HorseSense and Nonsense

HorseSense Under Construction

2008-08-03T10:05:00.001-07:00

Readers will note some changes in our template and content in the forthcoming weeks.

Please stay tuned for updates about our HorseSense revamp and reorganization.

More coming soon!

Update: Another Delay in Student-on-Teacher Harassment Case

2008-07-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

Originally slated for a July 9 retrial, Adams v. Los Angeles Unified School District will now head to court again September 3, at the earliest. Reasons for the delay are private. However, this report can confirm that while LAUSD will certainly benefit from yet another reprieve to re-assess its defense and/or consider settlement negotiations, there was nothing political about Judge Kenneth Freeman's decision to set the new date.

The hostile environment sexual harassment case was first brought to court in 2001 by a single teacher, Janis Adams, who argued that LAUSD had enabled three years of ugly and sexualized student aggression which culminated in the public sexual harassment, libel, threats, and defamation perpetrated by a student-generated underground "newspaper," The Occasional Blow Job.

In a June 9 hearing, where Judge Freeman refused LAUSD's motion to dismiss the case, lawyers for the district did reveal a new slant in their arguments. Acknowledging that Adams "had suffered something," LAUSD attorney Linda Savitt urged the judge to consider Adams' case purely as a "workman's compensation" matter rather than a case of sexual harassment. Judge Freeman rejected this idea.

It's sad that it's taken 8 years and over $1.3 million taxpayer dollars for the district to acknowledge, finally, that Adams suffered the insufferable. But LAUSD still needs to learn that personal retribution for speaking up as a teacher-worker can certainly include a sexual component, as in Adams' case.

In fact, sexual-bullying-and-harassment-as-retaliation for speaking up or standing up to perpetrators is a common consequence in workplace cases of this kind among adults--unless an employer intervenes swiftly to address the workplace dynamics. Legal scholar and Yale professor J.M. Balkin has written on this subject at length in Columbia Law Review.

Adams' case is no exception. The key distinctions of her circumstances only heighten the problem she faced: her perpetrators were required by attendance laws to re-enter her workplace; and, as minors (albeit very old ones) her perpetrators were treated as "little darlings" by the community and by their parents, who screamed a lot about rights and very little about responsibility.

No doubt LAUSD is dreading the moment when a new jury not only considers facts of this case, but also the impressive reality that Adams has withstood the emotional and financial strain of 8-years worth of litigation and argument in order to make her voice heard.

Teacher Watch: School Safety and Teacher Civil Rights

2008-06-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

Do teachers have the same right to a safe workplace as other professionals? Not if they’re threatened, defamed, or harassed by students.

At least that’s what Los Angeles Unified has spent seven years and $1.3 million taxpayer dollars to tell one plaintiff, teacher Janis Adams, whose hostile environment sex harassment suit against her former employer is slated for retrial starting July 9. If the district has its way, Adams v. LAUSD will have detrimental consequences for schools.

Adams filed suit against LAUSD when she was grossly libeled and defamed in an underground student paper, the Occasional Blow Job, from March through June 2000 at Palisades Charter High School.

The first issue attacked teachers other than Adams, but when she challenged the publication she became its primary target. An actress-turned-teacher, Adams was called a former “porn star” who had performed so many anal sex acts she had to wear a diaper. On the cover of another issue, her face was superimposed atop the splayed body of a porn model.

In print materials circulated at her public workplace as well as the upscale neighborhood nearby, Adams was called “bitch” for fighting back. She reported being heckled as a "slut" on campus, car stalked by students when picking up her 7-year old, and harassed by phone calls at home. She also found a threatening note posted on her classroom door.

Despite Adams’s pleas to school administrators for support, and despite clear school policies against sexual harassment, the responses at site and district levels were lamely ineffective. Individual students received hand-slaps, but their publication continued to appear on campus until the school year ended. Deanne Neiman, the go-to district official in charge of vetting sexual harassment cases, remained ignorant of the controversy until just before her deposition was taken--almost two full years later.

The jury for the original 2001 trial sided unanimously with Adams, agreeing that LAUSD had been negligent in following its own discipline policy, the state education code, and federal law. The district was held liable for enabling a hostile work environment, to the tune of $4.35 million--more than double the damages Adams sought.

In a post-trial ruling, Judge Kenneth Freeman negated the financial award as inflammatory. But rather than reducing the amount or directing a different verdict, he ordered a new trial. In his statement of reasoning, he made the bizarre claim that teachers voluntarily forfeit their civil rights, “trading” federal protections against “offensive conduct” for the challenge of working with kids.

If you teach, this is one legal form you may have missed.

The implications of Adams are highly gendered. For nearly 150 years, the business of teaching minors has been a “pink collar” profession. The National Education Association reported in 2006 that approximately 8 out of 10 educators are female. Put this together with Hostile Hallways, the 2001 report by the American Association of University Women, documenting that 36 percent of high school students have witnessed peers sexually harassing teachers.

The reluctance of LAUSD to settle this case suggests that it’s not the money but teacher protection it dreads. In the past five years, there have been reports across the country--from Horace Mann School in New York City, Cook County High School in northern Minnesota, Tesoro High School in Orange County--of women teachers being sexually bullied and defamed on paper or online by male students, who then claim “free speech” when called on it. It was only a matter of time before one teacher stood up in court.

LAUSD’s central argument, in the first trial and on appeal, is that it has “limited control” over students, mere “third parties,” in the school workplace.

But what other workplace, aside from prisons, has compulsory clientele? And how can any district justify discipline policies for protecting such “third parties” from each other, but then deny such protection to those we entrust with their care?

It’s easy to say we expect educators to stand up against bullying, drug use, cheating, hazing, graffiti, and violence. But few people realize that the first responders--our teachers--are often targeted, threatened, isolated, shushed, or simply ignored when they intervene to witness or prevent escalating behavior.

There can be no sustained safety for students at the expense of teacher civil rights.

LAUSD: Not Yet Settling for Teacher Civil Rights

2008-06-17T12:10:00.000-07:00

Monday, June 9, in Department 64 of Los Angeles Superior Court, Los Angeles Unified lost its latest "Hail Mary" to dismiss 8-years' worth of trial and appeal in the sexual harassment complaint of former teacher, Janis Adams.

In a fruitless response to Judge Kenneth Freeman's oral ruling against the district, LAUSD attorney Linda Savitt started her arguments with, "First of all, let me say anyone who teaches high school deserves a medal of honor..."

Experienced faculty hears the "but" coming.

Savitt indeed continued: "...But kids are mouthing off, and you know they will." Mouthing off? Judge Freeman seemed to disagree that this perhaps easily foregone conclusion negated the severity of Adams' particular case, which included repeated acts of defamation, libel, attacks on her family, threats, and stalking from students during spring 2000 at Palisades Charter High School.

The judge agreed that these allegations were questions of fact to be weighed by a jury in deciding LAUSD's degree of liability for protecting teachers in the workplace.

New trial begins July 9, barring a settlement. Stay tuned here for updates.

Teacher Watch: War, Inc. in Limited Release

2008-05-23T11:47:00.001-07:00

Overshadowed heavily by the release of the Indiana Jones grand finale, John Cusack's War, Inc. opens today in Los Angeles at the Landmark Theater on Pico and Westwood.

Why not make it a double feature--for double discussion?

Find local showtimes for this limited release here.

Teacher Watch: Susan Ohanian's When Childhood Collides with NCLB

2008-05-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

In his introduction to Susan Ohanian's latest, powerful book, Sid. S. Glassner writes, "The No Child Left Behind Act created an environment in our schools so counter to democracy's constructive spirit" that "[s]uch a condition cannot be permitted to persist nor should it ever be repeated."

A tale told in two voices, When Childhood Collides with NCLB (published by the Vermont Society for the Study of Education) dramatizes a sharp rift between media punditry and real life in public school. Each page literally splits down the middle as Ohanian provides two narratives, juxtaposing her own poems and meditations about classroom life with excerpts from newspaper headlines, press releases, reports, and commentaries. The result is a moving and provocative reading experience.

Her poem, "Processes and Terrors," for example, begins: "How to cross/A Piranha-infested River:/Stay out of the water/when piranhas are feeding./Swim or walk across/Quickly and quietly." This piece is printed directly across from a relevant snippet of a 2004 speech delivered by NCLB author and lobbyist for test publisher NCS Pearson, Sandy Kress: "[F]or those of you who are intimidated or threatened by NCLB, the world is actually going to become worse as we go along. I mean to say, more demanding. And it will look back at NCLB as a kind of just an initial foot in the water, if you will, to the world we're about to enter."

What multiple choice test or prep-packet asks students to consider a connection between poetry, Piranhas, and Scantron forms? Any teacher might happily use sections of Ohanian's book as a model for similar responsive creative writing exercises in their own classrooms.

A single copy of When Childhood Collides with NCLB is available for $8.95. Order copies from the author and publisher by sending a check directly to VSSE, Box 26, Charlotte VT 05445.

For $27, you can get two copies plus a year's subscription to the hard-hitting monthly Chicago teachers' newspaper, Substance.

War, Inc. and A Nation at Risk: The Martial Overtones of Ed Reform

2008-04-25T10:34:00.000-07:00

John Cusack's new film, War, Inc., appeared in limited release on screens this past week in Toronto and will show April 28-May 4 at the Tribeca Film Festival. The movie dramatizes the outrageous marriage of violence and profiteering enabled by corporation-loyal foreign policy, and its satire doesn't come from fiction: billions of taxpayer dollars are used to employ fee-for-hire "private military" or "security" vendors (think Blackwater) in the name of supplementing our nation's poorly-compensated and poorly-outfitted armed services.

So how could the push for perpetual--and now private--warmongering get so far, so fast?

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism offers a brilliant take, arguing that our economic system exploits moments of disaster and suffering to maximize corporate profits on an international scale. In the face of tragedy, brutality, economic losses, real and imagined fears, citizens are enticed to give up their best economic interests, their civil liberties, and their consciences while power and resources are consolidated for a mercenary few.

A longstanding tradition of educational practices in the U.S. has helped this process along, quietly evolving as support for the military-industrial--and now data-tainment-surveillance-- complex. On a parallel track to the "war and worry" economy, schools have become the true domestic front for conflicts abroad.

It's a handy coincidence that the limited release of War, Inc. coincides with the annual barrage of spring tests just beginning for students all across the country.

The publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 may have preceded 9-11 and our "war on terror" by a generation, but it began the drumbeat of crisis-mongering which has enabled the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and other academic surveillance corporations to profit from fear-based education policy--all in the name of improving schools and making them safe for success.

It's easy to decry campus shootings, but how long will it be before some school offers a specially-designed "security services" academy track to target "at risk" or uniquely "gifted and talented" kids? Unless we actively push back, it's not an impossibility.

Military terms such as "strategy," "targets," "cohorts," and "marshaling" have become essentially natural in conversations about student achievement, school funding, and teacher training. We say "battery of tests" without blinking an eye. Even the emphasis on "raising standards" has martial overtones: "standard" also means flag.

Thus it shouldn't surprise anyone that the No Child Left Behind Act dictates for student names be provided to military recruiters--unless parents know enough to complete an "opt out" form.

It's also perfectly logical that Reed-Elsevier, one of the major corporate players in the assessment industry (think Stanford Achievement Tests), acquired Seisint Technologies in 2004. Seisint famously developed Matrix software to monitor citizens for Homeland Security and the Justice Department.

The now-constant rhythms of scantron, bubble-the-answer testing have normalized the need for social surveillance while also feeding collective and individual anxieties about failure, school funds/closures/takeovers, matriculation, college attendance and placement, scholarships, and simple economic survival. It's no wonder captains of the test industry look ahead towards a bright future, while the daily-life, real-people context of classrooms gets cast as a weary and antiquated distraction.

A new generation of students has been raised--from grade one--to expect multiple choice questions with multiple choice answers to provide the quickest and most reliable way to know whether they know anything.

The social implications of this compulsion are far-reaching. It takes extra work to scrutinize and question who generates these assigned "multiple" choices.

All the while, billionaire business leaders, including superstars Eli Broad and Bill Gates, stand eager to "rescue" (i.e. privatize) the desperate, distracted, and panicky public education system, donating all-expenses paid makeovers in the corporate model. Euphemisms like "professional learning communities" (where consesus is "demanded") merely perpetuate increasingly well-dressed, professionalized and potentially violent forms of remote control.

Sometimes violence itself is the tie that inspires, even if we'd rather forget it. Harvard President James Bryant Conant (1893-1978), co-father of Educational Testing Service and persuasive advocate for the mid-century comprehensive, mega high school, established status as an education policy advocate because of his experiences with warfare.

As a professor, Conant helped develop chemical weapons for the Chemical Warfare Service during World War I. He subsequently chaired the National Defense Research Committee, playing a fundamental role in our development of the atomic bomb. Conant also served on the Interim Committee which decided to drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki without warning.

War, Inc. thankfully will provide broad audiences with an opportunity to reject easy notions of compartmentalization. In asking "how" and "why", we might remind ourselves that politics, economics and education are inextricably intertwined.

Watch for the release of the film your local area later this spring and early summer. Meanwhile, read a great live blog session with the producers and writers of the movie online at Crooks and Liars.

Exit Exam Blues: Waiver Dies for Special Ed Students

2008-04-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

So much for special needs.

According to a settlement filed in Alameda County Superior Court on Friday April 4, high school seniors enrolled in special education classes will have to pass the California State High School Exit Exam (HSEE) in order to receive diplomas in June.

The settlement overturns a measure approved by the state Legislature for the classes of 2006 and 2007, exempting special education students from the HSEE and granting diplomas to all such students who had fulfilled other graduation requirements.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, author of the law which originally enacted the Exit Exam requirement, told the editorial board of the Press-Enterprise last week: "I don't want to have a devalued diploma for these folks."

"These folks"?

Certainly it's time for parents and schools to weigh the possibility of opting out where they can (with the state STAR testing program), and/or organizing collective boycotts of the HSEE.

There's safety and solidarity in numbers. For information on your rights and available resources, contact CalCARE at 510-496-6028 or FairTest.

Opting out of Standardized Tests: CalCARE's Push for Justice

2008-03-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

Parents, teachers and students are all too aware that the emphasis on standardized testing has come at the expense of much "big picture" learning. In Riverside, California, junior high school teachers have a tough time convincing students to study, complete homework, attend on time, or even to behave during classes--since, as long as they squeak through trimester assessments with merely a "basic" score, students can advance to high school even if they fail core English and math courses.

Not exactly the "rigor" touted by the authors of No Child Left Behind. Not the most coherent preparation for a glorious 21st century future.

What about opting out? The California Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education (CalCARE) has renewed its awareness campaign encouraging parents (and school districts) to know their rights about opting out of the state STAR test program. CalCARE is the state affiliate of watchdog FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.

California is one of the few states which allows parents to opt out of testing, but the movement has grown even in states where risks exist. CalCARE and FairTest provide support and technical legal information about what districts may or may not do to discourage parents from taking action. Both organizations also serve as clearing houses to connect, record, and publicize any intimidation used by districts or school sites.

The strength lies in numbers. California districts which are already designated by NCLB as hopelessly "failing" might have the most to gain by a collective opt-out. The move is especially important for parents whose students do not yet read, write or speak English fluently.

For more information and answers to questions, parents, teachers, and administrators can also contact CalCARE directly by phone, at 510-496-6028.

Novels a No-No: Update--The Disinformation Doctrine

2007-10-26T13:15:00.000-07:00

I remember vividly five years ago: as then-English department chair at Riverside Poly High School, I emailed the downtown district office to express department frustrations with the opaque and disingenuous mixed messages circulating about reading and instruction. In public, Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) was telling the community that "novels weren't banned, just not required." At our campus, teachers weren't allowed to check sets of books from the library to use with students.

Like a little kid, I was summoned into the principal's office. He handed me a copy of a district response to him regarding my communication. One line from that email still haunts me, and it seems particularly relevant now: "I find it interesting that Ms. Scott [sic] still refers to 'teaching novels.' Hasn't she seen the test scores yet?"

Who would have thought that a small, little-known school district in Southern California could so perfect the art of public doublespeak? Now twice in five years, the same district has distinguished itself by using disinformation to rid its English classrooms of the pesky novel.

Documents defending their latest purge are linked below:

If you saw our first report, you learned that RUSD has a strange attitude towards reading book-length works in accelerated high school English classes. Apparently, you can read too much. Now responding to local criticism by columnist Dan Bernstein, as well as outrage from students, teachers and parents in school board and department chair meetings, RUSD landed a local headline and long article in the local newspaper, The Press-Enterprise, to dismiss the controversy as a "novel mixup" (PE, October 15, 2007, B1 and B10).

Eerily, the piece appeared just days from the five-year anniversary of an almost identical article making the same assurances when RUSD first applied its restrictive novels policy--to some public outcry--in the mainstream (i.e. non-Honors) instructional program five years ago (PE, October 13, 2002, B1.)

This year's message is exactly the same one offered in 2002. Sure, teachers are allowed to teach novels, but only after all of the standards for each month are mastered via Holt, Rhinehart & Winston assessments and district-approved materials. How one is supposed to cram this hypothetical novel into remaining instructional days is not quite clear. In the regular program, for most students in RUSD as well as surrounding districts, the novel option amounts to "up to" one book per year, unless teachers fill out a form to begin a review and approval process.

Consciously or merely by osmosis, the district has for five years now simply parroted language long cultivated by captains of the test industry. Even Bernstein has poked fun at RUSD's disingenuous explanation, writing last week that "the novel, much like a Dickens child, has become an orphan," abandoned in favor of the "McNovel" transplanted into textbooks and complete with worksheets.

RUSD officials apparently think that if they simply avoid or ridicule the word "ban," no one will notice that reading whole books has become extraneous, disposable work for English classes. RUSD also insists that as a "program improvement," or "PI," district it has no choice but to respond to demands made by financial and political forces determining success and failure under No Child Left Behind. However, RUSD was not yet a PI district five years ago when first trimming back novels from its program.

No wonder. In a report from the Book Industry Study Group released in June 2007, general publishing sales will barely expand over the next few years. The one expected area for big growth? Elementary and high school textbooks.

In a unconfirmed and poetic act of desperation and protest against RUSD's insult to student and teacher intelligence, the English department at one local high school (serving a high number of poor and minority students) gave all of their novels away--putting them directly in the hands of students.

No, no, no, whines the district, playing Prufrock. That's not what we meant at all.

Well then. Sources inside RUSD have provided copies of official internal paperwork (linked above), including meeting minutes which set off the controversy in early September, followed by the official memo two weeks later, supposedly clarifying the issues for all 7-12 Language Arts Departments.

These documents, not seen by the general public and certainly not discussed in the recent PE article, illuminate startling contradictions. Reading through, you have to wonder if despite all the hype about critical thinking for students, teachers themselves are expected not to think too hard.

A few highlights (emphases added; all caps in the originals):

Responding to teacher and parent concerns about scripted learning maps, the Sept. 19 document virtually shouts out a semantic distinction: "We have a CURRICULUM guide, not a pacing guide." However, both official documents use the phrase "pacing guide" over and over to describe required lesson plans and classroom structure: e.g. "Pacing guides are MONTHLY to allow teacher/site autonomy and flexibility as much as possible"; "It is IMPERATIVE that all teachers follow the new grade level pacing guides for English."

