REFORM REVISITED—DECEMBER 2009

 

          Ramon Cortines the current Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified school district is now demanding a 2% pay cut this year and a 10% cut next year. Most of the cuts will come from the classroom and the teacher side of the budget.  It is easier to replace a teacher position that has been cut than to put back administrative positions that have been  eliminated. 

          The following is an article that Harriet Perl and I wrote in March of 1990.  Unbelievably the situation in the Los Angeles Unified School District is worse today than it was then! Class size has been increased and there are more administrators, many more administrators!                                                                    LET’S HAVE REAL REFORM—MARCH 1990                      Despite a great deal of talk about reform, education remains a bulwark of autocratic stagnation, with kids and teachers still last in line for the money, still getting what is left over after the bureaucracy takes the lions share of the budget.  A few weeks ago I received a copy of the “88-89”  LAUSD budget audit.  As I read the document, I began to realize the upside down budget priority system of the LAUSD.  It is a priority system that feeds the bureaucrats and the bureaucracy and starves the educational needs of school children.                                                                                                           What is happening in Los Angeles with our school districts budget is happening in many other districts in this state.  In fact some smaller districts have even more waste than L.A.,  Pomona, Long Beach,  Azusa, and Beverly Hills just to name a few.  These districts have a higher administrator-teacher ratio than the 1 to 11.6 in Los Angeles.                                              The incredibly small percentage of the budget that is actually spent on the students’ education is the truly appalling aspect of the L.A. District’s budget.                                                                                                               There is no question that the main function of a school is to educate kids.  So, if the 60% of the kids that stay in school and graduate can’t read and write beyond the eighth grade level and can’t compute a two-step math problem, then all the money that taxpayers spend on the schools is wasted.  The schools are unquestionably not fulfilling their function.  Why?                      

 

For years now as test scores dropped, it was we teachers that were blamed.  We were the obvious ‘fall guy” for the failure of public education.  No one pushed that idea more than administrators.  If the heat was on us, then it wouldn’t be where it should be, on them.                                                              Administrators had a double problem:  make the educational system look better to the taxpayers and maintain their own cushy positions.  Telling the public that teachers were at fault solved their problems perfectly.  In the 70’s and 80’s the legislature decided to pass “reform” legislation to evaluate teachers every other year, the Stull Bill.  The legislature also passed the CBEST, a test all prospective teachers had to pass.                                                The result of these “get the teacher” reforms was that nothing changed.  Test scores continued to go down, obviously proving that teachers are not the problem.  In fact, teachers are the strength of the system.  Teachers hold the systems together and make them work as well as they do.            A study of the districts budgets in the 1980’s tells a terrible story of mismanagement and waste.  (The last nineteen years have seen no change).                Any business will tell you that management should never receive more than 15% of the budget.  LAUSD Administrators annually consume more than 30% of the budget.  In 1988-89 the LAUSD budget was $3.5 billion.  Last year (1988-89) the 33,000 teachers earned an average salary of $35,000 (including benefits), that comes to$1,245,000,000.  Add the $83,766,000 spent on text books and supplies for students.  You then realize that only 35% of the budget is spent directly on the classroom.                                  The district’s administrators received 25% of the entire $3.5 billion budget, $976,700,000.  That figure does not include the cost of school site administrators.                                                                                                       Any business that only spends 35% of its budget on the product (in our case, students’ education) would be out of business or creating a lousy product.                                                                                                                It is almost impossible for a bureaucracy to reform themselves.  It will take legislation to do the job.  One absurd California law that must be changed is the one that allows districts to have one administrator for every 12 teachers.  There should be a law that requires districts to budget 75% for supplies and personnel that work directly with children.                                        Teachers are the real educational experts, not administrative bureaucrats that “escaped” the classroom as fast as they could for higher pay and less work.                                                                                                         You want real reform, ask an experienced teacher.  They will tell you what to do and how to do it.  The problem is nobody ever asks!

 

A Flawed Proposal

The Lung Cancer Alliance-California on November 26, 2009 released the report “State makes little progress on improving lung cancer outcomes”.

Many of these “bad” cancer doctors should be fired. If the cancer rates are not going down these doctors are not getting the job done and should be relieved of their duties.

