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.