In fact, both documents reveal how teacher-designed "pacing guides" can be used as both buy-in and blackmail: if teachers do not follow the pacing guide they themselves so willingly designed (a "proactive" option provided by RUSD), they could be "mandated to follow procedures such as implementing the Holt 'red-line' pacing guide." Oooh. Lucky for those kids. But there's more: "Pacing guides may not be modified nor the order changed," and "Selections should not be moved from one month/one quarter to another," and "The curriculum guide can not be accelerated in any class so that an entire quarter, semester or year is covered in compressed period of time, so that the rest of the year can be spent on other materials." Reconcile those statements with the following: "This is a LIVING document which will continue to evolve and change over time as we see how fast we can/can't move . . ."

How about supplementary materials? "The practice of using outside materials such as newspapers or magazine articles 3 times a week, for example, is not appropriate . . . Teachers must be able to justify and explain how a piece is appropriate for the standard." Also: "Magazines for independent reading are not appropriate unless they are tied to such standards as technical documents, and students are given a specific criteria/task related to them."

The district notes a decline in Gifted and Talented (GATE) scores last year. Could it be that too much thinking and too many complicated assignments during class time hurt student performance on Scantron tests? Nevermind what that might imply about multiple choice assessments--here's how vague unease becomes big policy: "Board members have expressed concern over the depth and complexity of schools' Honors/GATE classes. Some of these students are currently not showing consistent, district-wide growth. This issue is a current RUSD board goal. GATE/Honors classes are required to follow all pacing guidelines set forth for the regular curriculum...[then] they should move on to other challenging assignments."

What about independent reading? "No one disputes the idea that getting students to read more will help increase their overall achievement with reading..." but "work should be reading-level appropriate, and teachers should hold students accountable." Also: "Middle schools with an independent reading period should hold site discussions to determine how to make this time the most effective..." Perhaps most importantly, teachers must not permit students to read in class too much, only a "minimal amount of time to reinforce the standards for that time period. Minimal is defined as a maximum of 30 minutes per week NOT to be done in one class period. An appropriate standards-based assignment must accompany the independent reading." (This last point is repeated verbatim in both documents.)

Honors and AP classes, which have traditionally required summer reading, have been viewed as a haven for students and parents seeking access to a now-privileged program of more instruction for complete primary, rather than predigested, materials. But one new Riverside high school is already being touted as an example for neither requiring (nor strongly encouraging?) Honors students to read books as summer prep. In the September 4 document, RUSD says that the whole concept of summer reading needs to be "reassessed" district-wide, "by looking at what is the purpose of reading/assignments."

These last two points, not discussed at all in the newspaper, perhaps reveal more about RUSD's real attitude towards curriculum and micromanagement than any spokesperson's clarifications about how and when novels "can" or "can't" be used in classrooms.

How are teachers to cope? Already used to this rhythm of disinformation, many shrug it off. One Honors teacher says she expects, maybe, to get through one novel by the end of the year. Teachers in the regular program? Maybe none at all.

Here's one irony: Brand new teachers at Poly High this year were required by their principal to read Harry K. Wong's The First Days of School: How to be an Effective Teacher within the first six weeks of classes. These teachers were required to complete "homework" and meet to discuss the first "unit" during second period of a regular instructional day.

Here's another: the RUSD main office sits right across the street from the PE (not-so-locally owned by the Belo Corporation). In 2006 RUSD hired a PE reporter, Jacquie Paul, to be "spokesperson" for the district when speaking to her former colleagues at the press. Like any good bureaucracy, RUSD knows that narratives are best controlled with a kinder, gentler turn of phrase--and that good professional connections help, too.

Teacher Watch: Student Race and Discipline

2007-10-14T08:09:00.000-07:00

So much for desegregation.

At the end of September, the Chicago Tribune published an investigative report stating that, on average, black students in the U.S. are suspended at three times the rate of white students. According to analysis of senior correspondent Howard Witt, who mined through U.S. Department of Education data collected in 2004-05, there's a dramatic disparity between rates of suspension and expulsion for blacks and their total numbers of enrollment.

The study examines suspensions and expulsions only, with no distinction made for preliminary stages of intervention, such as referrals, parent conferences, or detentions (school site data which is much more difficult to get). In addition, there is no evidence yet regarding the nature of infractions by students of all races, crucial information for evaluating whether suspensions and expulsions were merited. Are we talking about fights? carrying weapons? chewing gum? selling drugs? carrying an iPod? cheating? eating Doritos in class?

Witt reports that the disparity of consequences is more extreme with African American students than with other minority groups, such as Hispanics (apparently disciplined in proportion to their overall numbers) or Asians (disciplined at lower rates). Idaho, perhaps not surprisingly, is cited as the only state where no such discrepancy exists.

In a conversation on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Witt alludes to a backlash of defensiveness from teachers, who feel targeted by charges of racism and are eager to "explain away" the disparity. Interestingly, the Tribune report underscores the fact that 83 percent of teachers are white, but Witt and those he interviews notably ignore the equally intriguing and complicating factor that now nearly 80 percent of teachers are also female.

Witt stresses the impact of discipline unfairness on black students, implying (though never stating) that perhaps a majority of these students received suspensions or expulsions they did not deserve. However, the report does little to scrutinize how white privilege--administrative fear of connected, affluent, and/or litigious white parents whose children "can never do any wrong"--may have exaggerated the disparity in recent years. In other words: How many white students did not receive penalties they might certainly have earned?

This report on student discipline, like most others, also fails to interrogate the complex attitudes directed towards women in positions of authority. Perhaps school institutions, like the larger milieu, tolerate white male disrespect of white female teachers more indulgently (consider the recent Carl's Jr. ad, which attempted to sell burgers by valorizing white male sexual aggression towards a "hot" female teacher). Perhaps white female teachers themselves learn to have higher thresholds of tolerance for misbehavior in white males. (Not a good thing, by the way.)

It's unfortunately not unthinkable that school officials would be more righteous in policing perceived aggression directed by black students at white female teachers, and teachers therefore may learn to be more confident about soliciting backup from administration when dealing with black males.

There's another angle here as well. Because the Tribune report only documents statistics of suspension and expulsion, we have no way of comparing rates of lower-level interventions that sometimes prevent or delay escalation: student and/or parent conferences, referrals, detention. While white teachers may initially bend over backwards to engage this process with white students and their parents, some may indulge "white guilt" about facing black students honestly and frankly at early stages of trouble, actively involving parents in discussions about behavior. One logical result would be that no intervention takes place with black students until something really drastic happens--going from zero to sixty in ten seconds on the discipline meter--giving a reasonable appearance of unfair haste. Another, more ironic result could be that white students gain some immunity from regular forays into the principal's office ("we're working with him; let's not suspend him yet...")

Reversing this trend of apparent unfairness requires more than a patronizing acknowledgment that racism still exists in America. (Duh...) It also requires that we ask whether white students are really "behaving better" by avoiding suspensions and/or expulsions, or whether schools are more afraid of following through when their detentions and referrals stack up. That means scrutinizing invisible privilege, not simply visible punishment.

Novels a No-No

2007-09-29T11:14:00.001-07:00

Southern California's Riverside Unified School District (RUSD), which at the beginning of the 2002-03 academic year instituted a "no novels" policy for lower level English classes grades 7-12, has now upped the stakes. As of Fall 2007-08, even Honors courses are bound by the policy, demanding that teachers stick to the letter of the Holt, Rhinehart & Winston textbook and curriculum planning map and avoid primary sources of literature.

Now, as then, district officials deny in public that there is an official ban, while telling teachers through meetings and memos about the need for uniformity and consensus on the subject of "no novels" and curriculum maps for classes. The dissonance is migraine inducing.

While there was some limited outcry and public discussion in 2002, district officials had little trouble containing the opposition because the most vocal cohort of students and parents were apparently exempt from the ban. Nevermind the groundwork laid by the district with its stance that reading whole novels, or for that matter any genre of complete, unadulterated text (a former colleague was chided two years ago for using a nonfiction book) was detrimental and distracting in an English class.

At the heart of this, of course, lies concern about test scores. Superintendent Susan Rainey currently reasons that novels are "based on literature" rather than "based on the standards." Perfectly consistent with the 2002 view.

The current shock of parents, Honors teachers, and students unfortunately comes five years too late. Coverage in the local press, along with indignant presentations to the school board, have as yet made no mention of the history and precedent already in place. I'd like to cheer for the protesters, but the disconnect remains a depressing commentary on the amnesia fostered by disinformation in school districts.

The current outcry also smacks, however unintentionally, of elitism: The lower-level students may not need literature, but we at the top deserve it.

Ironically, the most accelerated levels of students in RUSD tend to purchase their own books anyway, and no one can stop them from continuing to do that on their own. Even if the district does relent on the ban for Honors students, there will be no remedy for the majority of kids whose main opportunity and motivation for getting access to books remains through school resources. The ban for them was set five years ago.

I've already heard that the "wiggle room" allowed by the district for Honors courses (to pacify instructors) will go something like this: Once you finish covering everything on the planning map, go ahead and use real literature; just make sure you teach the novels using materials provided by the Holt standardized curriculum. (Several teachers report that this is a step forward, a victory....) The same "compromise" was vetted five years ago for non-accelerated, non-Honors courses and guess what? There's little real whole-book reading going on in those classes anymore.

Which is more Orwellian: that RUSD decided books have nothing to do with learning, or that people are shocked after five years to discover that the district really does mean it, and thinks this principle should apply to all students?

Not for Teacher

2007-08-31T14:06:00.000-07:00

When a teacher named Janis Adams approached her site administration for--um, help?--when she discovered a kid masturbating during class when her back was turned, the dude in charge of discipline gave her a lecture on hormones and girls with big breasts, telling her "Little Lady, you got to get used to it."

That was almost ten years ago, but the comment and its underlying attitudes set the stage for a series of other, more personal incidents targeting Adams and other teachers at her site. Adams finally decided she'd had enough, and sued Los Angeles Unified School District for failures to maintain a safe and civil workplace, free of hostile environment sexual harassment. An appeals court ruled last year that her case can be indeed retried under the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), and that new trial is pending.

LAUSD has already spent nearly two million dollars in legal fees to characterize Adams' complaint as an overreaction. Should other teachers consider this water under the bridge? Ancient history? We've come a long way, Baby, so don't get your shorts in a wad?

Um, no.

Just in time for Fall classes, Carl's Jr. has rolled out a new ad campaign for its "patty melt," complete with a booty-slapping, pelvic-tilting Mary Kay Letourneau lookalike in a tight skirt (mostly a sad ripoff of--or homage to--Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" vid). Two white boys rap and sneer about their "bun" preferences, draw and then erase part of the teacher's naked backside on the chalkboard, even flash brass knuckles at the end.

"Get used to it," indeed. You don't have to be a piece of meat. View--and rate--the ad yourself here.

School Peformance Anxiety--No More Gimmicks!

2007-08-17T02:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, maybe it was cute to see the occasional principal pledge to shave his head if student test scores improved at his school for the year. But some of the stunts to rah-rah rally kids at scantron time have become more irrelevant, protracted, and bizarre. We should probably expect these to get weirder with the buzz over NCLB renewal and as test scores hit plateaus.

At one Title I Elementary School in Riverside, California, a principal pledged to spend a whole day on the school roof. In a memo to staff, the administrator wrote, "Following the [school] assembly I will climb a ladder to the top of the annex roof and set up my office for the day. While this event may take some time away from regular activities it can certainly provide you with fodder for some other very meaningful lessons."

Fodder for lessons? Now that's a real educator talking!

The memo enumerated eleven "ideas" for lesson plans related to her day spent on the roof, including:

"Students can write friendly letters to me about the event. I will have a mail 'basket' hanging off the side of the roof in which students can put messages to me."

"Teachers can read other picture books aloud in which the main character is a principal."

"Have students draw pictures of me on the roof, and then write stories to go with the pictures, or orally tell about the pictures during Language Development time."

My favorite suggestions were that teachers should tell their students about "not trying this at home" and asking them to read classes a passage from a book titled What Principals Do When No One Is Looking. The principal also included a song about the event she wrote to the tune of "Up on the Housetop" which teachers were encouraged to sing with their students. (Call me crazy, but I wouldn't turn loose lyrics at a school with "ho, ho, ho, there she goes" in the refrain.)

How revealing is it that gimmicks can end up being more about administrative ego than about celebrating real campus achievement in a meaningful way? The image of any principal sitting on top of his or her school is, ironically, simply another powerful metaphor for disconnections we're all expected to ignore.

(New) Teacher Watch: What BTSA Won't Tell You (A Fiction)

2007-08-12T15:49:00.000-07:00

Call it a rude awakening.

You have a student in class who's constantly disruptive, let's say personally hostile from the get-go--something about you sets him off. He's physically intimidating. He's given you the finger. He's cursed you across the classroom. You've found notes in the margin of his homework about how much he hates you, maybe a stick drawing of you hanging from a noose, maybe you having sex with a co-worker or an animal. You've tried "understanding," humor, and ignoring it; you've tried firmness, negotiation, a behavior contract. You've tried moving his seat. Other students perceive in a general way how much attention this person seems to be stealing from them. Even they resent you a little for it. God knows you have to hide the details from them.

Not exactly the perfect scenario for teaching quadratic equations or Shakespeare. But you don't want to be paranoid. That's you--the good sport with a stiff upper lip.

Along the way, you've phoned the kid's mom and dad at work and at home, and on the cellphone at the mall. You've held conferences on campus during your off-time, documented details with administration, even pulled in a counselor--every step along the expected Pyramid of Interventions. Each time, the boy shrugs and apologizes, but returns to the behavior again. Accelerates. It's been months now.

He really wants to be in the class, says mom. Maybe you should try more creative teaching strategies, says the dean of discipline. You're making the valiant effort to deny how bad this is, how impossible even breathing seems during the drive to school, you don't like leaving your classroom during the day, how can you fix this? how can you make him stop? But the more you try to be valiant, the less you feel safe in the place where you work. This job everyone says you have to love. It must be me, it must be me. Finally, someone--your union rep? your spouse? a friend looking over her own shoulder?--says you've got to stop letting this go. To hell with zen and the art of classroom management. It's not you. You're not a bad person to say "no."

He's dropped from your class. This, you think, will end it. But he approaches you on campus, says he plans to "get even." He says his parents hate you. You find your car windshield smashed in a few days later. You have no proof who did it. You feel no safer. His friends stand in line in front of your classroom door, stare in at you. There are calls to your house. Someone is circulating written rumors in a newsletter--you were a porn star, you wear diapers, you must've performed sexual favors to get this teaching job. Other teachers are targeted too, in the same vein. Somebody makes a video and leaves you a copy--an effigy of you is decapitated and burned. One of your colleagues actually tells you to have a sense of humor--not like anyone has physically attacked you yet.

Maybe you are going crazy. Some part of you feels this is your own fault--if you had been a better teacher, a better person, a smarter person...When you talk to your principal, he says there's nothing he can do, must suck to be you, maybe you're a little oversensitive these days?

You decide you might have a legal claim here. What is this, the Land of the Lotus Eaters? Why should you feel unsafe and bullied in your workplace--and at these wages? You know a judge, Judge Kenneth R. Freeman, who has made rulings in at least one teacher workplace case. He'll have some words of comfort, surely, a wise balance between the letter and spirit of the law. You don't want to sue anyone, you don't want anyone hurt, you just want to know how to feel right driving to school again. You want to be able to leave your classroom to take a bathroom break in peace. You want a clue how the system works. Judge Freeman should know--he was married to a teacher in Los Angeles Unified. There's hope.

Judge Freeman goes to the file cabinet where he keeps copies of documents from previous cases. He pulls out the order granting a new trial for a teacher who had been in a similar situation to yours--a ruling from June of 2002, Case No. BC 235667.

For a new trial? you wonder, Hmmmm... But then you think: What a coincidence! This is great! and you cut yourself an extra piece of cake.

Well, says the judge, I'll skip right to the good parts: (ahem) Hostile acts may be committed by children. Schools are fundamentally unlike an adult workplace in many ways, including that children may regularly interact with each other and others in a manner that would be unacceptable among adults....

Yeah, you say. That's how we got here. And?

Okay, says the judge, yadah yadah yadah...here we are: A teacher voluntarily elects to teach in the challenging high school environment, to some extent trading protection against offensive conduct for the professional challenge and stimulation of that unique marketplace of ideas...

Suddenly, cake looks unappetizing. You put down your plate. Wait, you say. Wait a minute. Trading protection for the professional challenge? Professional challenge? A unique marketplace of ideas? What about me--as a worker, as a professional person, a human being? what about my migraines?

The judge doesn't hesitate. You? he says. My point exactly.

Moral: Ask your district, ask your union. Make sure to wait until an answer comes very clearly: Do teachers trade safety for the privilege of working in public school?

Teacher Watch: LAUSD--Stand Up Now Against Harassment?

2007-06-28T07:09:00.000-07:00

In 2005, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) settled a lawsuit brought by brave students at Washington Preparatory High School. The case alleged that school administrators, teachers, security guards and students harassed gays and lesbians on campus--creating, in effect, "a climate rife with hostility towards and discrimination against students and staff based on their actual or perceived sexual orientation."

The original complaint details patterns of unchecked namecalling--"faggot", "sissy fruitcake" and "sinner"--and alleges that students were told they were "wrong" and "unholy" and "not supposed to be like this." Some teachers allegedly threatened to "out" students to parents as punishment for perceived homosexuality. The principal was said to have refused investigating campus incidents where staff treated students poorly or differently if perceived to be gay or bisexual. You can download the entire original complaint here.

As part of the district response in the settlement, Deanne Neiman at LAUSD's Education Equity Compliance Office affirmed the district's effort to enhance protections she states are already in place: "It is important to acknowledge that the District has had a long-standing and pro-active commitment to protecting LGBT students from discrimination and harassment. Since 2001 and continuing to date, 216 Anti-Bias LGBT Trainings were conducted for school administrators and staff. At Washington Prep this settlement agreement augments the comprehensive training and activities already underway at the school and in the District as a whole."

I'm glad for this awareness check--long overdue--to protect students and staff who work in Los Angeles schools. LAUSD should be commended for stepping up. It is unclear whether there was any financial component to the settlement, although the original complaint did ask for unspecified damages.

But there's another story here.

Heterosexual harassment--let's say, male students against a female teacher?--remains uncomfortable to identify or interrogate because, well, we're "used to it." Everybody remembers Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher." It's kind of funny, perhaps inappropriate, but essentially harmless. Right? (Wink wink, nudge pinch.)

On a recent trip, I was standing in line for a Southwest flight and studying a deposition from Janis Adams v. LAUSD. Peering over my shoulder, an insurance salesman in a Hawaiian shirt asked what I was doing, and when I replied that I was studying a case of student-on-teacher sexual harassment--the first such case which has actually gone to trial--he paused, chuckled and said, "Doesn't that happen all the time?"

Adams's complaint was filed in 2000, approximately four years before the plaintiffs at Washington Prep filed their own demand for a jury trial. But during the seven years--seven!--of the Adams trial and subsequent appeals, LAUSD has become increasingly aggressive in its repeated claim of "lack of control" and "limited control" over bad behavior in the school environment. Such limits were apparently not asserted by LAUSD in response to Washington Prep students: Everything is under control, the "teaching moment" is in full force, we're watching out for you.

