies Wall Street deems acceptable) comprise “the civil rights issue of this era.”
In this framing, millionaires and billionaires trying to eviscerate traditional public education from their Manhattan office suites are the new Martin Luther Kings — even though the empirical data tell us that their schemes to charter-ize and privatize schools have been a systemic failure, often further disadvantaging the most economically challenged students of all (one example: see Stanford’s landmark study showing more than a third of kids whom reformers ushered into charter schools were educationally harmed by the move).
The truth, of course, is that for all the denialist agitprop to the contrary, corporate education “reformers” are motivated by self-interest, too. In a sense, these “reformers” are akin to the Bush administration neoconservatives when it came to Iraq. Some of them wanted to invade for oil, some wanted to invade to create a new sphere of influence, some wanted to invade to further isolate Iran, and still others wanted to invade to “spread democracy.” But as Paul Wolfowitz famously said, they “settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction” as the public rationale for war.
Same thing for those who fund corporate education “reform”: they have a lot of different self-interests, but they’ve settled on schools as a political target that unifies them all.
So, then, what are those self-interests? Here are three of the biggest ones that go almost entirely unmentioned in the ongoing coverage of the education “reform” debate.
Self-Interest No. 1: Pure Profit
First and foremost, there’s a ton of money to be made in the education “reforms” that Big Money interests are advocating.
As the Texas Observer recently reported in its exposé of one school-focused mega-corporation, “in the past two decades, an education-reform movement has swept the country, pushing for more standardized testing and accountability and for more alternatives to the traditional classroom — most of it supplied by private companies.”
A straightforward example of how this part of the profit-making scheme works arose just a few months ago in New York City. There, Rupert Murdoch dumped $1 million into a corporate “reform” movement pushing to both implement more standardized testing and divert money for education fundamentals (hiring teachers, buying textbooks, maintaining school buildings, etc.) into testing-assessment technology. At the same time, Murdoch was buying an educational technology company called Wireless Generation, which had just signed a lucrative contract with New York City’s school system (a sweetheart deal inked by New York City school official Joel Klein, who immediately went to work for Murdoch.
Such shenanigans are increasingly commonplace throughout America, resulting in a revenue jackpot for testing companies and high tech firms, even though many of their products have not objectively improved student achievement.
At the same time, major banks are reaping a windfall from “reformers’” successful efforts to take public money out of public schools and put it into privately administered charter schools. As the New York Daily News recently reported:
Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction. The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years…
The credit can even be piggybacked on other tax breaks for historic preservation or job creation. By combining the various credits with the interest from the loan itself, a lender can almost double his investment over the seven-year period.
No wonder JPMorgan Chase announced this week it was creating a new $325 million pool to invest in charter schools and take advantage of the New Markets Tax Credit.
On top of this, “reformers’” initiatives to divert public school money into voucher schemes — which data show have failed to produce better student achievement — means potentially huge revenues for the burgeoning for-profit private school industry, an industry that “has fascinated Wall Street for more than a decade,” reports PBS Frontline.
The bottom line is clear: In attempting to change the mission of public education from one focused on educating kids to one focused on generating private profit, corporate leaders in the “reform” movement are pursuing a shrewd investment strategy. Millions of dollars go into campaign contributions and propaganda outfits that push “reform,” and, if successful, those “reforms” guarantee Wall Street and their investment vehicles much bigger returns for the long haul.
In light of all the money that’s already being made off such “reforms” (and that could be made in the future), pretending that businesspeople who make their living on such transactions are not applying their business strategies to education is to promote the fallacy that the entire financial industry is merely a charitable endeavor.
Judging teachers by how students do on standardized tests makes no sense at all, psychologically, demographically, or statistically. How are you going to realistically compare kids from wildly different neighborhoods? There are some neighborhood schools where kids have impoverished backgrounds, with little or no intellectual stimulation at home. Then there are some kids who come from neighborhoods where, like Lake Wobegone, they are all above average. The teacher who may not be all that good as a teacher, but by the luck of the draw, snags a few kids who are polymaths may get a raise, where the skilled teacher who has nothing but budding criminals and gangbangers gets fired.
