Ever since the publishing of A Nation at Risk during
Reagan’s presidency, the teaching profession has come under increasing
suspicion and scrutiny. During the 30
plus years since his grave pronouncement, this mistrust has led to; No Child
Left Behind; Race to the Top; PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness
for College & Careers) and Smarter Balanced tests, Common Core State
Standards; VAM (Value Added Model); decreased teacher training quality (Teach
for America); vouchers; the outlaw of unions in some “right-to-work” states;
increased importance of high-stakes standardized testing; a high rate of
teacher “churn;” record-low morale among teachers; introduction of laws to
eliminate tenure (due process) for teachers; and the closing and charterizing
of hundreds of public community schools. This war is raging on many fronts at
this time as political and corporate powers without much teaching experience
attack teachers and their unions, especially teachers in highly urban or rural poverty-ridden
communities.
The average teacher does their job of educating young
minds no matter what the current “flavor” of reading or math teaching strategy
is. We are so used to top-down management imposing programs and materials on us
that may or may not have any educational value. We usually just accept the
package and go on trying to reach growing minds. In my 37 years of teaching in urban public schools, I have seen
the preferred reading methods reach full-circle twice and the math has come
‘round once. Rarely do the people in authority even ask teachers how it’s
working. Rarely do they consider that it will take upwards of 10 years to see
whether a new method is truly working. They expect to see miracles within a 2
to 3 year period and when they don’t, it’s get on the carousel again to the
next “best practices.” Indeed, it takes a good three years for a teacher to get
used to a new program and use it well. When a teacher finally can implement the
program easily, it is changed and the process repeats itself ad-nauseum.
Teachers have always just dealt with the war against
administrators by doing our jobs and complaining when things didn’t work out
for the better. Indeed, we have no say in the adoption of educational programs
in the district, but have to use them anyway. Both teachers and our students
have suffered through such horrible ideas as scripted lessons and no-phonics
reading only because we were evaluated on using them “with fidelity.” Thank
goodness our unions were eventually able to show the administrators that scripted lessons
were NOT good for the education of ALL children, and that balanced literacy approach works
for most children.
Indeed, no one method will work for all children to
learn. Hence our opposition to the Common Core State Standards. The premise behind
the standards is good, but each state already had standards which they used
throughout the grades and subjects. The states, for the most part, had employed
teachers to examine, write, adapt, and test the standards’ viability in the
classroom. It is the states’ responsibility according to the constitution to
educate their citizenry and federal interference is not allowed in the
impostion of curriculum. The name Common Core STATE Standards belies the
process by which they were birthed and adopted. Neither the states’ education departments themselves nor their
teachers have much to do with writing them. There were two college professors
on the committee which first examined the standards, both of which refused to
support the final versions in math and reading. There were no early childhood
teachers whose students are the most impacted by the developmentally
inappropriate standards. Most of the writers of the common core were employed
by corporate educational testing companies or other non-teaching industries.
Pearson, which is involved in writing the tests for the standards, should not
have been given a seat at the birthing table. And the adoption of the standards
was somehow done before they had been written and diseminated. I don’t know how
to account for the states’ “approval” if the governors voting to implement them
had never seen them, nor had they been field-tested prior to approval.
Attackers from another front are charter schools,
supposedly public schools who have the liberty to “do their own thing.” Many charters have selective enrollment
processes which prohibit or deter English Language Learners (ELL) and Special
Ed (IEP) kids from applying because of their application process and/or lack of
programs. Many charters counsel out students with learning or emotional
disablities through no excuses discipline and one-size-fits-all educational
practices. Charters were originally established to help the very students they
are counseling out, those that can’t make it in the public school system. Instead,
charters have managed to skim the cream from the public schools, leaving
disproportionate numbers of ELL and IEP
students. All this for what? The majority of charters here in Pennsylvania do no better than public
schools when standardized tests are used to compare. Some do achieve better,
but many more do worse than the local public schools, cyber charters in
particular. Not one cyber charter made AYP. In addition, the school
district ends up paying for all the charter school kids regardless of where
they transfer from. In Philadelphia, a significant number of charter students
come from Catholic schools, not public schools, but the public school district
has to pay for them, too. Teachers and parents here have had it with closing
schools, laying off familiar experienced teachers and hiring Teach for America
recruits for the charters, most of whom stay 2 years and leave. Both teachers
and parents are sick of the closing-schools battles in this war and the
constant churn of new, inexperienced teachers.