Even as it settled the LGBT matter, the district continued pursuing appeals and preparing for a new trial in the Adams case, seeking to affirm its "lack of control" in supporting teachers who want to say "no" to sexual harassment and defamation from students. LAUSD has now exceeded $1.2 million taxpayer dollars for legal costs.

The real story here is that this isn't big news.

LAUSD should take a cue from its better judgment in the Washington Prep case: when operating at taxpayer expense, it's wise to take some responsibility for the safety, sanity, and security concerns of the teachers we expect to protect students.

And as long as any school district fights to keep a blind eye to harassment or bullying of the heterosexual variety, whether against adults or students, LGBT students and staff shouldn't feel too sure of their protection, either.

EdWeek: Are You Kidding?

2007-06-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

I laughed out loud when my EdWeek NCLB alert this morning included a link to this article: "To Know NCLB Is to Like It, ETS Poll Finds."

Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse.

The poll generating results indicating support for No Child Left Behind was commissioned by Educational Testing Service (ETS), the non-profit testing giant which has much to gain from renewal of the policy. As a formidable member of the Association of Test Publishers (ATP), ETS is also a major player in the accountability lobby.

Did EdWeek note either of these facts? Heavens, no.

According to EdWeek's report, 1,526 respondents during eleven days in May were asked their attitudes towards NCLB and were also "tested" on particular knowledge of NCLB as policy (state standards for achievement, grade levels for testing, how schools qualify for federal funds).

Here's the twist: Before respondents were "told" correct answers about the law by the interviewer conducting the survey, they split almost evenly on support vs. non-support of NCLB. But then, "[O]nce the interviewer mentioned the law’s focus on standards and accountability, requiring highly qualified teachers, and other details, 56 percent said that they viewed the law favorably."

The article also quotes Susan L. Traiman, Director of public policy for the Business Roundtable, essentially arguing that the negative associations of NCLB can be overcome by a simple shift in terminology: from "testing" to "identifying kids" and "providing assistance."

Wow. I can't help but recall the industry rallies at the 2005 ATP Conference in Scottsdale, where speaker after speaker repeated how it was a good day for the test business, but gee, they could really use a break in the public relations department.

The latest ETS maneuver is harrowing, but rhetorically effective: Quiz 'em on knowledge, expose technicalities in knowledge gaps, and then call for an "attitude adjustment." Sounds like a perverted version of direct instruction for students: Ask what they think, show them what they don't know, then teach 'em when they're feeling humble.

EdWeek does mention research conducted by Scripps and Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup. But this outlet for teacher information could do more than take ETS's word for its own benificence.

The Trouble with Teacher Testimony

2007-05-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

A highly-publicized study released last month by Cal State Sacramento's Center for Teacher Quality emphasizes that working conditions, not money, are the most crucial determinants for teachers who leave or plan to leave the profession. As reported in the LA Times on Friday April 27, here's the Top Ten, generated via online surveys of nearly 2,000 teachers:

Bureaucratic interference
Poor support from districts
Low staff morale
Lack of resources
Unsupportive principals
Poor compensation
Too little decision-making authority
Too little time for planning
Accountability pressures
Lack of teamwork.

If you teach and work hard at your job, none of these reasons surprises or shocks you. And yet there you are: still showing up on time every morning, writing your standards and Bloom's Levels of Thinking on the white board, grabbing your quick sandwich or granola bar at lunch, heading to the Schlechty or PLC training after school, and going home to grade papers, call parents, and plan new lessons.

What's intriguing about this study, and others like it, is how it leaves several premises uninterrogated. One is subtle, a suggestion that when a profession retains its workers, all must be well. If we could only get teachers to stay longer! It certainly may be true that bad conditions provide incentives for workers to leave, but the fact that workers don't switch professions does not necessarily mean conditions are great. Think: coal miners, ER techs, data entry workers, people at Wal Mart. And yeah, think parents who stay together for the sake of the kids.

An assumption related to the above premise is that those who stay mostly do so because their conditions are better than the leavers' conditions. This begs the question about why it takes an exodus of teachers to generate a modicum of interest in the teacher's job. The fact that we mostly wring our hands over "the ones who got away" may reveal deeper attitudes and perceptions about the ones who stay, or who honestly may not be able to admit feeling stuck.

The dialogue currently seems to allow only two distinct groups: the dissatisfied leavers and the satisfied stayers. What about the dissatisfied stayers, who struggle each day to keep up with work loads that remain largely unacknowledged? What about the lazy stayers, who simply coast along? (Sorry, but there are a few...)

What's still necessary is an allowance for more messy, complicated teacher testimony from those who do remain past their probationary period, as well as those who stay past the window of contract mobility, after which transfers may involve some penalties. Like many workers, teachers may stay put in their profession for a mixed bag of reasons, aside from love and constant satisfaction: lack of mobility, family obligations, financial debt, deep ethical commitment and sense of mission, simple boredom, a belief in hope, fear of the unknown, personality style, practicality (knowns vs. unknowns, certain losses vs. uncertain gains), attitudes about the "seemliness" of career change, and even a simple lack of confidence: What else am I qualified to do?

This last attitude, an erroneous sense that the skills necessary in classrooms do not translate outside the school premises and beyond students, may be more pervasive than we might like to admit. It's certainly a legacy of Shaw's awful adage that "those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Perhaps the barely visible day-to-day working conditions of teachers--despite all the emphasis on assessment and accountability--reinforce the idea that teachers aren't themselves really doers. (For an eye-opening contrast of hour to hour tasks and managerial work, look at the "day in the life" comparison between a high school math teacher and a pharmaceutical salesman, from 4am to 9pm, in Teachers Have It Easy.)

Our effort should not merely be to "keep" teachers but to understand them with more depth. Who are the people who stay? How do dynamics of the profession shape their attitudes about what they do, what they deserve, and what kind of future they can expect?

Clearly, stayers should be able to do more than simply cheer for the home team. And if the dialogue with teachers is sustained, authentic and engaged--some of the favorite buzz terms for classroom work with kids these days--we may get more than "ritual compliance" or snarky rebellion in teacher responses to questions about their work lives.

Can you be a good teacher, one who stays, and still be conflicted about the demands of your job? It may be easier for us to prefer the narrative which assumes that the 78% who stay past their 4th year are fulfilled by emotion, Oprah's Teacher of the Year Show, and the occasional thank-you. The truth is, we might not really care about losing teachers if it weren't so damn inexpedient. An April 26 press release from the Center for Teacher Quality regarding its new study emphasizes the costliness of recruitment, hiring, and training for California, which now spends more than $455 million to offset teacher losses. State Superintendent Jack O'Connell laments the "inefficiency" of teacher attrition, particularly as it makes it difficult to close "the achievement gap" between affluent and poor students. There's some evidence to suggest that the continued emphasis on efficiency rather than other values will not demand a more thoughtful, coherent view of sustained teacher careers over the long-term, but will rather fuel stop-gap measures such as Bush's "adjunct teacher corps." Efficiency can also be used to justify contract restrictions which make it more difficult for teachers to seek better working conditions if they so choose.

It's important that O'Connell doesn't call poor working conditions a shame or an insult. In describing the costs of teacher loss, he doesn't point out the ironic clash of high expectations and heroic imagery with the actual treatment of teachers. It's beyond time that teacher voices--both in and outside classrooms--become more than a means to an end.

Violence, Schools and the Limits of Standardization

2007-04-19T08:45:00.000-07:00

In the wake of this week's shocking massacre at Virginia Tech, we hear pundits on cable and network news repeating theories about "warning signs" and how teachers, educational institutions, and social service entities should recognize them.

No one has mentioned a cruel irony. Since publication of the A Nation at Risk report in 1983, schools have in fact been preoccupied with other "warning signs" indicated by numbers on standardized tests. Is the student performing at below basic level? Put him in a special class devoted solely to test strategy. Does he need counseling? Well, there's no money in the budget. Does he have any other problems? Sorry, the documentation is spotty on that. Have you had problems with him? We'll get to it eventually--how are his scores? If he gets to college, all our problems will be solved.

The compartmentalized view of what happens in classrooms has come at the tragic expense of a holistic view of student life as a matter not simply of mastery but of social connectedness. In fact, listening to the seething display of Cho Hui on his DVD recordings, one can't help but notice the desperate, angry ravings of a person who opted for mastery at the expense of everything else--empathy, coherence, other human lives, and ultimately his own. As deranged as Hui may have been, we must acknowledge that he parroted all too well a zero-sum attitude which now pervades our educational culture and has long dominated our reality entertainment, our foreign policy, and our love of outlaw masculinity.

Teachers do notice disconnects in their intimate work with individual students on a daily basis. But noticing doesn't seem to matter these days. Are you on script? Did you fill in the bubble sheets? Can the students identify the standard for today's lesson? No Child Left Behind demands that schools worry more about numbers, not narratives, across time. The result is enforced cultural and historical amnesia.

In Cho Hui we have a young man who--even as an English major--had found no words to transcend brutality. It's not enough to shrug and say that most students will not resort to such atrocity to solve their frustrations and problems. It's worth really asking: What are we teaching and modeling for them instead?

Teacher Watch: LAUSD--How Much Money to Protect Bullies?

2007-01-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

Reports about school bullying usually emphasize how adults need to witness on behalf of the victimized. The implication, certainly true in some cases, is that teachers see and simply ignore or dismiss incidents of bullying. But there's another layer of awareness we must document as professionals. We must examine ways in which we have ourselves been socialized to accept direct and indirect abuse.

Teachers often have long histories of isolation from administrative support when it comes to reporting discipline problems. After years of witnessing classroom or hallway troubles resulting in counter-productive or inconsistent patterns of administrative follow-up, many teachers intuit that they are "on their own" with student discipline, without institutional backing. Students are smart--they pick up on this isolation, even if they can't exactly put it into words. The logical message they get is that schools don't care.

This goes to another level entirely when teachers themselves are harassed or bullied by an isolated parent or student, when they are left unprotected by site administrations and school districts. Quietly, and usually out of public view, the front line for defense against student-to-student bullying can be severely demoralized and damaged, if not lost altogether. This lack of support and intervention sends a distinct message--it's your job, as the teacher, to be the punching bag--and the ripple effect can move through faculties and staff quickly. The social authority of the anti-bullying crusade will remain severely limited unless it begins to include an awareness of the teacher as potential target and victim of bullying. What will make such teachers’ testimony believable? And who will witness for justice on their behalf?

One California legal case should be on the radar of every California teacher, and in fact could cast a disturbing precedent across the country. Between 2002 and 2006, the conflicts in Janis Adams v. Los Angeles Unified School District made their way to the California Supreme Court, and are now suspended in Appeals Court pending a possible new trial this year. The plaintiff, a teacher named Janis Adams, faced an extreme scenario: her face was superimposed into pornographic photos and circulated throughout the school; she was openly libeled as a former porn star who had had anal sex so many times she had to wear an adult diaper; in an accelerating pattern over a three-year period beginning in 1997, she was threatened in her classroom and off campus by students she knew well, who did not themselves suffer any significant disciplinary action, despite her reports. UTLA helped Adams secure a restraining order, but the conditions deteriorated to such an abusive level that Adams had an emotional breakdown and was driven from the teaching profession altogether.

It's important to know that, in the original trial, after less than half a day deliberating, the jury ruled against LAUSD, saying that it failed to take reasonable steps to protect a teacher from ongoing harassment that created a hostile work environment. The jury also awarded Janis over $4 million in damages for economic and emotional distress. Here's the twist: when the District filed Hail Mary motions to vacate the financial judgment, the judge didn't merely reduce the damages--he stated that any teacher, in effect, voluntarily waives her civil right to a workplace free of harassment because she works with kids all day. In a mixed message which has fueled subsequent appeals, the judge vacated the financial judgment altogether while still upholding the verdict. LAUSD has to-date spent $1.2 million perpetuating the appeals process, seeking a new trial in hopes of overturning the verdict altogether.

The fact that Adams ultimately sought legal recourse against the district, which did not protect her in the face of what seem such clear-cut incidents of sexual bullying, suggests what other research indicates: that Adams is not unique in her complaints, only in her pursuit of justice publicly through the legal system. She chose to say “No” out loud and continues to live with the consequences. The initial abuse at the hands of students, appalling as it remains, seems secondary now to the enabling behavior of school site administration and the Los Angeles Unified School District. The district continues to argue, even in the face of the in loco parentis doctrine, that students are merely "third parties" from whom the district, as an employer, is not liable to protect its workers. By that logic, how could any district protect such "third parties" from bullying each other?

LAUSD has committed--financially, politically--to dragging Adams through a second trial, rather than taking public responsibility for reasonable steps to establish and reinforce a climate of safety for students and teachers, together. The next months will reveal whether a new trial goes forward. We shouldn't need to wait. As teachers in living, breathing communities, we must stand together for safe schools, and the first step means being willing to witness for each other, even if we've been abandoned at previous times ourselves. Suffering in silence is no solution.

For resources on bully-free workplace awareness in the USA and Canada, go to Bullying Institute.

High School Exit Exam Upheld--And Chickens Come to Roost in Higher Ed

2006-08-12T10:49:00.000-07:00

Here's the news you didn't hear: Yesterday, the California Court of Appeals upheld the requirement that every student in the Golden State must indeed pass the High School Exit Exam to earn a diploma. Lawyers for the plaintiffs, who have not challenged the test itself but rather the quality and equity of school resources, are now appealing to California's Supreme Court. (For background, see our recent coverage of Valenzuela v. O'Connell.) If students don't pass the test, the judges argued, they will be given a message that they don't have adequate skills to succeed in life.

Here's the news you did hear: Two days earlier, university professors from across the country were shocked! shocked! to hear Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and her federal commission admonish higher education to clean up its act with standardized testing. (The committee did settle on laughably euphemistic language for some recommendations at the end of its session, as reported by the NY Times, changing "should require" testing to "should measure student learning" with tests. Of course, any public school teacher knows what this really implies for colleges, who would be foolish to consider the phrase adjustment some sort of appeasement or exemption.) Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education--which includes members from private and public schools, think tanks and corporations--certainly did offer some enticements, in the form of increased money for Pell Grants to finance student attendance. Pell Grants, of course, mean more political leverage via federal money spent expressly on colleges and universities.

It's difficult to sympathize with the outcry from universities, who have themselves been largely complicit in the test mania perpetrated on "little sister" K-12--while remaining insanely out of touch with daily realities of compulsory schools and local communities. The university system has, in effect, fed the monster it now decries as counter to its educational interests.

As an ETS speaker told one group at its Orlando Pathwise Conference in June, "The old system used to be that universities told the primary and secondary schools what to do. Now the Nation's Report Card is going to tell the universities." This statement is only half of the story, however. The Nation's Report Card itself has been largely influence by corporate interests such as Achieve! and The Business Roundtable. Educational testmakers such as ETS and Reed-Elsevier have long been in bed with corporations such as Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and IBM.

Consider this passage on corporate involvement in education as posted on our own U.S. Department of Education website:

Today, more than ever before, corporate prosperity as well as our economic success as a nation depends on a highly educated workforce. The demand for highly skilled and well-educated workers in the new economy will only increase over time, making businesses major stakeholders in the educational success of our children.

To this end, the Office of Corporate Liaison works to facilitate effective communication between business leaders and program officers at the Department, to build mutual understanding of the needs of both the corporate world and local communities, and to promote business—education partnerships around the country. Businesses interested in supporting local efforts to improve education may consider aligning their current programs with one or more of the Department's priorities.

The now public-push for testing in universities, where professors have too-long enjoyed the privilege of obliviousness, shouldn't be a surprise. I'm reminded of the old parable: They came for the blind, and I did nothing because I could see. They came for the crippled, and I did nothing because I could walk. They came for the Jews, the Catholics, the evangelicals, the atheists, and I did nothing because I was none of these. When they came for me, there was no one left to stand up.

Teacher Watch--ETS Pathwise Conference, or: Who's the Potato Head?

2006-08-09T09:31:00.000-07:00

In June, I attended Educational Testing Service's annual Pathwise Teaching & Leadership Conference. The 9th annual gathering, held just outside the main thoroughfare of Orlando's bustling DisneyWorld Resort, was designed to promote what ETS has branded its "System 5" program for educational customers: Professional Development Solutions, Instructional Solutions, Assessment Solutions, Data-Driven Decision-Making Solutions, and School Improvement Solutions. (The 5-point and 5-year plans of certain historical dictators come to mind.)

Most of the attendees came from local superintendent and professional development offices, or were active classroom teachers. The group felt somewhat divided among administrators gunning to raise test scores, researchers curious about training teachers, and educators lassoed by their districts to gather solutions for local problems. The total turnout seemed relatively small, approximately 300-400 people, which I did not mistake as a sign of ETS's waning influence. (Coincidentally, the National Education Association was holding its annual convention in a hotel nearby, and there appeared to be no overlap in crowds.)

The rhetoric in Orlando displayed an intriguing shift from the brazen "rah rah tests and moolah" speeches at the 2005 Association of Test Publishers Conference in Scottsdale Arizona, where ETS logo, products, and corporate speakers had made a formidable presence. Here in Orlando, where ETS was the only game in town, we had a kinder, gentler and much more disingenuous language offered for the teacher audience--for those people in closest proximity to actual students. "We're not picking on teachers," one presenter said. "Change is hard for everyone." This rhetorical seduction was capable, smooth and (perhaps) well-meaning, as it was usually delivered by individual researchers themselves "on the ground" and less connected to centers of ETS power. (The only trace of corporate leadership appeared on certificates for professional development credit, via John Oswald's signature in black felt-tip ink.)

One of the central ETS promotions in half-day workshops was its Keeping Learning on Track (KLT) Institute, also listed under the title What is Formative Assessment? The idea, presenters insisted, was to change what happens inside learners' heads--and that requires minute-to-minute assessment in classrooms. Don't confuse what ETS means by this and what Madeline Hunter meant by "checking for understanding", "guided" or "independent practice," or for that matter any of the other hundreds of individual instructional, social and emotional assessments teachers make in the course of any given day. KLT means asking one particular question, with a quickly assessable answer, to an entire group of students--who indicate their responses, en masse, via A B C or D choice cards or, perhaps, by flashing up a few words or symbols on their personal white boards. The results tell teachers how to proceed.

Most bizarre during this workshop was how presenters openly attacked the idea of scripted learning and curriculum maps (ETS would offer a separate "Curriculum Mapping: Aligning Learning" workshop just two days later). There was something dissonant and surreal about the presenters' attack, since ETS benchmark tests--at district, state and national levels--were acknowledged openly as the keys driving curriculum alignment and realignment in the planning process. To sell KLT, however, presenters appealed to teachers' frustration with mapping and scripts. A brilliant maneuver.

For example: One presenter described how she addressed teacher frustration balancing KLT strategies with the weekly planning demands prescribed by her district. "You all remember the Nuremberg defense?" she asked us. "Saying 'I was just following the pacing guide' is no defense if your students don't move ahead." I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing aloud at the hideous analogy, especially by a representative of a corporation that drives curriculum mapping, but the quip drew solemn nods from the group. (I wondered how many teachers might be subjected to that comment when attendees returned to share the story with their districts.)

