Corporate Reformers' Motivations Explained!

Why do Bill Gates and Eli Broad and Michael Bloomberg and the Waltons and the Koch brothers and David Tepper and all the rest think they can come in and radically remake both American schools and the teaching profession to their liking?

Here's one explanation:

It wasn’t just the candy experiment, either. In a game where a computer rolled dice and any score above 12 got the user a $50 gift certificate, those making more than $250,000 were more likely to lie to researchers than those making less than $250,000. “A $50 prize is a measly sum to people who make $250,000 a year,” Berkeley’s Paul Piff told Bloomberg. “So why are they more inclined to cheat?

In another test, researchers observed cars at a busy intersection. Drivers in pricey vehicles were more likely to cut off other drivers and less likely to stop for pedestrians than drivers in cheaper cars.

Researchers also asked study participants to go on an employment Web site and negotiate salaries with people seeking permanent employment. The participants were told the position they were filling would soon be eliminated. Higher net-worth participants were less likely to pass this information along than lower net-worth participants.

Bloomberg has more details on the findings here, including interviews with the authors. They also note that the study isn’t alone. It “builds on previous research that has shown wealthy people are worse at recognizing how others feel and are more likely to be disengaged during social interactions than others.” [emphasis mine]

Says it all, doesn't it?

Reformy Cory

Newark's mayor is one reformy dude:

Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker said Monday that he backs Gov. Chris Christie’s education reform measures — including school choice and teacher tenure changes — but he is critical of the new plan for higher education.

[...]

In addition, Booker said he favors more educational choices for children, including charter schools, public schools run by nonprofits and school vouchers. But he said he was not giving up on traditional public schools, either.

“I hold no allegiance to a school delivery model,” Booker said. “I really don’t care if you’re a charter school, a magnet school, a traditional district school. The question is: Are you providing quality education?”

But bad schools must close, and that includes charter schools, he added. Booker said two to four charter schools in Newark should close, though he declined to name which ones he had in mind.

“The biggest mistake in the charter schools movement is … defending bad charter schools,” Booker said. “They are not closing quick enough in the state of New Jersey. Many have had years to show if they can make progress, and they’re just not (doing that).”

Cory, the biggest problem isn't that were not closing bad charters fast enough - it's that these schools ever opened in the first place!

But if you're so damn gung-ho, and if it's so important to the kids, why don't you man up and say which of these schools should close? Put yourself on the line for once in your life: in your expert opinion, who do you think needs to go?

And what are you going to do with the kids who "chose" to go to these schools? Throw them into more charters they "chose," and then close those down in a few years when they don't perform? Or hadn't you thought that through yet?

Lord save us from celebrity education "reformers"...

"Look under your seats - you all get to run your own charter school!"

Fool Me Twice...

When ACTING NJ Education Commissioner Chris Cerf worked in NYC, he swore that teacher evaluation data would NEVER be released to the public. Last week, it was.

Now, he's making the same promises in New Jersey. How do you think this will turn out?

Yesterday, acting education commissioner Chris Cerf tried to quell worries and said he would be against public disclosure of individual teachers' scores.

"I don't believe in that," Cerf said in an interview last night. "It is counterproductive, and I believe it is not something we should put out. And especially putting that out in isolation, it's against everything we want to do."

ACTING Commissioner, the folks you worked with at the NYCDOE were the ones who urged the NYC press to file freedom-of-information requests for the data. The weak protestations that they are only following the will of the courts are ridiculous: they started the whole thing! Your old boss, Joel Klein, always wanted the data made public. Releasing these error-ridden, unreliable ratings was always part of the plan.

Further, ACTING Commissioner, you have a history of working the press to meet your own ends. You were in charge of the "Truth Squad" at the NYCDOE that leaked information you had accumulated about Diane Ravitch to be used to savage her in the press. (Is there a similar shop currently set up in the NJDOE? Hi, fellas!)