If teachers should be fired for not raising standardized test scores then cancer doctors should be fired for not reducing the rate of lung cancer.

It is more important to fire bad doctors because they contribute to pain and suffering and even death.
A “bad” teacher slows the learning process which the student and future good teachers can make up.

My argument is absurd! Not as absurd as President Obama’s plan to rate teachers on the standardized test scores of their students.

Many scholars have serious questions as to the validity of these tests. Why then is the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan supporting this plan? This plan raises questions as to M r. Duncan’s competence. How much classroom teaching experience does Mr. Duncan have? My guess is not much.

The second problem is that no matter how hard the teacher works, fifty percent of all test takers will score in the bottom half of test scores. All standardized tests are normed for this fifty-fifty breakdown.

Low test scores are more prevalent on average among poor children, English language learners and students with learning disabilities. Under the Obama plan teachers with large numbers of these children in their classes are doomed to failure. They have a future of bad evaluations, no promotions and likely termination. What the president and his advisers don’t seem to understand is that with education as well as medicine there are many variables outside the control of the doctor or the teacher. A teacher that works with a student one hour per day had no control over what went on in that child’s life in the years before that student sat in their class or the other one hundred sixty three hours of that week not spent in class.

The president shows he is very limited in his understanding of the educational process and the teacher’s role in that process. Teachers can’t make students learn. Education is a discovery process, a process that can be accepted or rejected, explored or tuned out.

Every teacher knows that many social and economic factors have dramatic impact on a child’s classroom performance. This is proven when wealthy and middle class children score far better on average than poor and working class children on these tests.

The best predictors of public school test scores are the zip codes. Test results mirror very closely the value of the homes and the annual incomes of the families in that zip code. The standardized test score game is very predictable; the wealthiest areas have the highest scores, the poorest areas, the lowest.

Rating teachers on student’s standardized test scores is dishonest and makes as much sense as rating cancer doctors on the death rate of their patients.

Let’s hope the president will reconsider this flawed proposal.

Where have All the Union Leaders Gone?

When teacher union leaders lose their will to fight the bloated bureaucracy of the school district, they have to give the membership some hope of improvement. Many of these leaders then substitute fighting for real union issues by becoming advocates of reform.
Unions and management are natural adversaries. Teachers don’t always understand this but the administrators do and are trained how to win disputes with union members. School administrators are not good at not having their way. Their attitude is usually, my way or the highway. Teacher unions are the only powerful interest that will fight to save public schools. Politicians only support schools as long as the union contributions roll in, even then that support is usually lukewarm at best. Most parents don’t support public schools, they would prefer private schools for their children. Unions work to improve public schools while being attacked as corrupt and protectors of “bad teachers”. In this atmosphere, union leaders have to be strong. This is not a world for the timid and faint hearted. The English Historian John Keegan wrote in his recent History of the American Civil War that General George McClellan
“ was psychologically deterred from pushing action to the point of result; he did not try to win.” He wrote “General U.S. Grant, turned out to be both an absolutely clear sighted strategist and ruthless battle winner”. Union leaders have to be latter day Clarence Darrows in the defense of their profession and the institution they serve. As President of the United Teachers Los Angeles from 1984 to 1990 (self analysis, always dangerous), I tried to strongly advocate for what was fair and fight that which was not fair or equitable. I seldom missed a chance to go on the offensive, always looking at the end game. The objective was to win the war. This scared a lot of teachers and engendered the hatred of a lot of civic leaders and district officials. Improving the lives of our 32,000 members was all that mattered. As Harry Truman said, “If you want to be loved, get a dog.” What UTLA accomplished between 1984-1990 had not occurred before or since. During those years we increased salaries 54%, ended all elementary teacher yard duty, negotiated lifetime medical benefits for retired teachers and created a good school based management program. Future union leadership killed SBM by creating a phony program under the direction of corporate Los Angeles called LEARN. It was never intended to work and no longer exists.
UTLA won one of the largest teacher strikes in U.S. history. In May of 1989 twenty five thousand teachers went on strike and the school district collapsed in nine days. A great example of what teachers can do when they get organized and fight. Current teacher leaders have to stop being George McClellan and turn themselves into U.S. Grant. Fight everyday for your kids and your teachers. Be the best Clarence Darrow you can by defending the interest of your kids, teachers, and the institution that has made America great.
Free public education in the United States depends on these leaders
and their members.