It was repeated at least twice in this session that it's not sufficient for students to arrive at the right answer for wrong or inaccurate reasons. (Terrific! An emphasis on thinking! says the conscientious teacher.) Nevermind that ETS and other brands of multiple choice tests--the big elephants in the classroom--rarely provide students with opportunities to earn credit for thoughtful or accurate thinking and methodology, even if they make a simple computational error at the very end. The teacher-touching emphasis on “process” in the rhetoric of KLT is frankly undermined by the reality that “product” is what our system ultimately measures and values.

A final note: It was hinted at various points during the five day conference that ETS researchers are now pushing to eliminate teacher grades in favor of written feedback or comments only. Keep in mind, however, that while it might consider “letter grades” from individual teachers irrelevant, ETS corporation has its eye fixed on the big prize: there’s no talk of eliminating the numbers, rankings, scores, and percentiles generated on a national level by its own test instruments. That sounds like Game-Over, Check-Please, and all in the name of "better learning": making one corporation the final arbiter of multiple-choice quality in the world of education-as-product.

Keep your own potato eyes wide open on this one.

Exit Exam Debate Heats Up, Again--ETS Contract in the Background

2006-07-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

On July 25, the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco heard arguments about the fairness of the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) in the continuing case of Valenzuela v. O'Connell. The court will have 90 days to decide whether a judge in Alameda was correct in blocking the exam. The case and its ensuing debates seem to hinge on two central questions: Does the CAHSEE punish students not equitably prepared by educational resources across the state, or does the test reward students by creating a common benchmark for graduation?

While many of us are certainly rooting for the underdogs here, it's important to note that the case does not challenge the test instrument, the assessment process, or the core principle of "exit exams" per se, but instead argues that bad teachers and poor materials are to blame for students not passing the exam. Even a plaintiffs' victory in this case could result in an ironic backlash of increased standardization for classrooms. It's an odd case of Be careful what we wish for.

The results of Valenzuela v. O'Connell will determine whether or not students denied diplomas in June for failing the exit exam will be issued diplomas retroactively. According to estimates, nearly 40 thousand students in California failed the CAHSEE.

However, behind the scenes is a larger picture, with ETS's multi-million dollar contract to develop, administer, and score the test hanging somewhat in the balance. Making the test "optional" or rendering its results "unconstitutional" would not bode well for the assessment giant. ETS has already taken recent hits in the press for "misplacing" score sheets for the CAHSEE in Long Beach, as well as for scoring errors nationally publicized on the the high-stakes SAT exam.

Additionally, ETS last spring spent $11.1 million to settle a class action suit brought on behalf of 4,100 teachers who "failed" the PRAXIS teacher certification exam when they had actually passed it (a total of 27 thousand teacher candidates received lower scores than they should have and may also be eligible for damages).

No wonder ETS has learned to diversify its services, building up the minute-by-minute formative assessment component of its K-12 instructional marketing, offering a more intimate classroom connection--increased resources for "how to prepare for tests we give you."

Click here to read the Sacramento Bee's coverage of appeal preparations last week, including sample questions from the CAHSEE with answers.

Teacher Watch--ETS Hydra Adds Another Arm

2006-06-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

It's more difficult by the minute to track who owns what, who's bought or partnered with whom in the test and curriculum industry. It's practically migraine-inducing even to try.

Here at "HorseSense" we attempt in our modest way to keep you up to date on some of the key players and their new deals. This isn't simply trivia. It's important for teachers, parents, students and activists to have at least some information about key players in the industries that shape policy and research in education. Under-our-nose acquisitions, partnerships and mergers can make individual corporations seem smokier, less direct, in their lines of accountability to public money. See our coverage of scoring errors in the SAT and California High School Exit Exam (CASEE) earlier this year.

In a new maneuver to aquire a competitive edge in teaching writing through computer assessment, Educational Testing Service (ETS) has teamed up with Great Source, a division of publishing heavyweight Houghton Mifflin. Houghton Mifflin announced in a May 30 press release that its Great Source division will now "market and distribute subscriptions to a co-branded version of ETS’s Criterion Online Writing Evaluation."

"Distribute subscriptions" means selling and managing sales. Co-branding is a partnership marketing strategy between corporations seeking to corner or control a market. According to a term coined by Brandenburger and Nalebuff (1996) this maneuver is called "coopetition." Such connections are not always clearly advertised to the public. (Consider how the connection between Philip Morris and Kraft Foods became camouflaged in 2002 when the parent corporation was re-named Altria Group.)

ETS's Criterion online writing program for grades 4-university will now complement Great Source's Write Source textbooks. According to John Oswald, senior Vice President of ETS Elementary and Secondary Education, "By working together, we can reach more schools with stronger resources that give students the practice they need to become clear, fluent, and effective writers."

And there's more: In a development announced by ETS June 6, Criterion has also partnered with Educere, "a respected provider of virtual education services to K-12 schools."

The ETS announcement of the Educere partnership makes no reference to the new Great Source connection, an announcement reserved for a previous, separate release. In effect, however, we now have an alliance between Criterion, Educere and Write Source--with quite a corporate trail in the wings.

Teacher Watch--Formative Assessment Agenda

2006-05-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

Recent public outrage over scoring errors in the SAT and California High School Exit Exam (HSEE) has again inflamed national, if temporary, questions about high-stakes benchmark testing--and the unregulated corporations which create and adminster such programs, at the state and national level. Part of the concern is that many test corporations subsist on continuous public funding for each trial, error and profit.

But as eggregious as these momentary scandals may seem to parents, students and teachers, it's important to keep in mind that corporations such as Harcourt and the Educational Testing Service (ETS) have long shifted their eyes to something much more lucrative, long-term and mostly unquestioned: formative assessments.

Roughly, as teachers already know, "formative assessments" are seen as practice tools to prepare students to succeed on high-stakes, benchmark tests that occur perhaps once or twice a year. High-stakes benchmarks at the state level, such as the CAT-6 in California, are used to determine rankings of Adequate Yearly Progress under the No Child Left Behind Act. Such results can affect funding for schools, not to mention the real-estate rates in your neighborhood. National high-stakes benchmark tests include the PSAT and new SAT test, which affect student entry into colleges and universities, and can also affect individual student options for scholarships and other funding.

By comparison, "formative" test sounds kinder and gentler--it's just like studying, right?

As articulated by CEOs at the 2005 Association of Test Publishers "Innovations in Testing" Conference, what test publishers mean by "formative assessment" is literally constant assessment. Via tools such as remote control, internet question banks and automated, instant online grading software programs, the formative assessment agenda seeks to break down barriers between "testing" and "curriculum" so that they literally mean the same thing. The buzzphrase for this is "integrated" testing.

The argument, of course, is that teachers are always preparing students for tests anyway, so more automated and standardized formative practice would simply make the whole process user-friendly for everyone.

Two months ago, ETS acquired the assets of Assessment Training Institute (ATI), a Portland Oregon company which specializes in integrating assessment with day-to-day instruction. In an official press release dated March 8 2006, John Oswald, ETS Senior Vice President of Elementary and Secondary Education, says, "ATI's people and products will broaden ETS's educational solutions, including minute-to-minute assessment for learning in the classroom, periodic benchmark testing to validate and adjust instruction, and high-stakes summative state assessments."

Richard (no relation to Henry) Higgins, CEO of ATI, calls the approach "assessment FOR learning." You can read the entire press release here.

The key is that big-money testers know how to diversify their portfolio. Corporations such as ETS are already planning creative recovery from possible fallout over inevitable, isolated squabbles over a few high-stakes tests.

If George Orwell were still alive, he'd repeat that the domestic counterpart to a state of chronic war with an enemy somewhere else is a state of chronic surveillance at home. In the next generation, unless we resist, compulsory schools will be the primary (and invisible) front for this battle.

The Reiner Initiative and Preschool Pressures: An Interview with Diane Flynn Keith

2006-03-31T11:00:00.000-08:00

What might be the problem with preschool? Where can conscientious parents and educators find common ground? In this interview, Diane Flynn Keith shares her views with Jo Scott-Coe about California's "First Five" advertisements, Rob Reiner, standardized testing, John Taylor Gatto, Bill Gates, Oprah--and much more.

Diane Flynn Keith is founder of Universal Preschool.com and author of Carschooling: Over 350 Entertaining Games & Activities To Turn Travel Time Into Learning Time (Random House 2002).

Jo Scott-Coe: The name of your website, "Universal Preschool," must catch some people off guard once they start reading it. Talk about how your group began.

Diane Flynn Keith: In my home state of California, I kept hearing advertisements by "California First Five" that made ridiculous claims such as children who don’t go to preschool are more likely to wind up in prison.

California First Five is a tobacco tax funded front for the California School Board supported "Children & Families Act of 1998" that was spearheaded by actor-director Rob Reiner. First Five believes that parents are woefully inadequate and therefore need government preschools to prepare kids for entry into kindergarten and first grade. This is absolute poppycock.

I thought that I'd see parental rights organizations offer an opposing opinion but, to my amazement and consternation, it didn't happen. The ads were so recurrent and insidious that by August of 2004 I had heard enough! I decided that if no one was going to oppose the movement to institutionalize little kids in government preschool programs -- I would do it myself!

The fastest way to get a message out is via the Internet. I found the domain name, "UniversalPreschool.com" was available. I decided to launch a website, where people looking for information on "Universal Preschool" would be surprised to find information opposing it, along with resources to empower parents to teach their little ones at home and/or with the thoughtful use of privately funded preschool programs. I also wanted the website to be a place where activists could mobilize opposition to public preschools.

JSC: What's been your reaction to the latest First Five barrage of ads on TV and radio in California?

DFK: Outrage. I can't believe that tax money is used to disseminate such propaganda. I didn't know that public funds could be used to convince the population that little kids should be institutionalized without providing equal opportunity for rebuttal. Reiner's First Five Ads were cleverly timed to sway public sentiment and opinion to assure a "yes" vote on the Preschool-For-All Act. The 23 million tax dollars spent on this advertising campaign were funds that could have been used to help educate parents in ways that would make meaningful differences in the lives of children. What a waste of taxpayer's money. It's unconscionable.

JSC: What about conscientious, financially struggling parents who can't afford privately funded preschool options but who want some support?

DFK: State and federally funded programs (such as Kidango and Head Start) already exist for low-income families. They are under funded and have waiting lists. The PACE research study released in 2005 by U.C. Berkeley and Stanford University show that while at-risk, low income children receive slight benefits from preschool, children from middle class and high-income families develop negative social behavior, aggression, stress, lack of cooperation, poorer work habits, and were more difficult to discipline as a result of preschool attendance. Rather than subsidize preschool-for-all, we should adequately fund and expand existing programs to help the at-risk children for whom it will do some good.

There's a second part to this question. There are families who are struggling financially who don't qualify for government programs based on income. They find it difficult to afford private preschool. There is an assumption here that children NEED preschool. Want and need are two different things. Again, research shows that “disadvantaged” kids receive some benefit from preschool. Not all low-income children are disadvantaged. Many children have functional, attentive parents who provide what children need to prepare them for school readiness without ever setting foot in a preschool. However, for some parents preschool is synonymous with daycare. They WANT welfare for daycare in the form of public preschools. That is an entitlement mentality, and it cultivates dependency on the government nanny from womb to tomb. Rather than developing preschool welfare programs for everyone, we should take a look at raising the financial intelligence of the population. Invest in education programs that teach people how to manage their money, avoid consumerism, and make their money work for them so that they can afford privatized preschools if they want them. Even as I say this, I understand that it doesn't relieve the financial stress for some families in the here-and-now. Perhaps we should consider the feasibility of low-interest preschool loans.

JSC: Now we have Rob Reiner's abrupt withdrawals--“leave of absence” and now outright resignation!--from the First Five Commission. It appears that there's an audit imminent. Any predictions?

DFK: I won't bite my lip in anticipation of a scandal. I can tell you, however, that last Fall, at a Preschool Advocacy Day in Sacramento that was sponsored by the non-profit Packard Foundation, I witnessed a presumptuous and cocky Reiner urge the audience to turn out the yes vote on Preschool-For-All in June 2006. Reiner acknowledged that he wasn't supposed to say that (due to IRS regulations restricting non-profits from political and lobbying activities) but told the audience he didn't care and invited the Feds to come and get him.

If the auditor's saber-rattling serves no other purpose than to wipe that arrogant smirk off Reiner's face, stop the First Five ads, and cast doubt about Prop 82 in the minds of voters that's a good thing, in my opinion. Whether or not an audit proves conclusively that First Five mishandled public funds to influence votes, the damage has been done. I hope voters won't entrust vulnerable 4-year-olds to legislation that has been sold like snake-oil to them by people seemingly without ethics or political principles.

JSC: What's your definition of a good education?

DFK: I think it's different for every human being. I know that it's not about producing a product, hard as that may be to believe in a society that is product oriented. A good education is not linear. A good education is chaotic and messy. It's trial and error. It's the scientific method at work. A good education is human life expressing itself unencumbered by false agendas. The journey is what a good education is all about -- magnificent quantities of time to wonder, engage, and reflect in order to figure out who you are, what you're good at, what you want to contribute, and how to be happy. A good education provides the student with a sense of utter fulfillment and infinite joy in becoming the author and editor of his or her own life.

JSC: How does a child learn to be a good person as well as a good student?

DFK: Every person has their own view on this. I can only speak for my own family. My husband and I raised our children with an assumption of goodness. We reinforced it with three rules as guidelines. Two are from English common law and the third is the Golden Rule. They are:

1) Don't encroach on other people or their property.
2) Keep your agreements
3) Treat other people the way you would like them to treat you.

We posted these rules -- our family's Civil Code of Conduct -- in plain site in our house. Whenever the children had friends over -- we showed them the rules, so they knew what behavior was expected and accepted. Whenever there was a situation where we needed guidance, we referred to it. It worked for us.

JSC: How do you think policymakers view a "good student" and "good person" in the current climate -- and what do you see as tangible effects for kids, both at home and at school?

DFK: I think policymakers view a good student and a good person in exactly the same way -- as human capital. They think of them as human resources and consumers who need to be managed and controlled so that they are predictable, and can be quantified and calculated for profit down to the last penny. The way the masses are indoctrinated and controlled is through government schools. Kids who are in the public school system don't have a prayer of escaping without some kind of intellectual, social, emotional, psychological or physical damage. That damage extends to the society at large.

JSC: What interests you specifically in John Taylor Gatto's writing about American compulsory school?

DFK: Gatto taught in public and private schools for 30 years and upon receiving the New York State Teacher of the Year Award in 1990 he used the opportunity to quit -- accusing the government school system of being psychopathic. From that time, he's been a champion for change and has worked to reveal the hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling. He spent 10 years researching public schooling that culminated in the release of his book, The Underground History of American Education, that details the social engineering behind public schools deliberately designed to not only dumb down the population but rob us of our autonomy and liberty.

JSC: Lots of people are excited about the Reiner Initiative's sound bytes, which
promise half-day preschool programs, five days a week, for all 4-year-olds. On the surface, it seems like such an easy sell. "Tutoring" plus daycare support. Why is UP opposed?

DFK: UniversalPreschool lists many reasons why we are opposed to Reiner's
Preschool-For-All Act or Proposition 82. Here are five of the most important:

1) Preschool-For-All will jeopardize funding for California K-12 public schools that already have academic scores among the worst in the country.

2) A state-run preschool monopoly will put private preschools out of business. Replacing thriving businesses that are mainly owned and operated by women and minorities will eliminate jobs and tax revenue and reduce educational and childcare options for all families -- especially for the poor and middle class.

3) California spends $3 billion each year to provide preschool for families in need -- and this initiative extends that subsidy to the middle class and rich who don't need it.

4) Preschool-For-All has unproven benefits and may actually harm children. Proponents make inflated claims about preschool based on a handful of studies that were conducted on severely disadvantaged poor children. Those findings don't apply to children from normal homes. In fact, the PACE study by U.C. Berkeley and Stanford University shows that children from middle class and high-income families suffer negative consequences from preschool attendance.

5) Preschool-For-All is not in the best interests of ALL children. Taxpayers should not be forced to pay for preschool programs that can hurt the state's economy, destroy small businesses, and harm little kids.

JSC: There's a rising tide of teachers in the public system concerned about
test mania and standardization in schools, which has frankly stood
unchallenged by the unions which supposedly represent them. What kind of
connections might you envision between dismayed parents and teachers to
create alternatives to the status quo?

DFK: Funding for schools is tied to accountability through standardized testing. Until and unless we don't require that kind of accountability nothing will change. Most people think that standardized testing is a legitimate measure of what a student knows, and that's a myth that needs to be exposed too.

In my opinion, the only way that teachers and parents can change the status quo within the public school system is through outright rebellion. Refuse to administer tests. Refuse to teach to the test. Refuse to allow children to take tests. In California, Education Code 60615 allows parents to waive testing of their child just by requesting it in a letter to the principal of the school. More parents should do that.

JSC: Certainly, but why aren't more Californians mobilized in this direction? In Colorado this past month, citizens addressed lawmakers on the floor of the state legislature, challenging the notion of testing for merit. Our own California "opt out" advocates are rather quiet these days.

DFK: Perhaps it's cynicism or apathy. But it could also be that misguided Californians (largely uninformed about the monolithic school system) don't want to negatively impact school funding. Most believe that money is the answer to the problem. Of course, if money were the answer, we would have solved the problem a long time ago.

The public school system is not just sick, it's terminal. We keep it on life support by pumping more money into it. We need to pull the plug and let it die. Of course, that would result in an economic disaster when you consider all of the corporations and special interests who benefit financially from public schooling. That government-school-industrial complex will not sit idly by and allow change without a fight. The truth is that most parents only care about school while their kids are enrolled in it. Their opposition to business-as-usual is transient. The system is set up so that change is completely and utterly avoidable.

JSC: What do proponents of younger and younger preschool attendance NOT
understand about the parental choice to delay enrollment in school?

DFK: I think they understand very well the meaning of parental choice to delay or refuse preschool enrollment. Parents currently have authority over the lives of their young children. That's a threat to social engineering. I think that's exactly why we are seeing this push-to-preschool on a national level. Once voluntary public preschool programs are seeded, and people become accustomed to them, we will see legislation introduced to make preschool mandatory. (It has already happened with Kindergarten in many states, and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano is leading a task force to provide public preschools and to make Kindergarten mandatory nationwide.) The younger the student is, the easier it is to program them with state doctrine. Historically, political dictatorships have done it with great success.

JSC: How would you describe your own educational journey?

DFK: I had a private, parochial school education from grades 1-12. I received an AA degree at community college. I attended a registered nursing program and a couple of state colleges but began resisting schooling in earnest -- I just couldn't take responding to an authority outside of myself any longer. So, I dropped out of college and spent many years in different jobs trying to figure out what I wanted to be and do. Working provided the best educational experience. I started my own business and that was the ultimate eye-opener -- that I could direct my own life, work, and education and enjoy it every step of the way.

JSC: Describe your philosophy of home-preschooling.