So you'll forgive me, ACTING Commissioner, if I'm not ready to merely take you at your word on this. Your boss has already lied about our pensions, and you've been incredibly disingenuous about the state of New Jersey's schools and the "achievement gap". Why would any teacher ever believe you on this issue? As the NJEA says:

"In two and a half years, we have seen enough misinformation from this administration that, let's just say, our caution lights are on," said Steve Wollmer, communications director of the New Jersey Education Association. 

[...] 

"It's a disaster that shouldn't happen anywhere, and certainly not in New Jersey," said Wollmer. "If you want to totally alienate an entire generation of teachers, that's the way to do it."

That is exactly right, except we know that this administration couldn't care less about "alienating" teachers: insulting us has pretty much been Chris Christie's entire education policy.

There is no doubt where this is going, and no one should be fooled by Chris Cerf's pie-crust promises ("easily made; easily broken").  The only question is: what are we going to do about it?

30 Pieces of Silver

It doesn't take a lot of money to sell out teachers:

In the latest move to use money as an incentive, Gov. Chris Christie's administration has added to its new school funding plan a multimillion dollar program to reward schools and districts that meet specific goals and implement targeted reforms.

Acting education commissioner Chris Cerf outlined the new "Innovation Fund" in last week's 83-page report on school funding, which serves as the basis of Christie's proposed system for distributing state aid to schools next year and beyond.

Under Cerf's plan, the Innovation Fund would serve two functions.

First, it would provide dollar rewards to schools that make specific achievement gains, such as the largest improvement in fourth-grade reading scores for low-income students or the biggest jump in graduation rates.

Second, it would serve as the central pool of funds for a competitive grant process. Schools would apply for specific projects and programs that meet the Christie administration's reform agenda for raising achievement, including greater teacher accountability or strategies for helping the very lowest-performing schools. [emphasis mine]

"Greater teacher accountability" is code for "teacher evaluations tied to standardized tests." So it's worth remembering that the ACTING Commissioner, back in his NYC days, was the one who swore that teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores would never be revealed to the public. That pie-crust promise was broken last week, much to the glee of the teacher bashers.

Make no mistake: the schools that are taking these relatively paltry sums are selling out their teachers. The entire point of this exercise is to put in place a data system that will eventually make teachers' VAM/SGP scores public.

Of course, the ACTING Commissioner could prove me wrong right now: he could support legislation that would make it illegal to publish this data. Will he?

Poverty, Schmoverty

Childhood poverty bothers ACTING Education Commissioner Chris Cerf: he's worried the little waifs might be ripping him off:

In New Jersey and across the nation, the number of students living in poverty is determined by how many of them qualify for free and reduced-price lunches, a federal program run by the Department of Agriculture. But the count is not just about the federally subsidized meals — schools with poor students in the lunch program receive up to 57 percent more state aid than their peers.

Citing growing concerns with the program’s susceptibility to fraud and error, acting Education Commissioner Chris Cerf is calling for a governor-appointed task force to study whether there’s "an alternative way to measure New Jersey’s at-risk student population." The move has the potential to shift where the money goes in the state school system, rekindling New Jersey’s long debate over school funding for needy children.

"It is hardly a well kept secret that (free and reduced lunch counts) are inaccurate and even at times fraudulent," Cerf said in an e-mail to The Star-Ledger Saturday. "We owe it to school districts and taxpayers alike to explore whether there are better ways to identify disadvantaged children."

See, something horrible happens when these little grifters or their schools fake the poverty level: they get more money for education! And then the state might have to stop giving tax gifts to millionaires and corporations! Can you imagine?!

But wait - the long con is even worse than that:

The report, however, does not stop with a call to re-evaluate how poor students are counted.

Cerf also challenges the long-held assumption that poverty puts students at a disadvantage in the classroom.

His report recommends the state study "whether a poor student should be presumed to be educationally at-risk, or whether there is a more precise way to define at-risk students."

It is, of course, totally wacko to think that a kid in poverty might have challenges that a kid with some economic stability in her life does not. That near perfect correlation between test scores and poverty is obviously a coincidence. It's not like it's been proven over and over and over and over...