Even Bill Gates, who has given millions of dollars to fund
his ideas for education has admitted that the current so-called reform models
have done little to improve educational outcomes. He keeps his hand in the
educationally profitable computerized testing industry which will not be
responsible to create, test and evaluate standardized tests that will be used
to judge student, teacher, and district. PAARC and Smarter Balamced tests made
for the Common Core will be given solely on computers that run Windows 8. Who’s
the winner there? Certainly not the school districts that have to purchase new
computers and upgrade existing one, leaving less money for actual instruction.
Computers may be wonderful, but teachers know that not
every student is able to show what they know on the computer. Students require
assessments that are as varied as they are to be able to judge whether they
have acquired the knowledge they need to be successful. There are 7 Intelligences according to Howard Gardiner
and teachers are required to differentiate their instruction to reach as many
as possible. Computer skills and visual methods used on the computerized tests
are but 14% of the skills that should be used to test children. Even if the
computer tests include audio, that’s only 22% of the assessments that should be
used in order to assess fairly. Teachers are still fighting the battle of
teaching to a child’s strength but testing only one facet of learning.
Then there is the unseen enemy, that is, the
behind-the-scenes corporate and political influences that shape the laws, even
up to the higher levels of the federal courts. Politics plays way too large a
role in how education works in our nation.
Every two-four years the elected governor or legislators seem to decide
whatever the previous guy did for education needs to be changed. These changes
have nothing to do with the needs of public schools, but with political
atmosphere at the time. Unfortunately, these political changes have taken on a
national agenda, with so many states challenging tenure, changing work rules
for teachers, requiring evaluations tied into test scores, promoting charters
and vouchers, and reducing budgets and pensions. It is the same all across the
country, too much to be a coincidence. Schools need to be far removed from the
political or corporate influences. It’s an ongoing battle we are currently
losing.
One of the latest battles teachers are waging now is
against our right to due process, our right to know what we are accused of and
be able to mount our defense. Most of the people in the United States misunderstand
the way due process, or tenure works for teachers in grades Kindergarten
through 12th grade. Although it’s commonly known as “tenure,” it is
not what tenure is in higher education. In universities, tenure allows
professors to study, experiment with, and challenge widely held views in order
to get to the truth about an issue. They can tackle controversial issues
without worry of being fired because the department head disagrees. Tenure in K
to 12 circles only means a teacher cannot be fired without good reason.
Highly-visible lawyers, former journalists, and movie
stars all seem to have opinions on tenure which they have put out there with
much ado in recent weeks. These non-educators misrepresent our profession and
our unions when they complain we can’t get rid of bad teachers because there is
tenure. But that is patently false. Our unions do not fight for bad teachers,
but they do fight for an accused teachers right mount a defense against
arbitrary and capricious accusations. It is not the unions obligation to get
rid of the “bad” teachers, but the responsibility of the administrator at the
school level. There aren’t that many “bad” teachers in schools, though, and no
techer worth their salt wants to teach with one. In fact, the union frequently counsels
out teachers who need to leave because they don’t improve after having been
found ineffective. If there are bad
teachers in a school, it is the school district’ responsibility to prove it and
to go through the process of firing. Despite research that shows that teachers
only account for 1% to 20% of a child’s school success, false information keeps
being spread by these political influences to discredit teachers and their
unions.