S

OBAMA’S RIGHT WING EDUCATION POLICY

President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently advocated rating teachers based on their students standardized test scores. This was also unstated approval of the terrible federal law, No Child Left Behind.
The federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, also known as the No Child Left Behind Act) has made things much worse for our public schools.
“This law sets teachers up for certain failure,” says Dr. James Popham UCLA professor emeritus and an expert on testing and student evaluation. “Improvement is set so high that it will be impossible to attain.”
George Mason University professor Gerald Bracey holds the same opinion. He agrees with Popham that the ESEA has “a number of impossible-to-meet provisions.”
All schools must test all children in grades 3 through 8 each year in reading and math and two years later in science. Schools must also show adequate yearly progress (AYP). After 12 years, all schools and all students will again be required to meet “proficient” levels.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has come up with a set of educational terms, such as basic, below basic, advanced, as well as “proficient.” NAEP achievement levels and their definitions have been, including such prestigious groups as UCLA, the Center for Research and Evaluation, Student Standards and the National Academy of Sciences.
Lyle Jones of the University of North Carolina points out that American fourth-graders ranked third in the world on TIMSS science tests, but only 12 percent ranked “proficient” on the NAEP Science Assessment.
The ESEA requires NAEP standards for all states. All states must participate in the NAEP reading and math test to confirm their own state results.
“Most states will never reach ‘proficiency’ levels on NAEP tests,” says Bracey. “When they don’t, districts will then be subjected to increasingly severe and unworkable sanctions. Teachers can be fired, kids sent to other districts, districts abolished.”
North Carolina and Texas have been singled out as having great improvement on test scores. But if the ESEA’s new provisions had been in place for a few years, 90 percent of schools in these two states would be labeled “failing.”
As Professor Bracey reports, conservative public school critic Denis Doyle has written, “No Child Left Behind (legislation) means that the U.S.A. is about to be inundated in a sea of bad news and tht (public) schools are going to get poleaxed.”
The school system has proven it as an ossified government monopoly that can’t reform itself,” chimed in public-school basher Chester Finn (former under-secretary of education) in the Wall Street Journal.
“When these preordained high failure rates occur,” says Bracey, vouchers and privatization will be touted as the only cure.”
Finn insists, “It is time to apply American business expertise to educaton,” just like Wall Street, no doubt.
Bracey, replies, “(As it did) with Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, ImClone, and WorldCom?”
We can thank California congressman George Miller for the No Child Left Behind Act. He and Ted Kennedy were big backers of the bill. Miller advocated requiring tests of veteran teachers. I assume that he will be a big backer of the Obama plan to rate teachers based on their students standardized test scores. I had hoped that with the election of Obama that we would get a sane national education policy. It looks like we will have to wait a little longer for that dream to come true.

"FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU; FOOL ME TWICE, SHAME ON ME"

“FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU; FOOL ME TWICE, SHAME ON ME”

When the education community voted for Barack Obama, we thought we were getting a progressive reformer. Ten months later it looks like we got a right of center very Blue Dog Democrat. It was announced on 11.3.09 that he wants to bribe public education with a few dollars. In exchange for a few pieces of silver, teachers will be evaluated on the standardized test scores of their students.

I will not deal here with these tests and how their validity is seriously questioned by experts. The White House does not take into account how poverty and language affect the test scores. I have dealt with these topics in previous blogs. I will say at this time that in the Los Angeles Unified School District there are over 120 native languages spoken.
There are over 5,000 homeless children enrolled in the classrooms of Los Angeles and there is a special school for homeless children in downtown L.A. We know for a fact that only a small percentage of these students will score well on Standardized tests.