Thank goodness we have folks like Amanda Ripley, who has "...been to Finland, Korea and Poland working on this book, and I have the luxury of spending hours reading PISA results." She, like the ACTING Commissioner, can spend her days worrying that we might be overestimating poverty, which is a nice way to "fix" poverty without actually doing a damn thing.

Of course, we could always ask an expert about this:

The school funding issue aside, the state should be examining fraud in the lunch program, some education experts say, but eliminating it as a measure of poverty goes too far.

"It ain’t perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got," said Bruce Baker, an associate professor at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.

A recent analysis by the state auditor estimated that up to 37 percent of participants in the federally administered free and reduced-lunch program are fraudulently enrolled. Cerf cites that finding, along with reports by The Star-Ledger last year that Elizabeth’s school board president and two spouses of district employees allegedly falsified their income so their children could receive meals, as proof of the need for a change.

"There is a perverse incentive to sign up these kids and it’s a big conflict of interest," state Sen. Michael Doherty (R-Warren), a member of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee, argued recently. "I think it’s a statewide problem and Elizabeth is just the tip of the iceberg."

Baker said qualification for free and reduced-price lunch is a good indicator of which students deserve additional state and federal aid because it measures students’ backgrounds. Some states use Census data to measure student poverty, but it’s not accurate, Baker said. Others don’t consider poverty at all in school funding.

"Numbers of books in a home or a parent’s education level might be better ways to determine which students are at the greatest risk, but the cost of developing and updating such a complex index would be extremely burdensome," he said. "Is the system so susceptible to fraud that it’s no longer a useful index? No.

"As it stands, free and reduced lunch is highly predictive of student outcomes," Baker added. "Plus, it’s something you can audit, and we should do more of that."

I agree. And, while we're at it, maybe we should audit corporations and find out why so many aren't paying any taxes. Even though I'm sure it won't yield nearly as much cash as going after school lunches...

(sigh...)

Who Has a Job For Life?

Not teachers; politicians:

Success of congressional incumbents has become something of a half-funny joke recently.  These are the figures for those Representatives who sought reelection in the 13 biennial national elections for 435 U.S. House seats from 1982 through 2006:  95.17% of incumbents who sought reelection were successful.  What's more, an average of 396 of the 435 incumbent seat holders sought another term, leaving only 39 "open seats" each biennium for new Members of Congress (Jacobson 2008, 28-29).  You can see these effects graphically via thirty-thousand.org - Reelection Rates of Incumbents in the U. S. House, and Duration of Representatives’ Incumbency in the U. S. House.  Rounding the 4.83% of winning challengers to 19 freshmen, another 39 get there the easy way by filling a seat vacated by a departing incumbent.  So about two-thirds (39 of 58) of freshmen only get there from good fortune of facing no incumbent. 

    [...] 

    The Senate has not been much better:  86.98% of incumbents were winners in the 1982-to-2006 period.  Only 33.3 Senate seats on average are up each biennium (a first 33, another 33, then 34 to tally 100; and back to the first 33).  In the 13 elections of 1982 to 2006, that's 433 senators who could seek reelection; and 361 of them did so, leaving just 82 vacated open seats for new senators.  By rounding the 13.02% of challengers who broke through against incumbents to 38 freshmen, that's 85 of 113 freshmen who got there by virtue of avoiding a collision with a senatorial incumbent.  And in 2006, there were 6 incumbent senatorial losers, all Republicans.  At least one, George Allen of Virginia, was a surprising loser considering that he was prominent among those expected to contend seriously for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.  All that's gone now. 

[...]

     The year 2008 was no change in these numbers.  You can see turnover and defeats in the House here:  United States House of Representatives elections, 2008 - retiring incumbents.  The 435 members of the 110th House of 2007-08 mostly ran for reelection, with just 33 incumbents retiring, leaving 402 up for election in November 2008.  Of those, 23 lost (4 in primaries, 19 in general election) and 379 won, producing a reelection rate of 94.28%.

It's no better at the state level; take New Jersey:

Redistricting tie-breaker Alan Rosenthal’s decision to support a legislative redistricting map drawn up by Democratic commission members can be summed up in two words: status quo. 