Then there are bright kids who just happen to suck at standardized tests. Why should they or their teachers get the short end of the stick?
What the Teachers Are Fighting for at the Chicago Strike
By Charles P. Pierce
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/chicago-teacher-strike-2012-12701572
Excerpts:
CHICAGO — The teachers gathered, all in their red T-shirts and red plastic ponchos, out in front of the Hyatt Regency hotel on Wacker Drive, hard by the river here, on the third day of their strike. Autumn had come blowing in early off the big lake, and it had brought a chill drizzle that had brought out the ponchos, and many of the picket signs seemed in imminent danger of blowing off in the general direction of Joliet.
That they were gathered at the hotel — and not at the headquarters of the Chicago Public Schools several blocks away, or in front of any of the shuttered school buildings themselves — was a signifying development in that it demonstrated that the strike had tied itself to issues far beyond pay and benefits, and even beyond class size, and even beyond the galling insult of measuring a teacher’s worth by how the students perform in the (admittedly quite profitable) monkey-show that is the educational testing industry. You see, Penny Pritzker, one of the many dilettante corporate millionnaires who have attached themselves to the educational “reform” movement, also is a high-ranking executive of the Hyatt corporation. In her day job, fairly defined as “raking it in with both hands,” Pritzker was granted a number of lucrative tax breaks by the administration of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who also, as it happens, was the guy knuckling the Chicago Teacher’s Union on behalf of the school “reform” movement. The teachers were not shy about associating Pritzker’s tax breaks, her work in “reforming” the public out of the public schools, and Emanuel’s conspicuous involvement in both of them. In every real sense, the Chicago teacher’s strike was as much an attempt to arrest the tightening grip of oligarchy as anything that ever happened in Zuccotti Park. Once again, at the very least, people were yelling at the right buildings…
*****
The strike has forced a lot of things to the surface, not the least of which is the entirely unsurprising revelation that Rahm Emanuel is every bit as much of an imperious dickhead as an elected official as he was as an apparatchik under both presidents Clinton and Obama. Quotes have leaked from various bargaining sessions that demonstrate quite clearly that Emanuel is in this fight for the power it will bring him, and to cement alliances with the various corporate panjandrums financing the “reform” movement, especially by funneling money to corporate-backed charter schools in and around the city. He is busting a union, pure and simple, because he’s found a union he can bust while still getting to speak at a Democratic convention…
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And what, I always ask, is the alternative? From the “reformers,” we get pie in the sky dined upon by golden unicorns. Once we jettison the deadwood out of the system, the “good” teachers — the ones who can get the right answers installed into their students according to standards set by, among other companies, the corporation that’s keeping The Washington Post afloat — will be paid what they are worth by a grateful citizenry. Horse hockey. People don’t want to pay teachers because they don’t value the work that teachers do. If they don’t respect the sacrifices most of those people on the picket line are making now, what makes anyone think they won’t gripe just as loudly in that glorious future over what the “good” teachers are making, especially if private sector wages everywhere else remain stagnant and income inequality grows?
Great response Elaine! The privatization of CPS is all about the money, not the kids.
Darren,
OK. Let’s have tests determine teacher’s evaluations. Now let’s have the murder rate determine police evaluations, and let’s have Rahm’s evaluation on his ability to plug the $650 million dollar hole in the CPS budget and completing the repairs on schools that are in terrible repair.
capt ratt
what school system are you principal at?
Darren,
The high stakes standardized tests only evaluate what children learn in a limited/narrow way. Children may make lots of progress during the course of a school year that cannot be measured by a paper and pencil test. Teacher and student evaluations should be multi-dimensional.