DFK: I hate the term "home-preschooling." It implies that preschool is a de facto necessity. It suggests that if you don't send your children to public or private preschool then you must create preschool at home. Nothing could be further from the truth. Encouraging learning is what's important. Children are naturally curious and with the loving guidance of functional, caring parents they develop all of the skills and attributes necessary to prepare them to tackle schooling or other learning scenarios when they are developmentally ready. Parents who spend copious amounts of time with their kids and who talk, read, sing, hug and kiss their kids, and who play with them and take the time to show them how to do things and how things work, and answer their questions with facts, clarity, and honesty, and who expose their kids to the bounty of life, not only instill learning readiness skills, but provide self-confidence and emotional stability as well. While institutions like preschools may provide some activities that get the synapses firing, they are woefully lacking in the variety of stimuli, attention, love, support, and encouragement received by a child raised in a loving home.

JSC: You probably saw footage of Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey on Entertainment TV on February 16 making a surprise school appearance down in San Diego. Gates' Foundation has already donated $11 million into a "smaller schools" program there, and Winfrey has herself made million-dollar contributions to schools. What's your reaction to the rush of corporate money, and "celebrity experts," to "help" the public system?

DFK: I didn't see footage, but I heard about it.

Gates heads a corporation that needs to train human resources and consumers. There is no better way to do that than through public schools. Donating $11 million is a small gesture to instill faith in public schooling that will result in billions of dollars in profit gained from training future work forces and consumers. That's all it is. It won't change the inequitable consequences of funding being tied to testing results. Testing results are tied to the socio-economic class of the student. The amount of money a kid's parents make is the best indicator of how well they will do on a test. Visit a public school classroom in Beverly Hills and then visit one in south central L.A. The disparity in educational opportunity will astound you. There is no such thing as the utopian ideal of equal opportunity in public education. All of Bill Gates' money won't change that if the system itself remains the same. I think he's counting on it.

As for Oprah, she thinks pouring more money into schools is the answer. Again, the government school system is the problem. I've said it's broken. Actually, it's not broken at all. It operates exactly as it was designed to do -- to dumb down the population so that it can be controlled and manipulated for profit. Public schools help to maintain the socio-economic status quo. It assures massive gaps in education among the poor and working classes and the elite. Giving government schools more money will only feed the machine, to the detriment of the very people Oprah hopes to help.

SAT Errors: An Invisible Partner? or, Testing in Fantasia

2006-03-18T10:13:00.000-08:00

You may have seen TV or newspaper coverage this past week regarding errors on October's SAT test for 4,000 high school students. Reportedly, the discrepancies ranged from 10 to 200 points on the now 2,400-point exam. Both FOX and Los Angeles Times reports included contact with representatives of the nonprofit College Board founded in 1900, whose best known "educational quality" programs include the SAT, PSAT/NMSQT and AP exams.

FairTest reiterated its call for government regulation of the testing industry. (Remember: there are currently no legal restrictions on high stakes tests, no accountability for the accountability-makers, represented by the Association of Test Publishers, or ATP.)

An interesting sidenote: No report has pointed out that the College Board doesn't score its own exams. The nonprofit Educational Testing Service (ETS)--last Fall granted a lucrative monopoly on scoring and administering the High School Exit Exam program for the state of California--is the exclusive scoring entity for the SAT and other College Board tests.

Somehow, ETS has been well insulated from the latest national gaffe.

But it's a small world after all. Yesterday, a story appeared about an error in scoring the California High School Exit exam for 400 Long Beach sophomores, who will need to retake the exam because answer sheets were misplaced en route to the scoring site. ETS spokesperson Tom Ewing insisted that it was "fairly rare" for answer sheets to be lost. But look at the layers of the story: California-contracted ETS had subcontracted Pearson Educational Measurement to subcontract arrangements for transportation of the score sheets. The courier DHL seems a too-convenient scapegoat, and even Long Beach School District officials seem way too pacified that ETS has admitted the error (um, what else could ETS do? as yet, there's no magic wand for missing tests). Kudos to the Long Beach Press-Telegram for covering the story.

So Friends, who's keeping score on the scorekeepers? (I've heard a rumor that one teacher plans a visit to ETS's annual "teacher leadership" conference at the end of June. Where? Why Walt Disney World, of course!)

One Tough Stand for Better Schools: Interview with Don Perl

2006-02-08T18:31:00.000-08:00

Think that "opting out" of standardized assessment is too controversial? too tall an order for any reasonable person? Think again.

In this interview with Jo Scott-Coe, Don Perl talks about how a coalition of concerned Colorado citizens are standing up and speaking out for better education--gasp!--without testing.

Jo Scott-Coe: How did you come to be concerned about the impact of standardized testing on schools?

Don Perl: 2001 was my last year in the public schools. I taught in an inner city junior high school - which during my last year became a middle school. About half of my students spoke Spanish at home, and although they were fluent in English, since it wasn't their home language, they were at a disadvantage. I was also one of only a few bilingual teachers at our school and was often called to translate conversations between administrators and parents. I saw parents struggling to understand a foreign system. And the more I read about high-stakes standardized testing, the more I saw the injustices at work, and the more I saw a system truly designed to marginalize our society even more. I remembered the phrase "in loco parentis" that I had heard often when I was an aspiring teacher. We don't want any harm to come to our children. This testing mania was harmful to them. Thus, I could not in good conscience administer the test. And so I committed an act of civil disobedience by boycotting the administration of the test. That was February, 2001.

JSC: What consequences did you face professionally?

DP: I was suspended for two weeks without pay - the two weeks that the test was administered then. When I returned to school, the atmosphere was so charged, I thought seriously for the first time that maybe this should be my last year. In early April I composed a letter of resignation of one sentence. It said, "So displeased am I with the direction public education is going that I have decided to make this my last year in District 6." I put a copy in the principal's mailbox and sent one to the superintendent. I saw the principal later that day in the hall, and she gave me a look of something like, "Thank God." We never spoke of it.

JSC: When and how did the Coalition for Better Education (CBE) get started?

DP: CBE really got started in February of 2004. At that time I was working on the language of a proposed ballot initiative. I also was working with some latino students from our Cesar Chavez center, a center for hispanic college students. I would meet with the students from time to time - and we staged two protests of the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) - we gathered on the sidewalk with signs and literature. One of the students, an aspiring teacher, started a website, and when our ballot initative was approved, our coalition was born. Right now we have 450 members on our list serve. I probably hear from 30 or 35 from time to time. We are all parents, grandparents, teachers, and just concerned citizens.

JSC: Describe your latest campaign to raise awareness about "opting out" of the state's standardized testing program. What problems and frustrations have you encountered? What successes?

DP: The latest campaign to raise awareness about "opting out" of CSAP concerns the purchase of signs on bus benches in the Denver metropolitan and Greeley areas. We raised about $1,950 this year to pay for advertisements. With that money we bought 20 signs for bus benches in Denver and 5 in Greeley (60 miles to the north.)

There was quite a bruhaha here in Greeley over the signs because someone ordered the signs be taken down. When we contacted the media and they published the story, someone within the city bureaucracy admitted to having made a mistake, and so our signs will go back up in Greeley. NextMedia, the company we contracted with, promises that those infamous signs should be up in a week or so. They read: “Parents: we can do something about this injustice." Then there is our logo, and then our website - www.thecbe.org

JSC: What do you see as the currently most pressing problem in K-12 education?

DP: To me the most pressing problem in our public schools has its roots in a lack of faith in the profession. This lack of faith has lead to the furor and insanity of high-stakes standardized testing. Instead of our society addressing the issues of poverty, we turn a blind eye and insist that our teachers get better and that society watch them through the hopelessly inadequate tool of test scores. 22% of our children, in this incredibly wealthy nation, are living in poverty.

JSC: Do you also see consequences, though, even for students who are more economically privileged? These are the kids most likely to be hardwired into the system, most likely to help perpetuate testing as “key” to meaningful measurement--whether they work in schools or in business. How are tests redefining "learning" and "school"?

DP: I see tectonic plates separating, separating more and more. So the privileged, hardwired into the system, as you aptly said, are increasingly marginalized from those who are struggling financially. With this kind of marginalization come frightening spectres such as more misunderstandings, more prejudice, a world increasingly more out of tune. High-stakes testing, by definition, ignores some truly important concepts such as co-operation, curiosity, and sense of community. Our world is such a mess. Not only do we have to think about preparing our children for its insanities, but we also have to work to improve the world for them.

JSC: Connecticut has recently pursued legal action over the No Child Left Behind Act. What legislative or legal measures are brewing in Colorado?

DP: Here in Colorado two legislators are looking to forward a bill which will de-claw CSAP, that is require school districts to inform parents of their exemption rights, and require that no negative consequences flow from such an option. We are hoping that this bill gets a lot of attention. However, the reality is that the governor (Bill Owens) has already announced that he would veto it even if it gets as far as his desk.

JSC: At last year’s National Governers’ Association Summit on national high schools, your governor talked about resolving the “Colorado paradox”--defined as more college degrees per capita than any other state, but a lagging population of students going on to college. What do you make of the “paradox” and his proposed solutions?

DP: His proposed solutions fail to address the socio-economic problems we all face. The true problems are in the dark and around the corner, and they deal with poverty, a minimum wage that hasn't been raised in years, neighborhoods whose water contains dangerous levels of lead, poor nutrition and all the attendant social problems. And I have to say that a university education is not for everyone. We need skilled people who ply a trade and perfect a craft. Politicians put the university education on some sort of pedestal without thinking of the need people have to develop their own individual gifts for the commonweal.

JSC: For a layperson, the idea of "merit pay" in schools may seem like good sense. What are the benefits and drawbacks? What is CBE's position on current "merit pay" proposals pending in Denver?

DP: Merit pay is founded on the notion that teachers seek out mediocrity. We can not force any artificial program of what is titled "merit pay" on our profession. Let us say that you feel called to teach in an inner city school. Your children come to the classroom with a set of experiences and issues planets away from the students who attend more affluent schools. What are the eating habits of our children? How much lead is there in the water? How do they live? Is there violence at home? All this and more impacts education. Would we fault a dentist who plied his trade in a low income neighborhood because his patients had more cavities than the patients of his colleague whose office served an affluent population? Should we fault teachers because their road of life took them to needier neighborhoods?

JSC: How possible or difficult is it to facilitate efforts with activists in other states?

DP: We are just beginning to converse with activists in other states. Thanks to this technology, the roadways are opened, and we are hoping that a national movement does grow.

JSC: What inspires you to keep going? What's most discouraging?

DP: I am inspired by parents and teachers who contact us, who thank us for being a resource for them. I am also inspired by other members of our coalition who share the incredible stories of both courage and abuse which are occurring regularly in education today. What is most discouraging is how so often supposedly thoughtful people, political leaders, so distanced from the real world of our children, become so enamored by the golden calf of unidimensional measurement.

JSC: What changes do your foresee in the next 10-20 years for American classrooms?

DP: I have great hopes that the monster will implode. But we have to make this happen. So often people will tell me, this too will pass. Yes, but only if we make it pass. If we wait for the world to turn, incredible societal damage will have been meted out.

JSC: You work from a university "base" to organize parents, K-12 teachers, academics and others. What has been most challenging about connecting these groups?

DP: The university base has great advantages. This is the community service I offer as part of my professional contribution to this little world here. I frequently make presentations to aspiring teachers and am amazed how little they know about the realities of the classroom in the swath of high stakes standardized testing. However, I am also often treated as a persona non grata from time to time since so many fear change and look to me as the person responsible for those fears.

JSC: Interesting. I sometimes receive blank or quizzical stares from experts who claim to be “deeply concerned” about reading and writing instruction. It can be depressing that practical experience isn’t always welcomed into the academy, especially from anyone straddling the line between K-12 and “higher” education. Hybrids, and any concerns we bring to the table, are sometimes kind of shunned. What's that all about?

DP: Academics often times think in a hierarchical mode. Once one gives in to that kind of addiction, one loses her focus on what truly benefits our children and their teachers. One's thinking narrows, and fear of change dominates.

** Read about the ongoing controversy over CBE's bus-bench campaign from ground zero in Colorado's Greeley Tribune.

Power Corrupts

2006-02-07T16:53:00.000-08:00

As an American, I am saddened by the culture of corruption in Washington, and it's disgusting that any politician is capable of abusing his office. I'm sure no one gets elected so he can be corrupt; it's just something that happens over time, but it still happens.

Campaign finance reform can help to stop some of this, but there is still too much money in campaigns. There are too many lobbyists who are willing to spend too much money on officials in order to influence their votes. Pork barrel projects are the name of the game since politicians want to get elected by the voters back home, and to get elected, it takes money.

Of course, when was the last time you gave any money to a politician? That's the problem. Most voters are so turned off with politicians that they don't want to donate to them, so politicians have to depend on the lobbyists and special interests to finance their campaigns. Wealthy candidates who are willing to fund their own campaigns are less dependent on these groups, but they are not immune either.

So what is the answer? Perhaps the public media can provide free time for the candidates. Otherwise, they need to raise millions of dollars to pay for TV ads. Limiting the amount of money a candidate can raise, and by whom, can help, but there are too many loopholes in the system.

Several groups and organizations have PAC ( Political Action Committee ) money which they can use to support their candidates. This makes it too easy to abuse the system, and corruption is soon follows.

We will be having a primary in June for several statewide and local offices, and it's amazing the millions of dollars spent for an office that pays something over $100,000 a year. For the governor's race alone, each candidate will spend close to $40 million.

Enough is enough. The voters need to be more involved in the political process and make it clear to our elected officials and candidates that we want them to represent all of the people, and not only those who contribute to their campaigns.

The reason for term limits was to ensure that no politician stays in office too long, but, inevitably, the best tool for term limits is the ballot box on election day. If a candidate is not being fair with the people who he or she represents, then that candidate needs to be removed from office.

Maybe it's time for a change in Sacramento in November. It's obvious to me and most Californians that Arnold the Terminator has let us down over and over again.

He attacked, for no reason, the very people who put him in office--the nurses, teachers, policemen, and firemen--then he wastes our tax dollars on a stupid election. Now he wants us to believe that he cares about the people of California by proposing a budget that is irresponsible.

It's a budget that will only lead to a larger deficit. I though the Republican Party was the party of fiscal responsibility. What happened under Arnold's reign? Is it possible that he, too, has become corrupt? Here is a man who said that he was so rich that he would not have to take any money from the special interests, and then he turned around to take more money than even Gray Davis took after serving for five years!

It's time for the people to demand that our elected officials and candidates promise to do what is right, or they should plan to be out of a job at election time.

No Tooth Left Behind

2006-02-06T09:21:00.000-08:00

Merit/demerits for teachers who "raise" or "fail to raise" student test scores invite a now familiar analogy: do we blame dentists for patient cavities? blame doctors for treating people with the most difficult cases? (If you talk with medical professionals now plagued by high malpractice insurance, the answer appears more often, unfortunately, to be "yes.")

Interestingly, this morning's Sacramento Bee (free registration required) includes an article about the increased incidence of cavities and dental pain among California's children. According to the article, out of 25 states studied, California ranks 24th--"second only to Arkansas" in rates of childhood tooth decay. Sound familiar?

Unlike examination of similar stats related to test performance and literacy levels, the discussion of dental health and hygiene (the "cavity crisis") focuses on larger socio-economic factors and solutions.

A bigger picture. Imagine that.

Opting Out--Colorado Style

2006-01-19T16:24:00.000-08:00

Denver's education system has made the news recently, mostly because of a pending ballot measure (to be voted on in November 2006) which would create a model of merit pay for teachers. While proposed "carrots" currently include compensation for such things as earning a Master's Degree, spending money on your own education, teaching in a hard-to-serve school and earning a satisfactory evaluation (among other accomplishments), most controversial is the connection between teacher pay and student test performance.

Meanwhile, something else is going on in Colorado, state-wide. Led by Don Perl, University of Colorado professor and founder of the Coalition for Better Education, a group of parents and educators are uniting for a common purpose: To opt-out of the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) altogether. According to one report published in The Denver Post last March, more than three thousand students "just said no" to the test in 2005.

In a new awareness campaign, launched on January 16 in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, the group unveiled bus bench ads displaying the web address for official opt-out forms in Colorado.

In California, the opt-out discussion hasn't quite garnered the same national attention. Even though there aren't any "opt-outs" allowed for the High School Exit Exam (HSEE), parents may still complete forms to opt their children and young adults out of the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program.

Teachers may not "encourage" or "rally" parents to exercise this right but are legally permitted to make information available. For information on what's possible in the Golden State, visit the California Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education (CalCARE) website.

His Terminating Days Are Gone

2006-01-16T06:59:00.000-08:00

What a difference a year makes! Last January he was unbeatable. He could walk on water. He was an intimidating figure. Yes, the terminator governor had it all--except common sense and good advisers. Now, we hear Arnold in his State of the State speech admitting that he had been foolish. He now understands, he says. The voters have spoken.

He's learned his lesson, he says, and now understands that the people of California want "to cut the warfare, cool the rhetoric, find common ground, and fix the problems together.

Now he wants to do what is right for the people of California, which means he has to work with the state legislature. You remember them; they were the "girlie men" of last year--now they've become his newest best friends. And what about those bad special interest folks? You know, the teachers, nurses, policemen and firemen? Well, they're okay now, too.

Are we to believe that he has had an extreme makeover since the special elections of last month? Are we to forgive him for wasting the goodwill that we had once showered upon him when he won the recall? We'll see how seriously he believes his own words.

He now wants to do all things for all of us. In fact, he proposed in his address to find the funding to provide all kinds of projects to improve the education of our children, the safety of our streets, improve the health care of our elderly, and insure that California remains the fifth-largest economy in the world.

"I say, build it!" the governor shouted several times, but what does he want to build? Is it truly our infrastructure, or is it his stature in the state? All of that without raising any taxes! If I didn't know better, I would have thought that it was he who parted the Red Sea and not Moses, and it was he who fed the people with only a fish and a loaf of bread.

He now wants to be the Collectinator instead of the Terminator governor. He thinks the federal government will come to our aid and help to fund the projects he mentioned. Well, where have the feds been since Arnold took over the reigns of power in California? Why does he think the government will come forward to help us now?

It's obvious that cutting taxes for the wealthy and funding a war based on lies have depleted the government's treasury. And California being a blue state in the last few elections won't make Bush any more sympathetic to our needs.

The problem, of course, is Arnold no longer has any credibility with the people. His true colors were out there for all to see leading up to the special election. Is he saying these things now because he realizes that he needs to be the people's governor instead of the governor of corporations and big business, or is he only thinking about his re-election in November?

Does he care about rebuilding California, or only rebuilding his own image? Is he thinking about the people, or his legacy as governor?

Only time will tell. If he's sincere, then in January, 2007, Californians will be cheering him as a true advocate for the people. If he's not, then we will be sending him back home to Hollywood. There, he can always get a role in a low-budget film portraying a governor. Once an actor, always an actor, even if he was never really a very good one.

Teacher Watch: Preschool Definitions and Data

2005-12-29T08:18:00.000-08:00

Since mid-December, we've heard plenty of sound-bytes regarding Rand's projections about the effects of preschool in California. But inside the rhetoric of P-16 alignment, the Rob Reiner Initiative, and First Five California ads, the details of Rand's study are lost.

Thanks to a tip from a very smart cookie and loyal reader (who, by the way, I am fortunate enough to call my sister!), you now can read a narrative about the original data extrapolated by Rand: Arthur J. Reynolds' 16-year study of a unique and intensive Chicago preschool program which has been around for thirty-four years.