Standardized tests are normed every year. That means that no matter how hard teachers work, fifty percent of all test takers will score in the bottom half. The teachers can’t win under the Obama plan.
This proposal is like investing with Bernie Madoff. A few suckers will win, but 99% will lose. Obama is a democrat in the tradition of ex Democrat Ronald Reagan. The President has swallowed the urban myth that most teachers are bad and are being protected by corrupt teacher unions. He has drunk the Kool-Aide that teachers need incentives and competition. This right wing myth is a cruel hoax that will not improve education. With this plan who will want to teach students with learning disabilities? Who will want to teach English language learners, low ability kids or very poor inner city kids? All of these children score poorly on standardized tests and live with problems that preclude much improvement.
This plan would be like holding Doctors accountable for lowering the cancer rate or reducing birth defects.

Obama is not a progressive; he is a right wing Democrat with a strong anti-teacher and teacher union bias! His proposal for “reform” is just another repackaged right wing attack on public education and teacher unions.
No doubt many Obama supporters like me have a new slogan, “Never Again”.

President Obama, You are Mistaken!

Recently President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan stated that teachers should be evaluated on the basis of their student's test scores. Both agreed with the Bush administration that schools should be evaluated on the basis of test scores. They are both wrong!

Standardized testing has spun out of control. Large numbers of children are not prepared to take these tests due to their poverty-stricken back grounds and limited English language skills.

"Poor children are much more likely [than middle-class children] to suffer developmental delay or damage," says Ruby Payne in her book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty.

Policy Analysis for California Education agrees. In 1999 it reported, "Poor children are two or three years behind their more affluent peers on several measures long before their first year of school."

In 2000, poverty was defined by Julian Palmer at Columbia University as a family of four earning $17,524 a year. According to 1998 figures from Columbia, the United states leads the industrialized world in child poverty.

Twenty-five percent of children under 18 and 33% of Latino children live in poverty and Edsourse reports that 42 percent of California's 6.4 million K-12 students are Latino.

"Well off white kids continue to outperform their disadvantaged or minority peers, often by sizable margin," says a January 2002 article in U.S. News and World Report.

California's Star program test scores reveal this sad reality and little else. Scores reflect almost perfectly the socioeconomic status of the children who are tested. And despite this knowledge, teachers are being pushed to the limit to raise test scores. It has become the political and administrative mantra in California: Teachers, raise those test scores!

In California in 2001, we tested 4.5 million kids in grades 2 through 11.


When the API scores were analyzed, I was shocked to find that in the bottom 10 percent of API schools, 86 percent of the students were poor while in the top 10 percent of schools, only 7 percent came from impoverished backgrounds. In the bottom 10 percent of schools, 46 percent of the students were English language learners whereas in the top 10 percent, only 2.6 percent had to overcome language difficulties.

Now let's take a look at the reality of testing and what it is doing to our schools.

The SAT-9 test, the major component of the STAR test, is a norm-referenced test. That means no matter how the 4.5 million kids score, there will be a top 50 percent and a bottom 50 percent. Half the kids and half the teachers lose no matter what!

A series of news articles by Sarah Tully Tapia, Keith Sharon and Ronald Campbell in the Orange County Register, citing research that API scores have a 20-point margin of error. Despite this, schools have been put on the list of under performing schools on the basis of one point.

The reporters also wrote, "students who traditionally score lower, African Americans and special education students, are excluded [from the API results in their school] at a higher rate than white and Asian students."

James Fleming, superintendent of Capistrano Unified School District, excluded 1,259 students of the district's 3,201 from his district's API scores.

One year a school in San Bernardino County raised its test scores by 102 points. The next year its scores dropped by 105 points. This is not uncommon.

As the Public Policy Institute of California revealed in 2000, "Much of the variation in {STAR} test scores among urban, suburban, and rural schools that appear in raw data can be accounted for by variation in students' socioeconomic status and school resources."

A strong case can be made that these STAR Test results are totally invalid, yet they are driving public education in California. Despite the fact that 50 percent of the students will always score in the bottom 50 percent, teachers are threatened with repercussions if they don't raise the test scores when it is virtually impossible to do so. In this testing system, the rule is if someone goes up, someone else must go down. We already know who will be at the bottom.

We must reform this testing nightmare. We must have tests that are aligned with textbooks and curriculum. We must have a criterion-referenced test. Then if 100 percent of the kids scored in the top10 percent, that is what would be reported. We must do away with a system that requires 50 percent of kids to score in the bottom 50 percent of the test scores.


Please Mr. President, study standardized testing before you endorse it!