The teachers and many parents are upset and angry because public neighborhood schools have been closed while dozens of charter schools have opened over the last decade. Many of the traditional public schools have large class sizes…no libraries or arts teachers.
I am a parent and was a public school educator for thirty-six years. I am definitely not in agreement with the “corporate education model” Rahm and a number of his astro-turf billionaire buddies are trying to foist upon the Chicago Public Schools, its teachers, and its students.
In the school where I taught, there were some of us teachers who willingly accepted more than our share of students with learning problems, physical disabilities, ADHD, etc. I don’t know if we’d be as willing to accept such students if we knew we might get fired because our students didn’t test as well as the students of teachers who had easier classes.
There is a lot more to the Chicago public school story–but I couldn’t include all of it in this one post. I may do a follow-up post in the future.
Captain Ratty, My husband went to Chicago public schools in the late sixties, and he told me that there were 7 National Merit Scholars in just his home room, and he was one of them. He was very well prepared for college.
I went to a 40 year high school reunion. The dumbest guys and gals from high school who got into college became teachers, Of those the dumbest became principals. All the talked about was retiring. Some had. The guys who had gone into labor unions in skilled trades were by far the most independent persons. Next to those who ran their own businesses. The most beat down by their jobs were the corporate white collar types. The union pipefitters made more money than any white collar guys until you get to bank president. The teachers were the most boring to talk to.
When I see the teachers in the Chicago scene all fired up about their strike, I am looking at big fat people who I would not want teaching my kid.
Stand firm Rahm and dont send your kids to Chicago Public Schools. By the way, when I went to college in 1967 in a small college in Illinois, the slowest and least prepared were from City of Chicago proper public schools.
You parents in Chicago gotta watch out for Pirates!
Mr. Emmanuel is nothing but a union busting bully. He doesn’t care about education, students, parents or anything else. Apparently he sees charter schools as a way to drain money from the public school system.. It is well known that on average charter schools are no better than public schools but they can pick their students , throw them out and generally act like private schools without any public oversight and some of them make big bucks for investers. It is disgraceful.
Great job Elaine. I just read that the teachers are still reviewing tentative agreement so at east one more say of no school.
Darren,
Being a teacher is not like any other job or business.
So essentially what is being said by many of those talking on behalf of the teachers is that the teachers should not be accountable for the test scores of the students.
I ask this then. Is there any measure of the students’ learning that will be acceptable to these teachers or not? It seems to me that it is inherent in any employment situation to rate the effectiveness of the employees. Quality of the product or service is certainly one of them, why should these teachers be exempted and not anyone or everyone else. if the students are not learning, they are not effective in doing their jobs.
So would the better situation be to just simply give these teachers carte blanche to have half the children drop out or receive failing grades without any question as to the efficacy of their position?
The one argument I will give to this side is that many teachers are teaching to the test, meaning they are gearing their cirriculum to prepare students more for the test than a general education. This has happened as a result of the situation.
Interesting it was to me, Mayor Emmanuel is receiving the blunt of the frustration of the teachers’ spokespersons calling him into line with all this political intrigue that is actually with more of the Republicans than him. And as an advisor to President Obama, this is rather laughable.
My wife and I do not have children, but if I did I would see to it if the public school was a bad learning environment for them, a private school would be something I would consider. That is my right to choose as is the case with Mayor Emmanuel.
I personally do not like Mr. Emmanuel’s politics, but I am in agreement with his position on this. I also would resent a teachers’ strike that denied my child an education. I did not strike during our negotiations with the department and could not by law because the citizens of the county would be terribly affected. My Dad was a postal clerk with the USPS and was prohibited by federal law from striking. Yet, we were able to get contracts in negotiation without forsaking those we served. Why can’t these teachers?
matt farmer makes a compelling case for public school vouchers or even private schools instead of public schools.
Why is everyone messing with the teachers? Muslims and teachers. If you’re working at a school and you wear a hijab, you’re really getting messed with.