In short, the Chicago Child-Parent Centers (CPC) program is sharply different from Head Start or generic "universal preschool"--CPC requires parent participation, for example, and supports kids through five or six years of early childhood. It's not a quick, temporary, fragmented or inexpensive bandaid "fix" of anything.

You'll note, at the bottom of the article, even Reynolds' optimism about CPC wanes now in the face of expected cuts to reduce the number of years students can access the program. It doesn't seem that politicians are too concerned about clarifying precisely what kind of program they want to apply in California. But with money on everyone's mind, it's doubtful that a statewide CPC program is the planned financial commitment.

Taking the "Pre" out of Pre-School?

2005-12-21T07:57:00.000-08:00

If you live in California, you must have noticed the increasingly varied ad campaign promoting preschool attendance. During the summer, one of the most common ads depicted two cops shooting the breeze inside their black & white, citing youth crime and dropout statistics, then smiling in unison as they turn to the camera and chime that preschool can solve everything.

A Rand study was published last week, asserting that for every dollar spent in California on preschool education, the state will yield $2.62 in returns. Funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (David Packard was co-founder of tech giant Hewlett-Packard), Rand used 2001 data generated by Arthur J. Reynolds' study of a comprehensive, multi-year preschool support program in Chicago. Rand extrapolated Reynolds' findings and applied them to each region of California.

Meanwhile, there had already been a steady drumbeat of new advertisements, specifically three you've probably seen. A boy races through crowded city streets as if running away from committing petty theft, but he's really running to the line for his diploma as a voice-over describes how he "might be a little late" but he'll definitely "get there" if he goes to preschool. A no-nonsense white principal strides shiny hallways of her high school, declaring how all her problems--we imagine poor test scores, fighting, tardiness, drop-outs--will be solved if kids just go to preschool. More subtly, an Hispanic father and toddler daughter take clothes from the laundry bin, as a voice-over narrates how this moment can be an opportunity for "a lesson" on colors and counting.

What could possibly be problematic in the sudden push? As with most things in education-related sound bytes and marketing lately, questions about motive cannot be underestimated. Do we view pre-school as an opportunity for toddlers to learn social skills, play with each other, create with clay and paint, listen to stories, sing, eat, and have free access to a rich "print environment" with books and letter blocks? Or is preschool just an earlier opportunity to make kids test and assessment ready, training them for a lifetime of giving the right answers? Is it possible that the latter motivation might easily exploit the former?

This distinction has just been raised in an open letter recently published by members of the Alliance for Childhood. As with No Child Left Behind legislation, politicians and business interests continue to employ the rhetoric of child-concern to fortify a more reductive view of education as "workplace training." More taxpayers--parents and teachers--must examine these conflicts and raise questions in their local communities.

The push for preschool is not just a recent idea, and it's not purely a California phenomenon. At the 2005 Association of Test Publishers (ATP) conference, coming off the meeting of the National Governors Association (NGA) in February, P-16 alignment was all the rage. P-16 alignment argues that all students, from preschool through university, should be on the same track of standardization to job-readiness and economic productivity. Documents from the NGA on the subject emphasize the need for government involvement--whether compulsory or voluntary remains a question--to make a transition "seamless," literally between birth and school attendance. And how do we know if students are "ready" for anything now? We test them.

Certainly no one can argue against being prepared for a job, but the question again becomes how students are trained to work, for whom they are working, what students will learn to expect from themselves and other people, and how they will be rewarded. Consider corporate guts in retirement and health benefit funding, outsourcing, the Wal-Mart effect. Do we want our young people to know when they're being handed a raw deal? If there's no bubble form for them to fill out for injustice, will they know how to speak up? The public doublespeak among business leaders like Man of the Year Bill Gates may pay lipservice to the dead "assembly-line" model of education, but the white collar obedience model isn't much better; everybody's hands just look a little less grimy at the end of the day.

Just a few social and economic elements/elephants in the room when we talk about preschool: poverty and lack of childcare, a general mistrust of parents, the low-level education and low professional status of teachers (mostly women) who work with our youngest children, and a tide of immigrant students who may or may not be literate in their primary languages.

How might we change the tenor of the conversation about early-childhood education so that we don't construct it as merely an antidote to crime and low test scores? What if, for example, we expanded funding to libraries, which provide free-standing access to reading materials that parents and children can choose together? Historically, access to books (not compulsory schooling) has been the key political empowerment issue: Stephen Douglas and Malcolm X write about how reading and writing changed their lives; early feminists crusaded for the right of women to be able to read and study as much as men. Just six years ago, Stephen Krashen studied the correlation between student success and book availability in Beverly Hills, Watts and Compton communities--not simply in school classrooms, but school and community libraries, bookstores and homes.

If we raise children who are curious, who read, write, think and ask questions, they'll be able to read between the sound-bytes. Sadly, perhaps this is the very reason that "preschool" and not "literacy" is the new political buzz.

Exit Exam Alternatives--Or Not?

2005-12-15T07:52:00.000-08:00

Jack O'Connell, California state superintendent of public education, called for a meeting this morning (a meeting he won't be in Sacramento to attend!), a gathering of non-teacher "experts" to weigh the pros and cons of alternatives to the current high school exit exam requirement. In six months, consequences of the high stakes exam will kick in for thousands of kids. As you might imagine, there are essentially two camps: those who argue that one multiple choice exam is not the best way to validate four years of learning, and those who argue that only a multiple choice exam can do just that.

Other states--including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont and New York--employ varying models of graduation assessment, in addition to, or as modifications for, one single exit test. Ideas include portfolios, native language testing for newly immigrant students and senior projects targeting the standards. New Jersey actually modifies test administration, allowing smaller pieces of the test to be taken at a time, linked more closely to specific subject matter instruction.

Some of the strongest and most prominent test advocates include representatives of California Business for Education Excellence. Jim Lanich, the president, dismisses alternatives as "subjective." (Seems he's been reading his Business Roundtable and Association of Test Publishers Bible: "To promote and preserve the general welfare of testing and its value to society, in all its forms and uses.") Lanich is also executive director of Just for the Kids, an organization whose name has creepy overtones when you realize that it's just another "accountability" lobbying group.

It's also crucial to remember what the newspapers aren't yet mentioning: the test in dispute is the High School Exit Exam produced by Educational Testing Service (ETS), highly-lucrative non-profit corporation which in November had its multi-million dollar contract renewed to manage and administer all test scoring and results for California. The stakes are at least as high for ETS as for California's schools--yet teachers are generally dismissed as the biased advocates in this debate.

Here's where the advocacy of the newly-refined UTLA platform has the potential to break ground in standing up for the complexities of learning, in a world where "people" and not "tests" have general welfare, and where kids and teachers proudly reclaim their vested interest in staying "in each other's way."

Watch for subsequent reports about what happens in today's meeting. The Sacramento Bee is closely following the story.

Teacher Watch: Kenneth Burke, Man of Letters

2005-11-27T10:34:00.000-08:00

He died in 1993, but 21st century teachers would do well to appreciate the educational path taken by Kenneth Burke and introduce him to their students. Burke's career (and his legacy of thinking) challenges dominant attitudes about "measuring" learning through tests and certificates. Arguably, his contributions are more relevant now than ever.

Burke famously dropped out of Columbia University in order to read, write and study on his own, penning heavy book-length works and hundreds of articles about language, philosphy, and literature. I once met a Columbia grad student at a conference in Leeds, UK, who confessed that Burke's legacy is an intimidation to even his most ambitious classmates, who are mortified to discover what he accomplished without credentials from the Ivy League. Some of Burke's significant texts include Counter-Statement (1931), Grammar of Motives (1945), Rhetoric of Motives (1950), and The Rhetoric of Religion (1961). He was friend or correspondent to many modernist writers and artists, including Jean Toomer, Marriane Moore, and William Carlos Williams. He worked for a time at The Dial (as a music critic!) and also contributed to The Nation. Despite his lack of a PhD, he was also a teacher in the ancient peripatetic tradition (i.e. he gave talks everywhere).

Burke examined language to interpret human motives and to advance complex dialogue--as an antidote to winner/loser debates and physical violence. His work is not easy to catalogue or typify, and Burke defended himself against being slotted into simplistic compartments of understanding. But his "place" is still debated by scholars in diverse disciplines, including literary theory, speech communication, composition, rhetoric, history, and theology.

What does this have to do with us now? Our perpetual bombardment of testing and failure in schools is counterpart, in domestic politics, to the state of perpetual war foreseen by Orwell--a state which haunted Burke and other writers who lived through the bloody beginnings of the past century. Burke's writings provide tools through which we can analyze and discuss motivations inside forces now assumed to be "objective," including multiple choice tests, automated essay scoring, textbook summaries, classroom performance systems, diplomas, and even teacher training.

For too long, schools have valued scrutiny over attentiveness. Extending the Burkean tradition, perhaps teachers and students can stand together for curiosity, life-work, and a commitment to posing questions that open rather than reduce conversation. In our own individual ways, we can do the difficult and sometimes uncomfortable work of breaking molds that confine us--because, as Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass, we too "contain multitudes."

Check out KB Journal for informational links, articles, new books and scholarship.

Breakfast with Hillary

2005-11-19T08:09:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, my wife and I had the opportunity to meet Neil Diamond. I remember how excited we were. We talked about it for months after. I also remember how excited we were when we had the opportunity to meet President Clinton at a private reception at the Pickfair Mansion in Beverly Hills. It was a fundraiser for a gun control group headed by Reagan's press secretary Jim Brady.

All of it was great including the secret service agents and their dogs. Clinton, ever the eloquent speaker, was a big hit.

I felt the same excitement again when I was lucky enough to have breakfast with Senator Hillary Clinton at a venue near the Los Angeles airport on Friday.

It all started when Artesia assembly member and 56 AD candidate Tony Mendoza invited me to be his guest at a gala at our alma mater--Cal-State University Long Beach. I was really impressed with the event, which was to celebrate the opening of a Center for Indo-American Studies at the campus, but I was even more excited when I met the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi.

He was such a genuine and sincere man whose love of humanity was quite apparent. It was obvious that his grandfather had left a lasting impression on him.

At the gala, Mendoza told me that he had been asked by an Indo-American host to be his guest at a breakfast for Hillary. Unfortunately, he would not be able to attend because he had a prior commitment.

I told him that I thought he was dumb for not wanting to meet the Senator until he told me that he had suggested that I go in his place. Then I told him what a genius he was!

Of course, Hillary was great, and made a point of greeting each one of us. We had the opportunity to have a picture taken with her before breakfast. She spoke passionately about the issues facing America today, and how disappointing some of the administration's decisions have been concerning the war in Iraq and the hurricane of Katrina.

She was asked if she was planning to run for President in 2008, and she said, "It's too early to think about anything else other than my Senate race in 2006."

She did say, however, that "I do admire South Asian countries who are ahead of America when it comes to placing women in high positions of leadership!"

She also was asked why, during the Clinton administration the Republicans were relentless with their attacks, but now the Democrats have little to say about "the current problems of indictments, cronyism, and incompetence."

Hillary replied that "Americans didn't seem to be ready to hear about the problems in Washington, but now they seem to be. So you will be hearing a lot more from Democrats as the 2006 elections draw near."

In attendance were representatives from Congresswoman Linda Sanchez's office as well as the appearance of Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi and State Board of Equalization John Chiang.

Overall, it was an experience I will always remember.

An Argument for Tenure--Part Two

2005-11-16T18:11:00.000-08:00

Here's an update to the previous post regarding the teacher at a private school who was fired for a volunteer job she used to hold with Planned Parenthood. Follow the link provided to the article in the Sacramento Bee. (Registration may be required.)

One key question: Will confidentiality bar the teacher from speaking up in public?

Loretto Settles with Teacher

A confidential deal avoids a wrongful termination suit in the controversy.

By Todd Milbourn -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PST Saturday, November 12, 2005
Story appeared in Metro section, Page B1

The Loretto High School drama teacher fired last month for past volunteer work at a Planned Parenthood clinic has reached a settlement with the Catholic all-girls school, attorneys for the teacher and school said Friday.

Marie Bain of Sacramento, who alleged last week that her termination was a case of religious and sexual discrimination and a violation of free speech rights, will not be reinstated but will receive compensation from the school. Neither side would disclose how much.

Teachers for Sale

2005-11-15T09:19:00.000-08:00

In my most recent small adventures courtesy of the Association of Test Publishers, I've received an email list of teacher name banks for sale by state and region--K-12 through Community College and University levels. Considering all the hubbub in recent years about identity protection, telemarketing and "opting out" lists, it's important for instructors to know that their professional contact information is being bought and sold.
How cheap are you?
Browse K-12 email lists
Browse 4-year University email lists

A few highlights:

North Dakota K-12 teachers (9,000+ contacts) are a bargain at $99.
California K-12 teachers (100,000+ contacts) go for $1249.
The whole country (1.7 million+ contacts) is a steal at $3999.

My last year as English department chair, I kept every catalogue, brochure and "special offer" that landed in my mailbox. By June, I had filled a giant plastic tub to past brimming. Apple logos everywhere. Plump kid faces and pretty teacher-ladies in front of green chalkboards. All the trappings and gimmicks of easiness and user-friendliness. What irritated me most were the packets from Cliffs and Sparks Notes, now billed as "study guides." But when I thought about it, I had to admit it made perfect sense: in a curriculum where novels are seen as "non-standard" material, who wouldn't like to teach the Cliffs Notes version? I thought about the generation of students raised on reading-for-testing, some of whom will become teachers themselves.

This insider's barrage of names for sale may not be surprising for professionals who deflect marketers on a day-to-day basis, but at least it provides us with a massive consumer's view of the educational meat market.

Exercise your right to opt-out.

Teacher Watch: ETS Monopoly Continues

2005-11-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

Educational Testing Service (ETS)--famed (or notorious?) publisher of the AP, SAT, LSAT, GRE, TOEFL, GMAT and most recently the HSEE--has again been granted an exclusive contract to administer the "mammoth" testing program for California students, grades 2-11, through 2008-09. According to ETS estimates, the contract is worth $170 million. The final price has yet to be negotiated.

Keep in mind that ETS maintains not-for-profit status under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. This means two things: ETS pays zero federal income tax and does not have to report any of its financial information to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The fact that ETS vies for public tax dollars makes no difference.

John Oswald, former president of the Association of Test Publishers and senior VP of ETS Elementary and Secondary Education, is reportedly "gratified" to see the state board reward ETS's performance since 2002-03. Interestingly, Oswald has been fairly open about ETS's essential monopoly: "This might sound a little silly, but I don't really think that we have competitors... We really do approach the market from a very different standpoint. We want to work with states that will use assessments to make teaching more effective, that will invest in professional development programs, and that are serious about curriculum reform. Our trustees have made that a matter of policy."

One of Oswald's ETS colleagues, President and CEO Kurt Landgraf, has clarified the corporation's attitude towards (public) money: "[ETS] will never be the low-cost bidder on a contract." Landgraf has also quipped, "I would really be happy if people didn't know what the 'T' meant in 'ETS'. I think of this as an educational-solutions company."

Read the full article about Thursday's new contract award in the Los Angeles Times California section.

Click links for more about ETS, John Oswald and Kurt Langdraf (as sources for above quotes). Ironically, the first appears on a website run by ETS sometimes-competitor Thomson Prometric. The other appears on the site of Stanford University of Education.

Teachers--Press Your Union Forward!

2005-11-06T21:46:00.000-08:00

I’m an eleven-year veteran California teacher, now in voluntary exile from the public K-12 system. Politically, I’ve registered as “refuse to identify” on the California ballot for the past three years. I hated Gray Davis but voted for Camejo, not Arnold. I’m pro-labor. And with two days to go, I’m still tempted to vote for Prop 75, the so-called “paycheck protection act.” I'd like to clarify why.

In years past, I happily paid dues for union representation at the collective bargaining table, even though my district (like many) is essentially a “closed shop” which doesn’t bother with member recruitment anymore. It’s the extra money, approximately thirty-eight percent of the now $927 annual paycheck deduction for my former colleagues, that bothers me still.

Where does all that money go? Let’s say where it doesn't. In the past ten years, neither the National Education Association nor the California Teachers Association has resisted corporate interest in the public money pots of compulsory education. I don’t mean Coke machines and advertising on the Internet, but the bedrock of schooling: curriculum, standards, instruction and assessment.

That’s what makes “Stop 75” ads comparing union and corporate donations to political candidates and parties frankly laughable and even disturbing. In fact, union dollars haven’t used their muscle to advance a coherent, anti-corporate agenda under the status quo.

The National Business Roundtable’s impact on standardization in schools has stood publicly un-critiqued by unions. Neither NEA nor CTA has scrutinized, in any coherent way, the current testing and reporting system. They’ve bought into Orwellian euphemisms like “collaboration” and “professional learning communities"--phrases which belie increasingly top-down, scripted, multiple-choice models of learning. Unions have at times traded teacher pay for professional autonomy and told teachers they will not support “insubordinate” defiance of unconscionable testing practices. Even with heavy access to the Democratic Party, the NEA pressed for more funding of the No Child Left Behind Act, rather than an overhaul and re-examination of school policy.

While both NEA and CTA advocate for important medical benefits, salary, tenure, and retirement investment, they don’t press for more funding of ongoing teacher education. I’m not talking about some in-house training workshop run by district lackeys, but subsidies for serious study, writing and research. (I know, I know: it’s pie in the sky for the lowly schoolmarms.)

No union resources have been used to raise awareness about the financial interests at stake for industry lobbying giants such as the Association of Test Publishers and the Association of American Publishers. I haven’t read a single critique of how public schools are used as a marketing platform for assessments in the wider business world. No foray of union voices clamored when the nonprofit Educational Testing Service was granted a virtual monopoly on test administration and reporting in California from Grades 2-11 in 2002--and then was commissioned to develop, administer, and score the California High School Exit Exam. No one complained when Grey Davis, in his final election year, abruptly allocated millions for a quick buyout of newly-minted books with the California standards branded into the margins. (Then-CTA-President Wayne Johnson outed Davis for soliciting campaign money as trade for political support--but why was Johnson surprised?)

When I attended the 2005 annual Association of Test Publishers conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, I saw representatives from Microsoft, Vantage Learning, Thomson Prometric, ACT, Harcourt, The College Board, Linux, Caveon Data Forensics, Pearson VUE, and Educational Testing Service. Even Famous Amos of chocolate chip cookie fame was there, singing and playing a kazoo onstage. The absence of educators, state and local school board members and other officials was noted for the record at least twice. But they moved on without us. And there were no union watchdogs at the table.

Ironically, the main reason given by most supporters of Prop 75 is that “unions have an agenda.” What agenda? My problem is that the teachers’ union--at the highest and most prominent level--has provided very little organized vision and resistance.

The teachers’ union knows better than anyone that a textbook isn’t just a textbook anymore, and that information and test graft are easily the new wave of public waste. We need more sophisticated arguments than simply “Our kids need books!” or “We love kids!”