Rosenthal’s decision yesterday makes it likely not only that Democrats will continue to hold their majorities in both the state Senate and the state Assembly in next November’s election, but also that 90 percent of incumbent legislators will be reelected with relatively little difficulty. [emphasis mine]

These are the same loudmouths who rail on and on that teaching amounts to a "job for life." That, of course, is utter nonsense; the turnover rate in teaching is far, far higher than the turnover rate for elective office.

These people are hypocrites, but they are also completely shameless. That's why so many want a massive testing regime for our kids, but not their own. You can't convince them with reason; you have to publicly embarrass them into doing the right thing.

I know that makes some of you queasy, but I have to be honest: it's the only way we will win. Deal with it.

The Coming Nightmare For Principals

When they start releasing teacher VAM scores in the 'burbs, watch out:

Cheryl Champ, principal of Lakeland High School and leader of the northern Westchester/Putnam group, said she agreed with a column written this week by Microsoft founder Bill Gates in which he wrote that making ratings public would be “shaming poorly performing teachers.”

“There is a lot of fear around the numbers becoming public,” she said. “It will open a can of worms with parents fighting over teachers with the highest scores. But if we have two classes to fill, we can’t put 60 kids in one teacher’s class.” 

Andrew Rotherham, a veteran education analyst based in Virginia who writes the popular blog Eduwonk.com, said that public ratings would level the playing field for parents who aren’t plugged in on the best and worst teachers. And districts might have to address community desires when making personnel decisions.

“Would it help create more incentives to address personnel if you had this sort of pressure?” he said.

The "choice" culture that has grown up in urban districts will mitigate the pressure parents will put on principals to assign children to highly-ranked teachers. That won't be the case in the 'burbs: as soon as the yearly teacher ratings come out, principals are going to be flooded with calls by parents demanding that their child be placed with Mrs. HighVam.

At the same time, those principals will have to deal with Ms. LowVam's demand that she be moved out of the inclusion classroom and be given more high-achieving kids. And they'll have to deal with the growing resentment between the teachers who get VAM-based ratings and the ones who don't (art, music, PE, K-3, 9-12, guidance, etc.).

It's a potential nightmare, which is why so many principals are standing up against this insanity. But that's not enough. We can only stop this if the parents understand that this is going to ruin their children's education.

Will they listen?

The Incoherent Arguments For Releasing Teacher Evaluations

The only argument I can see here for releasing the error-ridden ratings of NYC teachers seems to be: "Because the unions didn't want us to":

UFT President Michael Mulgrew is furious, having failed first to avoid meaningful teacher evaluations and now to block the public release of those ratings. After using money taken from teachers’ salaries to pay lawyers to litigate in vain, he’s now using union funds to wage a media ad campaign attacking the city Department of Education and the rating system. 

Mulgrew screeches that the ratings are flawed, based on “bad tests, a flawed formula and incorrect data” that will mislead the public about teachers’ effectiveness. In typical obstructionist fashion, of course, no promise of the public release of results of a better-designed rating system, such as the one recently approved by the state, accompanies his complaints. 

While Weingarten held firm that this data on whether teachers advanced their students’ learning (an element many consider the core component of a teacher’s job) shouldn’t be used in job-performance evaluations, she acknowledged that “this information can be a powerful instructional tool.

Brian Backstrom's piece is typical of both the incoherence and the union-hating that pervades all of Rupert Murdoch's empire. Of course, Murdoch stands to make tons of money if he can follow through on his plan to replace teachers with software, so it's easy to understand why he wants his minions to bad-mouth as many educators as they possibly can.