Pension reform is the latest attack on teachers. Many
teachers stayed in their positions long-term because of the promise of a good
pension upon retirement. No one goes into teaching because of the salary. In
most school districts in the nation, neither salaries nor pensions are
commensurate with the level of proficiency and professionalism required by the
job. For most teachers, it’s not a job but a career, a calling if you will. How
else could you justify those tenacious instructors who stay in the ghetto, year
after year, trying to better serve the students in their charge? Those teachers
fight battles every day that the average citizen can’t imagine. The ravages of
poverty and violence that plague the inner city make it very hard to reach and
teach the students who live there. But they stay, and teach, and counsel, and listen,
and cajole, and comfort children who have seen more violence than many
soldiers. They buy personal items and school supplies for their students. They
work within the confines of the untreated PTSD their children experience daily.
After 30-40 years of teaching within these conditions, teachers deserve to
bring home a pension they have contributed to their whole working lives. Many
states have laws where teachers can’t collect both their pension and Social
Security. We all know that living on a Social Security check keeps one at the
poverty level or close to it. Is this what we want for those to whom we entrust
our most valuable resource, our children?
Again, the pension question seems to be on the political
agenda to destroy public education and is a nationwide issue. In my state of
Pennsylvania, funds desperately needed by the Philadelphia School District and
being held up because the Governor insists on pension reform. One has nothing
to do with the other. Our governor insists it is the public employees pension
funds that are bleeding the state. What he doesn’t tell anyone is that state
has elected not to contribute to the pension fund for at least a decade, the
state “borrowing” the money and using it for something else so they don’t have
to raise taxes. Our no-tax governor has decreased corporate taxes as well as
not tax the fracking industry in order to claim that the money it now owes to
the pension fund is bringing the state down. It’s a debt the state is planning
to renege on without paying any penalties and in the process, not fulfilling an
obligation to its workers. An obligation that was a contract with the workers
who gave up salary increases and reductions in workforce to save the state
money. Ken Previti says it best in his blog, Reclaim Reform. Even though
he speaks about Illinois, the battle is being waged in many states.
Not many people realize that the state legislature is
required by law to fund, as earned compensation, teacher pensions. The pensions
are further protected by the Illinois constitution. State legislators have
intentionally not fully funded pensions, preferring to use the money for pet
projects that profit political cronies and campaign contributors. Legislators
don’t want to be considered the thieves that they are, so the procedure is
euphemistically called underfunding. This type of theft became so popular that
R. Eden Martin and his cohorts have encouraged legislators to shift money in
order to put the money elsewhere into more “worthy” areas. This used to be
called misappropriation of funds. Now, it is called saving the state.
Well, the teachers have been trying to work for decades
with curriculum changes, evaluations based on test scores of students they may
never have taught, reductions in both federal and state budgets for education,
charter schools taking over their traditional public school and removing their
union rights, increased standardized testing whose practice tests and formative
tests eat up a whole month’s worth of reading lessons each year, being demeaned
by parents, administrators, television, radio, and movies. The attacks on
tenure, pensions and common sense practices has awakened the beast within. Both
the NEA and AFT have called for the Department of Education Secretary to change
his ways or resign, teachers have refused to give tests that count for nothing,
parents, teachers and principals have protested the incessant test-taking, and
an organization of teachers, 51,000 strong, dedicated to taking back our
profession, has been born- the Badass Teachers Association.
Watch out! The members of the Badass Teacher Association
are mad and we’re not going to take it anymore. The group is for "every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality, and refuses to accept assessments, tests and evaluations imposed by those who have contempt for real teaching and learning. " At first I was put off by the name, but after watching the continuing dismantling of the Philadelphia public schools, I felt I had to do something I was not able to do until I retired. That is, speak out loud and strong for the teachers who were left struggling to perform the miracles the system requires without the proper materials to do it. I joined the ranks of those who refuse to be blamed for the general inequalities of society and refuse to accept the assessments required by those who have no knowledge of proper educational methods and strategies.
Others have joined the fight against the Common Core, standardized testing, and the dismantling of teachers' work protections and pensions. This is the turning point in
the battle that we will win. We will vanquish our enemies. The fight has just begun.
Still learning!