I’ve seen pictures of CTA President Barbara Kerr beaming with the Gubernator before and after his election. Under her leadership, the union agreed (with reservations?) to permit the “borrowing” of $2 billion that never got returned. Current union ads whining about Arnold’s “betrayal” would be sad if they weren’t so infuriating. Did CTA--bankrolled by the rank-and-file--really believe The Terminator would be a true advocate for education? That union compromises hadn’t already set the stage for a smile and pat on the head (or the behind)?

What teachers need is organized civil disobedience and coherent philosophical leadership, not pretenses of “reform” inside a complacent system. Make unions rally the rank-and-file. Make unions stand up and defend their expenditures.

Then I’ll happily and proudly write an extra check.

Teacher Watch: Sandy Kress--Know this Face

2005-11-02T08:09:00.000-08:00

President Bush's central advisor on education policy, lobbyist and attorney Sandy Kress, also consults some of the most highly invested "pro-testing" interests in the country. Check out Jim Trelease's article, posted October 15 at http://davestoner.com

Kress recently spoke to Ray Suarez on PBS about Connecticut's lawsuit against the federal government over No Child Left Behind. You'll notice how, whatever the alternatives, testing is the starting and ending point:

"[T]here's lots of flexibility in this Act for Connecticut to do what it wants. They can do formative testing. They can do more in-depth testing. They can do testing by the way they can insist upon their contractor coming back faster than four months. They can do lots of things. The point is that parents and taxpayers want to know each year on a comparable assessment how youngsters are doing." (italics added)

Read the complete discussion at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/july-dec05/nclb2_8-24.html

Are Teachers at Odds Over Prop. 74?

2005-10-30T19:28:00.000-08:00

By LAUSD Teachers Larry Caballero and Tony Mendoza
From Column Left - Los Cerritos Community News- October 28, 2005

We were both surprised by Sunday's Los Angeles TIMES front page story entitled "Prop. 74 Has Some Teachers at Odds."

Apparently, there are some teachers in California who support it while the overwhelming majority of public school teachers do not. According to the story, teachers "are nervously wondering who among them will lose their jobs". If 74 passes, it would supposedly lengthen probationary periods for teachers and ease the rules for firing poor-performing veteran instructors.

The story also mentions how 74 "could rid California schools of ineffective instructors who curse at students, or talk on cell phones and show the movie Legally Blonde during class."

Frankly, we don't understand why some teachers are not opposed to 74 since it is a poorly drafted initiative which will not do anything to improve education in the classroom. It will also make it harder to remove poor teachers because schools must first find a qualified teacher to replace the one they want removed.

Even State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said, "The governor won't improve education with his half-baked ideas" since 74 will only make teaching less attractive in our state.

It's amazing to read that some teachers even believe that without 74, lazy and incompetent teachers will continue to teach in our classrooms. The reality, of course, is that very little good will come out of this proposition for several reasons.

First of all, the local school site administrator already can remove a poor teacher by simply documenting the infractions and by allowing the teacher a certain period of time to improve. If the teacher does not, then he's removed from the classroom.

The problem is not unqualified teachers as much as it is lazy administrators who don't do their jobs. It's like blaming the illegal immigrant who crosses over the border for wanting a job, but we don't blame the employer who hires the immigrant.

As for these teachers remaining in the classroom, we can assure you as veteran teachers that very few poor teacher survive very long in the classroom. No, they are not removed by the administrator, they choose to leave after their students confront them, and they will.

We're sure you remember when you were a young parent raising your small children. If you don't keep them occupied and busy doing something which is relevant, they will make your lives miserable with their behavior. It's the same in the classroom.

Teachers who are disrespectful to students or show movies every day hardly exist in today's classroom. The students would not tolerate it. Even one of the few teachers who support 74 had to admit that teaching "is really a draining kind of job. You
put so much of your heart and soul into it. I am exhausted every day."

At least, we agree with her on that, but to think that Proposition 74 is the answer is wrong. In order to improve our public schools, we need a state legislature and the community to work with the teachers and administrators.

Using ways to divide us all will not strengthen our public schools. This proposition will only cause more qualified people to leave teaching or not to enter the profession in the first place.

Vote NO on Proposition 74.

The S(H)MO Model--Post-Script

2005-10-29T10:17:00.000-07:00

The closing keynote address at the ATP "Innovations in Testing" conference was delivered by Wally Amos, of chocolate chip cookie fame. I had seen him standing among the exhibits that morning at breakfast wearing a watermelon-styled, crushed velvet pimp hat with matching shoes. He stepped to the stage tootling on a kazoo which, as he pointed out, was also decorated by watermelon decals--all in the spirit, he said, of reclaiming the watermelon for himself as a black person. He'd made millions, lost millions, made millions again. Anyone can. It's all about attitude.

Strange that we have no tests right now to reward "attitude" as an achievement itself. In fact, according to Professional Learning Community literature published by NES, factors such as "morale" are overestimated in many discussions of school improvement. I had hoped, in light of his humanistic optimism, Amos would present a more holistic view of "test innovation." I thought he'd maybe talk about the need for more library funding, for deeper "print environments" in classrooms and homes. But the thing was, he was addressing for-profit distance managers of education. He could gloss the idea of literacy as a self-evident principle (we're all for kids and adults reading, right?). In this way, he underscored the rhetoric and self-image of ATP, an organization, you remember, dedicated to protecting and defending the interests of testing, in all shapes and forms.

He did present two dolls he's designed, shaped like cookies and named Chip and Cookie, and he talked about how he was using them to promote literacy. But the happy-clappy tenor of the presentation--given what Jonathan Kozol and many other researchers have described as the tragically "unfulfilled promise" of Brown v. Board of Education--ultimately parroted a traditional defense of existing privilege and the status quo, a contemporary enactment of God's in his heaven, / All's right with the world!

The hall was filled with most of the seven hundred ATP attendees, mostly white faces, as Amos sang, read, played with his dolls, and talked. After three days dedicated to seminars about all manner of performance assessment--including panels on "legally defensible" testing, ATP beltway lobbying and test legislation, and the need for standardization from pre-K through college to the workforce as a religiously ultimate destiny--I couldn't help but feel Amos' speech in the back of my throat and the pit of my guts: here was yet another level of "performance" being assessed. I've since learned that the kazoo routine is one of his signatures, whether he's speaking at a graduation or accepting an award for his work promoting literacy.

(You can view actual video footage by clicking this link and downloading from Real Player: http://www.leadingauthorities.com/2891/Wally_Amos.htm).

Amos didn't talk about triumphing over childhood under Jim Crow laws, or the amazing fact that literacy tests to preclude voting were banned during his lifetime, in 1965. In fact, the narrative of his success pretty much began and ended in terms of business. A friendly woman next to me nudged my elbow. "What a positive message," she said, shaking her head. "What a positive message."

Here was a sad kind of minstrelsy, conjuring moments from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: a performance not just for whites, but for power.

No Child Left Behind--by Part-Time Instruction

2005-10-27T08:40:00.000-07:00

Serendipity strikes. I was looking this morning for the latest statistics on teachers who leave public schools and came up with a bonus: On the White House webpages devoted to education, I discovered George Bush's plan for an "Adjunct Teacher Corps." If you know adjunct instructors at the community college or university level, or if you've ever taught an "extended day," you know how the system can deeply sever overtaxed academic programs and staff. It's a business-style bandaid approach in lieu of reducing class sizes or investing in full-time instructors (with salary and benefits)--instructors who will be emotionally and practically attached to the workings of the school.

You'll note that the teacher degree statistics used to justify the adjunct program are math and science statistics--suggesting a need to bring more professionals from the business community into the classroom. Apparently, we already have plenty of working writers and artists in the schools. (And our kids do enough writing and reading already?)

As if fulltime teacher status wasn't low enough already, adjunct teachers in K-12 schools will have the least job security--and will be least likely to speak up. Bush's plan aspires to manage education the way Wal-Mart manages its stores. I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

Check out the website at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040121.html

Cubicle Training?

2005-10-26T13:44:00.000-07:00

This morning on public radio, reps from the Massachusetts 2020 Foundation talked about their program increasing the 6-hour school day to 8-hours--even if it costs recess. To be fair, the foundation argues that current inequities in schools can't be rectified within the "antiquated" 6-hour schedule (notice the appeal to a vague notion of social justice?), and that all students need more exposure to the arts. Still, it's difficult to ignore the fact that the new schedule more closely resembles the workday. One has to ask whose purposes are best served by two more hours of standardization.

Read how it's all about "coaching" achievement of "the American Dream" on the 2020 Foundation website: http://www.mass2020.org/

The S(H)MO Model--Part Five

2005-10-24T09:37:00.000-07:00

The 2005 ATP "Innovations in Testing" conference provided glimpses of the latest in curriculum and testing technology, straight from the industry professionals who research, develop, design and sell it.

At a table during luncheon the first day, I found myself with representatives from the Buros Center for Testing and--I'm serious--the Institute for Mental Measurement at the University of Nebraska. Two senior faculty had brought along two star grad students in psychometrics, who were both trying to pump me up to enter the field. "The demand is so great," one told me. "I've already been guaranteed a job. This is very common now. The money is incredibly good." (Little did he know: I was just one of those "teacher" people--unqualified, as Lee Jones of Riverside Publishing would say, to write her own test items.)

Setting aside my objections about relying solely on automated testing to evaluate individual learning--and individual people--I thought about how the wave of national demand might in fact be making it increasingly difficult to find highly qualified people to design the tests teachers are required to implement. (Forget the "highly qualified" teacher: what about the "highly qualified" psychometrician?)

As in any industry, overconsumption of a product does not necessarily guarantee that the manufacturing process will protect quality to meet demand. In fact, inflated demand and frenetic production increase the probability of error. Right now I'm only talking about test design. You may remember the gentleman from Thompson Prometric, who said he could "curl my hair" with stories about industry complicity in designing poor (or marginally ethical) workplace test instruments. But this doesn't include test administration, data management, and score reporting. How many times has your district mixed up test booklets, miscopied items, called committees to re-word in-house assessments, tried to re-route data that was mis-crunched the first time around? How many times have you asked yourself: Given the errors and inconsistencies I can see without looking very hard, what else is underneath? Why would conscientious teachers be labeled "defiant" or "insubordinate" (even by union leadership) if they questioned the instrument itself--or refused to administer it?

Consider: I saw one demonstration of cutting edge teacher certification assessments now used in England. In what's called "simulation" testing, would-be teachers must prove themselves competent in the domains of spelling, using statistics, word-processing, spreadsheets, database management, PowerPoint, email and Internet maneuvers. The keyboard literally tracks and logs the number and order of steps chosen to complete each task and then determines the level of teacher efficiency. This final threshold for UK certification reminds me of temp-worker tests I took between jobs in college. The emphasis on simple clerical skills (what Susan Ohanian has called "paraprofessional" skills) indicates that there's decreasing expectation for teachers to ask questions, innovate, or create. The consumer model demands obedience from teachers. And here's the rhetorical trope: The more obedient you are, the more you'll be praised for being an active and creative participant!

Mingling through poster sessions in the hotel lobby between breakout workshops, I found a vast range of quality and polish. Some companies, such as Promissor, Thomson, and Pearson, used top-of-the-line electronic equipment to display their products. A few showcased research presentations were simply PowerPoint print-outs tacked on boards. One woman, who worked in Florida teacher certification testing, handed out packets. She told me that in the previous year, thirty-five thousand tests had been ordered for teacher certification--but that the actual demand had been one hundred thousand. She said that the state was having problems keeping up with the demand. That they were trying to move toward automated essay scoring by scanning teachers’ handwritten texts into computers.

I found three companies pushing automated essay scoring for students: Pearson VUE (with KAT, Knowledge Assessment Technology), ETS Pulliam (Criterion Online), and Vantage Learning (Intellimetric). Company spokesmen emphasized that typing was the key to making this most efficient in classrooms, but when I asked how companies dealt with essays when computers weren’t available, say, or writing in the primary grade levels, I got this interesting tidbit: Handwritten essays can be shipped overnight to India, where they are transcribed at very low cost--with automated scores still returning to the teacher within a day! (Such transcription work was undoubtedly performed by some of the non-PhD caste in India, though Bill Gates had made no reference to this in his speech.) When I expressed doubt, one salesman at Vantage seemed so proud he had to insist. “It sounds inefficient,” he said. “But it’s affordable and it works. You’d be surprised.”

The buy-in for English teachers seems obvious: test corporations can reduce your grading workload. But there’s something else, too. If teacher workload can be reduced by automation, why decrease class size? New brands of “Teachnology” can reduce inefficiency by streamlining the human teachers and students out of each other’s way. For example, eInstruction was demonstrating its current line of Classroom Performance Systems Technology (CPS) programs. Individual students use remote control devices to answer banks of multiple choice questions on the internet. (Note: Ownership of these massive “question banks,” by the way, is a very big deal for ATP.)

With CPS remotes, teachers can employ LCD displays, PowerPoint and SmartBoards to broadcast formative “assessment practices” on classroom screens while the students click their responses. Then the computer--not the teacher--selects successive questions based on the group’s aggregate results for each item. Every time the class responds to an item, the screen can display a bar graph and percentage of collective results. Instant, outcome-based feedback! (Or: lots of trees but no forest.)

It was amusing that we conference attendees used the CPS remotes to complete evaluations for presentations, because over the course of three days, various people would step up to a microphone somewhere and remind us to “make sure you return the CPS that you picked up by mistake.” Here was a crowd of professional adults and the CPS units were still getting lost, pilfered, and probably broken. I thought: What if these people were teaching five sections of seventh graders every day?

That is, I suppose, an imaginative, funny, and frankly inefficient question.

An Argument for Tenure

2005-10-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

Note the following recent development as an example of why public school teachers have fought so hard to keep tenure--clearly, it's not just about maintaining a "job for life." (This woman was fired for a job she used to have!)

Anti-abortion mother got teacher ousted

By Todd Milbourn -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PDT Saturday, October 22, 2005
Story appeared on Page A1 of The Bee

The mother of a Loretto High School student obtained photographs that exposed a drama teacher as a former Planned Parenthood volunteer, a revelation that led to the teacher's firing last week. It wasn't the first time Wynette Sills raised her anti-abortion views on the all-female, private Catholic campus.

Sills, who leads anti-abortion rallies outside Sacramento-area Planned Parenthood offices three times a week, complained to school administrators last year about a classroom presentation on domestic violence, said Gail Erlandson, a theology teacher for 11 years at Loretto.

Finish complete article at The Sacramento Bee: http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/13752350p-14594085c.html

The S(H)MO Model--Part Four

2005-10-13T18:25:00.000-07:00

The morning I dressed for the first day of the ATP "Innovations of Testing" conference in Scottsdale, my husband and I had the television tuned to C-SPAN. There, in a re-broadcast from just a few days earlier, Bill Gates was addressing the National Governors' Association at their annual meeting. I recalled that only three weeks before that, George Bush had delivered the first State of the Union Address for his second term, where he lauded the "success" of No Child Left Behind, the positive results of testing, and articulated his mission to "demand better results from our high schools."

With perfect rhetorical symmetry, Gates railed against the failure of public high schools, noting that the U.S. ranks 16th among industrialized countries with its graduation rate of 73%. (Gates did not clarify differences in total enrollment or sheer numbers of graduates. A few examples at the top of the list, though Gates did not include names: Denmark has 100% graduation, Norway's a close second at 97%, and Germany comes in third at 93%. Discuss.)

Even as Gates conceded, "I'm not here to pose as an education expert," he followed by saying, "I head a corporation and a foundation." Then he proceeded to elaborate on his observations about specific campuses and key lingo of the test-to-success program. Gates lamented the U.S.'s lack of science PhDs compared to those in India and China, without clarifying the longstanding socio-economic stratification in those countries. He took time to promote his own private foundation's recent financial investments in American schools. One of his most interesting critiques was that only privileged students were studying Algebra II in high school, while poor, minority others were stuck learning to balance a checkbook. (I've seen plenty of AP calculus students who would benefit from practical clues about managing money--and watching for corporate scams--but that's an aside for now.) Variations of Gates' speech were published in national newspapers the following week (the LA Times printed one version March 1).

The evangelical terminology and its business agenda makes a kind of perfect wallpaper--you barely notice it. You take it for granted. When someone as rich as Gates talks about education, glosses over a phrase like "improve schools" or "settle for nothing less," it's easy to see how people figure, "He must have better things to do. So he must really care."

The timing of the ATP conference after such perfect prepping was hard to miss. This became more than a gut impression once the conference began. The keynote speaker, Gaston Caperton, new President of the College Board and former Governor of South Carolina, referred to the same talking points Gates did. Caperton mentioned that he was just coming from the NGA conference, and sometimes he didn't even cite Gates. The same was true when one speaker from Pearson Assessments addressed the general assembly as part of a panel called "Titans of Testing."

A few other highlights from proponents of the managed care model of education:

"Teachers are not trained to use formative assessments and change teaching on the fly, teachers are not qualified to write their own items...Districts are turning to test publishers for input on formative assessments to prepare them for high stakes tests...Test corporations need to be uncompromising in teacher training for use of benchmark assessments." (Lee Jones, President, Riverside Publishing)
"We need to acknowledge the similarities of our various textbooks--there's not that much difference [among company textbook products]...If teachers buy in [to focused study guides, shared plans and other data] they might be able to test less--because formative tests are more integrated [into curriculum]." (Steve Kromer, VP and General Manager, Pearson Educational Measurement)
"I'm not an expert in the field--I bring the business point of view...Formative assessments will replace teacher tests. Turning data into knowlege is key. We need to provide flexibility to non-expert users, be a facilitator of change without becoming the enemy--really reach out to unions, etc." (Jeff Galt, Harcourt Assessment)
"People are turning to testing corporations and not the textbook companies for tests and formative assessments...Our Natural Language Processing technology can help scan millions of sentences to choose for reading assessments...Professional development and consulting are integral parts of our offerings, but "data driven" decision-making scares teachers...Teachers teach because they love children, and data is noise. They should teach to standards, not in the same way they always have, but it's not test prep. Tests should be tied to textbooks, assessments, and standards." (John Oswald, Senior VP and General Manager, ETS Elementary and Secondary Education)

It's important to emphasize again that all the discussion about "teachers" and "classrooms" was uni-directional--from "us" to "them." The image of teachers as incompetent, scared of numbers, and incapable of vision was easy to perpetuate inside the "in-crowd." Our absence was noted, but was as moot as it was mute. They pressed on, unchallenged--no doubt comforted by their well-established and promoted national political and corporate agenda.

[Conclusion next week...]

Red Ribbon Weak

2005-10-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

It's worth asking: Would your school board be this gentle if one of its longtime overworked, lonely teachers had "a dependency problem"?

Maybe there's hope for the least of us.

***

DUI Charges Filed Against Superintendent
CHECKPOINT: Susan J. Rainey was arrested on I-215 after having dinner with neighbors.

08:05 AM PDT on Wednesday, September 28, 2005
By SARAH BURGE / The Press-Enterprise

Misdemeanor DUI charges have been filed against Susan J. Rainey, 58, superintendent of the Riverside Unified School District, following a Labor Day weekend traffic stop on Interstate 215.

Officer Ron Thatcher, of the California Highway Patrol, said the drunken driving charges were filed with Riverside County's Southwest Justice Center on Friday.

Thatcher said Rainey was stopped about 10 p.m. Sept. 2 while driving south on I-215 south of Newport Road, and arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol.

Attempts to reach Rainey on Tuesday by phone were unsuccessful. Riverside Unified board president Maxine Frost said Rainey decided to take 30 days leave. Frost said the superintendent is getting professional help for a "dependency problem." Frost said the board supports Rainey's decision and praised the work she has done as superintendent.

"We're looking forward to her return in October," Frost said.

In the meantime, Frost said, Deputy Superintendent Michael Fine will be the acting superintendent. Frost said Rainey was stopped at a sobriety checkpoint that diverted all of the southbound freeway traffic. Rainey was on her way to her vacation home in Oceanside after having dinner with her neighbors, Frost said.

"She said it was a bad decision and she shouldn't have done it," Frost said. "She's been alone," Frost said, pointing out that Rainey's husband died recently.

"She's been working especially hard in the last year," Frost said. "Too hard."

Rainey is scheduled to appear in court Nov. 7.

**Reach Sarah Burge at (951) 368-9642 or sburge@pe.com

The S(H)MO Model--Part Three

2005-10-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

At the 2005 ATP "Innovations in Testing" Conference, I was privy to more goodies than I knew what to do with. When I first checked in, I received the ATP logo conference tote bag, packed with treats above and beyond the giant notebook tidily organized with daily agendas, speaker bios, and corporate sponsor ad-sheets. A few highlights from the tote as well as things I picked up during poster (advertiser) sessions over the three-day period:

Blue and orange M&Ms in a sealed baggie, labeled: "You can't manage what you can't measure." (Caveon Data Forensics)
A blue luggage tag, inscribed: "College Board: connect to college success, Research and Pyschometrics."
A laser pointer: "LaserGrade: Your computer Testing Specialist"
A puzzle-shaped piece of chocolate stamped with the Thompson Prometric logo.
An Educational Testing Service (ETS) calendar and notepad.
A green Performance Testing Council (PTC) button that we were encouraged to wear throughout the conference. (I couldn't bring myself to do this. Most people didn't.)
A Thompson Prometric Testing flow-chart map, made into a kraft-wrapped puzzle
A dainty box of RecruitMints: The flavor that lasts a lifetime! Your best career investmint! (Measured Progress)
A bag of Famous Amos Cookies: "Join us for our closing keynote speaker Wally Amos, 'the face that launched a thousand chips.' " (more on this later)

If there was one theme, it was advertising. Even though three of ATP's four divisions are not directly related to education, it was startling how promotional language used by both business and education corporations fit seamlessly, interchangeably together. When I didn't recognize a particular company name, I often had difficulty discerning at first whether it was in the business of testing kids and schools or employees. The overlap is merely tangible evidence of the Business Roundtable's powerful influence on education policy, something Susan Ohanian has documented for years. I found myself having Professional Learning Community and WASC committee flashbacks.

A few highlights from some of the prominent sponsors:

Questionmark Perception: Explore the enclosed CD and get to know the benefits of using effective and interactive assessments throughout the learning process.
Professional Examination Service: Delivering Client and Stakeholder Satisfaction
The Pearson VUE difference! [...]Biometric processes help authenticate valid test takers from imposters... Truly collaborative customer relationships featuring service excellence...
Promissor: Knowledge Beyond Doubt, The Total Solution Provider
Thomson Prometric: Enhanced testing capabilities from us. Improved testing solutions for you. Measuring success.
ETS Pulliam: Instructional Data Management System, Standards Based Teaching, Learning and Accountability.
E-Instruction, Classroom Peformance System (CPS): Successful Training is No Accident.
Vantage Learning: Intelligent Technology for Intelligent Decisions, Measuring Success One Student at a Time
Integral 7: How Can You Effectively Manage Your Business Without Effectively Managing Your Data?!
M2: Research and Psychometric Services: Meaningful Measurement
Castle Worldwide, Inc.: Building Relationships, Offering Guidance, Tailoring Solutions.

There was something else equally striking: a co-option of language (or glosses of language) from the humanities and from social justice movements, in order to articulate, promote, and justify test-as-measurement.

In the opening session, the Industrial-Organizational (I.O.) Division chairman gave a talk with an almost "I Have a Dream" tenor. As best I could, I scribbled notes on what I could get verbatim. His speech crescendoed with this point: "I would like to see a qualitative change in how the public views testing, to see testing as the solution not the problem. Testing as the best way to judge who's qualified. There is nothing better than testing to do this. I look forward to the day when a job applicant will be stunned if there is no testing." This speaker emphasized the urgency of lobbying efforts, PR and legal monitoring, and promoting test industry interests to the general public. He also pointed out that the strongest resource of ATP was in fact the I.O. Division itself, needing to lead the drive for change.

So much for on-site vertical teams. I thought about this a lot during the conference. While so many individual teachers were hard at work inside isolated classrooms--convinced by teacher-training workshops that the big picture is too daunting, too overwhelming, too irrelevant, that their day-to-day work with individual kids is the only precious thing that counts--here was a convention of professionals revving massive financial, political and rhetorical engines to drive the entire educational train down the track. These folks spare no expense. They stick to time limits in their meetings. They make no apologies for their interests. They don't whine.

And as long as teachers buy in to doublespeak about "collaboration" and "standards," ATP doesn't need smoke-filled back rooms, either.

[Continued next week...]

Just Say No

2005-09-18T15:07:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, California teachers spoke out when the governor broke his promise to repay the two billion dollars he borrowed from the education budget. California nurses took the governor to court when he tried to roll back the hospital staffing law that protects patients. California’s firefighters and police officers attacked the governor's plan to eliminate survivor benefits for family members when an officer or firefighter is killed in the line of duty.

Now the Alliance for a Better California, a coalition of teachers, firefighters and nurses, kicked off the campaign to defeat Proposition 75 by unveiling its first TV ad.

The 30-second spot began airing statewide on September 8 and explains to California voters that Prop. 75 has a hidden agenda to silence the voices of teachers, nurses, firefighters and police who spoke out against cuts to education, health care and public safety earlier this year.

"Like previous California initiatives, Prop. 75 has a hidden agenda. Its real agenda is to make it easier for the governor and his big business pals to cut school funding, health care and public safety," said CTA President Barbara Kerr.

The top seven donors to Prop. 75 are major contributors to the governor, and a coalition of business and anti-tax groups was formed to promote Prop. 75 by gathering petition signatures earlier this year. If Proposition 75 passes, who will protect the workers in education, health care and public safety? It's a sure bet it won't be the governor who favors big business.

Prop. 75 will place restrictions on only public employees and would not impact any other organization that makes political contributions, including corporations. Yet according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, corporations already outspend unions by a 24-1 margin nationally.

Voters are fair and do not appreciate being lied to. It is apparent that Prop. 75 wants to thwart the efforts of workers and their organizations to reach out to the public, and voters won't be fooled. If this measure is so good for the public, then it should impact corporations and big business as well. Otherwise, it comes across to the voters as mean-spirited. Just say NO to 75.

The S(H)MO Model--Part Two

2005-09-11T23:36:00.000-07:00

So what about this "managed care" model of education? Something we learn to intuit--if vaguely--and even accept, deep down, as un fait accompli?

Early last spring, I went to Scottsdale, AZ for the Assocation of Test Publishers (ATP) "Innovations in Testing" conference. It was the sixth annual conference of the lobbying and networking group. ATP has existed since 1992, maintains non-profit status (under Section 2.01 of Illinois law), and keeps headquarters in Washington, D.C.

I had discovered ATP when its acronym appeared in a board member biography for a textbook company I was researching. I went to the website, where I was intrigued by the clear and unmitigating language of the organizational goals, especially the first: "To promote and preserve the general welfare of testing and its value to society, in all its forms and uses."

Because ATP isn't a 501(c)3 nonprofit public benefit corporation, it can legally restrict access to some materials for the general public. Some of these materials include legal updates, complete member directories, and a "school interoperability network."

Just browsing the site, however, it's not difficult to find names--a roster of members piling up financial resources, cachet, and prestige: The College Board, Educational Testing Service (ETS), SASSI, Microsoft, Linux, Lotus, Edison Electric Institute, Hewlett-Packard, Thomson, Pearson VUE, Harcourt...and on and on. Some of the most invested clients come from multi-national corporations based overseas, in countries such as China, U.K. and the Netherlands. ATP has four divisions, only one of which is directly "educational." The remaining three cover all areas of business and professional testing: certification/licensure, clinical, and industrial/ organizational.

K-12 education serves as an invaluable marketing platform for testing as a self-evident sorting mechanism. A part of the "real world" into which all students will venture.

It cost $650 (ouch!--at least deductible as writer's reseach) plus driving expenses (we live fairly close, in California) to get there. My husband's father happens to own a small apartment where we could stay. Unlike many conference participants whose expenses were covered by the test companies that sent them, I didn't have to sleep at the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa, where all meetings and panels were held. That--plus golf on the prestigious course--would have cost another $200+ per day. Many participants flew in from all over the country.

According to one estimate in a speech the first morning, there were approximately 700 attendees this year. A vast majority were white. The most prominent black male was the outgoing ATP executive director, William G. Harris, who went--I kid you not--by a big "G" on his nametag. Everyone called him "G," and I wondered if they figured this would buy them some clout in the 'hood, if anyone was checking for "racial sensitivity" among test professionals. As a white person, I was mortified.

The dearth of educators, whether from city or state boards, unions, K-12 teachers, or universities, was fairly startling. This absence was lamented out loud at least twice--once in the general session and once in the smaller education division meeting. But lamentation goes only so far.

Fact is, the conference takes place during a regular work week, when public school employees would be highly unlikely to attend. The expenses of the conference alone are enough to discourage attendance by any typical government employee. The formal Catch-22, offered as a reason there would be little remedy: Grants or incentives to make attendance affordable for public system employees would be illegal, as ATP's member organizations stand to benefit from contracts and contacts gained. It would be a conflict of interest.

It's strange that it would be a conflict of interest to have reps from public entities looking over the shoulder of private corporations who gather pots of public money from the public system.

Two key facts I gathered from attending panels and doing a lot of listening:

1. The test industry is not currently regulated by the federal government. This is ironic, considering the government's reliance on test instruments to evaluate teachers and schools. (One man from Thompson Prometric said he could "curl my toes" with stories about tests designed to fit client demands for particular results--low or high cut-offs, for example--rather than according to "best practices" encouraged by the industry.)

2. ATP has a love-hate relationship with No Child Left Behind legislation. On one hand, it stimulates demand for tests and test-support. On the other hand, it creates scrutiny by the Feds, who may eventually intrude with regulation. NCLB may also motivate government to get into the test game itself--as a fierce and unwanted competitor.

[To be continued]

First Daze

2005-08-30T08:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the first official school day in Riverside Unified. I checked with my mother in the evening to see how things went. She'd spent hours of unpaid overtime in the weeks prior organizing, cleaning, and decorating her room to make it welcoming for new students.

"No AC," she said. "All day." I doubt her school's situation was unique.

Some rooms had it, some didn't. (Divide and conquer? Gaslighting? "You must have done something to deserve the lack of air"?) No windows in the bunker, of course. Not everyone had fans. Ironically, the district had shelled out big bucks to replace the air conditioning system two years ago. Part of "modernization" grant projects.

This is another vividly depressing example of how individual teacher efforts to make the best of things can be smashed and demoralized.

Anonymous OSHA hotline, anyone?

The S(H)MO Model

2005-08-29T16:36:00.000-07:00

The annual AYP and API rankings were published mid-August--the annual treat--complete with aggregate and disaggregated test results for individual schools, districts and grade levels. If you teach, on day one or two of buy-back meetings you no doubt received giant packets of score results for grade levels, individual classes, individual items. Someone tries to read aloud the same reports on an overhead or using powerpoint. It can be migraine inducing. I used to imagine some poor schlub down at the district office having to make these thousands of packets and constantly running out of toner. There are so many pages now, though, we know these copies have to be hired out in district copy centers, sparing no expense, even in districts where teachers may still labor day-to-day under a paper ration.

Like the NYSE and NASDAQ reports, the bombardment of data can be impenetrable and intimidating. Those numbers suggest "authority," a final antidote for the unreliable "hysteria" of language, ambiguities, social contexts. (I'm sorry, was your observation research-based?)

But unless you've had a psychometric implant surgically installed, what you may be looking for as a teacher, parent, or student, is something more elusive than a number. Something a bit more desperate. Something we've been trained in the past ten years (at least) to be unsure that we deserve. We're looking for validation, any reason to let the air out of our lungs. To trust that the curriculum police won't come knocking at the classroom door, the house. To whisk our kids off to some brave new data-topia.

Sorry to say, the police are already here: kinder, gentler and comfortably inside. Corporate influence isn't relegated to Coke machines and Channel One anymore. It's implicit in the relationship between test publishers and textbook makers. It's been secured in the business move of financial and information giants to purchase textbook and testing companies in the past twenty years.

Just a few connections:
McGraw Hill--publisher of the CAT-6: Publishes the S&P Indexes.
Pearson--publisher of Prentice Hall/Globe Fearon: Publishes The Financial Times.
Reed-Elsevier--publisher of Harcourt/Holt & Stanfords 9, 10 et al: Owns Seisint Technologies, inventor of MATRIX software to track citizens for Homeland Security.

These people don't dress like surveillance experts or police. They aren't mean, either. When their marketers and salespeople come to districts and meet with teachers, they woo us with bags, free books, sometimes wine-and-dine evenings with prizes and lots of attention. At one meeting I attended as Department Chair, a district liaison with pink cheeks gushed, "These people really know how to treat teachers."

On the surface, yes. But corporate practices (including lobbying efforts) clarify two implicit convictions: 1. schools must serve as delivery mechanisms for products that sell political results; 2. public schools themselves can be a lucrative market, held captive by compulsory student attendance. Even a product that seems to fail can be marketed to justify the need for yet another product--another test, a new textbook series, a revised curriculum map, a revamped data management system. All at taxpayer expense.

A teacher's own knowledge, experience and questions get pitted as objects "in the way." Just as health maintenance organizations and insurance companies now tell the average doctor how and when to practice medicine, test and data management corporations have created a priority system that says teachers need to be told--by someone not a teacher, not interested in teaching--what will and won't work with students.

This model in policy and practice, which we could call an SMO model ("School Maintenance Organization" model), repeats one concept again and again--namely, that the teacher herself never knows what's really happening in her classroom. Despite the pretty or soft-sounding words, the candlelit dinners and other treats. Despite popular Orwellian euphemisms like Professional Learning Community or Collaboration or No Child Left Behind.

Last spring, I attended an industry conference for the Association of Test Publishers (ATP) in Scottsdale, Arizona. I attended as a grad student, and had to cough up the full $650 attendance fee--covered for many attendees by the test corporations they came to represent. God knows I couldn't exactly afford the expense, but I wouldn't trade what I learned there for anything.
[to be continued...]

Thanks, But No Thanks

2005-08-16T19:56:00.000-07:00

As a veteran public school teacher for 38 years, it's really laughable to read last week's Column Right in the Los Cerritos Community News when the writer, who is the President of the Cerritos Republican Club, is feeling sad for us poor teachers because "so many teachers who give themselves to our nation's youth are being distracted from their mission by having to fight their own unions."

Nonsense.

He says that "many" teachers are expressing their opposition to recent actions by their unions to raise fees for political purposes. He mentions the California Teachers Association as one of the major culprits. I would like to know how many is "many."

First of all, teaching is a very difficult job, and that's why 50 percent of us leave the teaching profession after the first five years. If it were not for our teacher associations--unions as the writer calls them--the percentage of teachers leaving would probably be higher.

I can assure the writer that we are not being distracted by our "unions." We know that if it were not for those professional organizations, who work day after day to protect our rights, we would have a difficult time indeed just to survive. As it is now, most new teachers are unable to afford a home or raise a family. And that's after five years of college!

If it were not for the "unions," we teachers would not be able to afford decent health care for our families or be eligible for liability insurance in case we are accused of some alleged wrong doing. If it were not for the "unions," I doubt any teacher would be able to retire with the hope of living a decent life.

Thank you, but no thanks to the writer who is so interested in our welfare. As a member of the California Teachers Association state council that represents 345,000 teachers, I can also assure the writer that we were more than happy to pay a few dollars more a year to have our professional rights protected by a governor who call us "special interests."

I guess I shouldn't complain since the last Secretary of Education called teachers "terrorists."

Since the writer seems to care so much about us, perhaps he should be writing to the governor to ask him to repay the two billion dollars he took away from us after promising to give it back to the schools this year. The writer is correct--we are expressing our opposition as never before, but it's not against our "unions," it's against the governor who lied to the schools and the children of this state.

And now he wants the voters to support Proposition 74 that would extend the period before teachers are eligible for due process under the law. Proposition 75 would require loads of paperwork in order to make it more difficult for employee unions to make political contributions that would benefit their employees, and Proposition 76 would give the governor the power to cut the budget on his own without discussion with the state legislature. What a guy.

As for the writer, don't be so worried about us being distracted by the "unions." We know who is out there caring for the needs of parents, teachers, and students, and it's not he, the governor, or some bogus legal defense organization.

The Almighty Standards

2005-07-26T05:23:00.000-07:00

Teachers aren't supposed to argue for ignorance, but I'm beginning to think the wrong kind of information is worse. Yes, I suppose I'm talking about the almighty standards. It's not that I have any truck with trying to measure up to a mark. Expectations are wonderful. As a classic under-achiever I can attest that the most meaningful portion of my education was the direct result of teachers who demanded a great deal more from me than I would ever have sought for myself. I'm eternally grateful to a hand full of brilliant souls who knew who I was and what I might do long before I did.

They had standards and they held me to them before any legislative body prescribed that they should. So, I don't argue that they shouldn't have. However, they understood the difference between holding me to standards and substituting those standards for a curriculum. I'm no expert. I'm just a teacher. In fact, I'm not quite a teacher, not in district terms. I haven't learned enough useless information yet. I have another year to go.

I was an ignorant writer in my former life. I haven't become famous, but I have been very successful in personal terms. I wrote screenplays and novels and stage plays for twenty years believing that one day I would seek an opportunity to teach and, corny as it sounds, maybe even inspire a student or two. All of my adult life I have continued to write and to read and study literature in a pleasant effort to learn all I could from and about authors I admired.

Imagine my surprise when LAUSD informed me that I was totally unqualified to teach English. Neither professional resume nor a masters in literature cut any rarefied LAUSD ice. Or as one helpful advisor put me wise "We don't teach the story. We teach the standard nowadays."

In other words information is obsolete. Content is passe. We don't have to get bogged down in subject matter. We have the standards to teach. It isn't what a student has learned that matters. It's the student's ability to list the things he or she should have learned.

I'm an old dog, I learn slowly, but I learn. I'm being schooled in the ways of the standards and teachers performance expectations too. So never fear that I have been unloosed on students without thorough redress of my ignorance as to why everything I know and believe about reading and writing is extraneous. Experts and coaches are standing by as we speak.

Boy, I'm glad no really great writers have applied with LAUSD. Think how insufferably ignorant a Doestoyevsky or Woolf or Faulkner or Toni Morrison would be. And the next time some ignoramus starts touting Shakespeare I know what I'm going to say: "Oh, yeah, 'to be or not to be' and all that, but what did the guy know about Reading 2.3?"