Mulgrew isn't "screeching, " he's simply repeating what even the designers of the ratings system know: these evaluations were never meant to grade teachers with the implied specificity the system produces. Backstrom's insistence that Mulgrew endorse "better" systems is actually an admission on Backstrom's part that these systems aren't nearly accurate enough. But he's not fooling anyone; this isn't about "informing instruction" at all:

No rating system will be perfect from the perspective of everyone involved. After all, being able to use the tenure system to guarantee yourself a job for life without anyone knowing whether you actually perform effectively is a pretty sweet deal. But the Department of Education, with the full backing of the mayor, has won a victory for parents, children and school administrators trying to improve the quality of public education. [emphasis mine]

He just can't help himself. In his smugness, Backstrom gives away the game: this is about punishing teachers for having tenure. Further:

No one wants to see any teacher unfairly rated, much less unfairly criticized, for his or her performance.But the union’s complaints would have more credibility if it weren’t for the long history of the UFT (and its statewide parent union, NYSUT) in resisting greater accountability and transparency in public schools. [emphasis mine]

It's also about punishing teachers for daring to claim collective bargaining rights.

Brian Backstrom doesn't give a damn about teacher accountability; if he did, he would acknowledge that the margin of error on these evaluations is so high as to render them meaningless. He would acknowledge that the ratings only affect a small portion of the teaching corps, effectively setting up a two-tier system that will destroy morale in the NYC schools. He would admit that this is setting up a culture of teaching to the test, something the wealthy and powerful avoid for their own children.

So spare me your pieties about how this is all about the kids, Brian; it isn't. Not once in this piece do you actually say why it's important for parents to have this inaccurate information, other than to bash teachers and their unions.

This is really about putting middle class workers - mostly women - in their place.

Accountability For Thee, Not For Me?

So now that it's hitting the fan in NYC, no one wants to stand up and be... oh, what's that word again... oh, yeah...

Accountable:

Facing a flood of criticism from teachers and principals, the city’s Education Department is trying to distance itself from the release of 18,000 teachers’ individual performance rankings to the press. That has not always been so.

In a guide sent to public school principals on Friday, city officials suggested that the principals respond to teachers’ concerns by telling them that the Department of Education “did not support the release of this data; we were required to do so by the courts.”

The guide also encouraged principals not to speak to journalists who might call with questions about the reports or specific teachers’ performance. (The Education Department later reversed this order, permitting principals to talk to reporters.)

Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott has repeatedly said that he has mixed feelings about the release of the reports and has warned reporters against singling out individual teachers for criticism. It is unclear whether he took any actions to end the department’s legal battle for publication.

His predecessor, Joel I. Klein, championed the reports’ release, telling reporters that he supported their publication by teachers’ names.

The Columbia Journalism Review reported that the Education Department’s press office went a step further, encouraging reporters to file Freedom of Information requests — known as foils — for the individualized reports. According to the Review article by Lynnell Hancock:

But the Department of Education had privately dropped hints to some reporters that their competitors had already submitted foils, some journalists countered. Suspicions had been raised when the department responded to the foils with uncharacteristic speed. Normally, such requests took months, with layers of negotiations, said Maura Walz, a reporter for GothamSchools.org, an independent online news service. This time, it was service with a smile. “The Department of Education wants this out,” said Ian Trontz, a New York Times metro editor. “They have a lot of faith in these reports. They believe they are trustworthy enough to educate and empower parents.”

Still, empowering parents had not seemed to be a top goal in the past for this administration. To the most skeptical reporters, it appeared as if the city was using them.

And when the rankings were first created in 2008 as part of a pilot program to evaluate teachers, a then-deputy chancellor, Christopher Cerf, said it would be a “powerful step forward” to have the teacher measurements made public, arguing, “If you know as a parent what’s the deal, I think that whole aspect will change behavior.”

He later said that the reports, at least at first, would be treated as personnel records not subject to public-records laws. [emphasis mine]

You catch that, all you Jersey teachers? Especially all of you in the current "pilot" programs? Back in his NYC days, when he wasn't violating conflict-of-interest laws, the current ACTING NJDOE Commissioner said he wanted the data publicized, but then promised it wouldn't be released. How you feeling about that, Jersey teachers? Do you have a lot of faith that your interests will be protected? Especially since this administration already lied to you about your pensions?

As to what's happening in NYC: I don't know who's more gutless, the press or the NYCDOE. The press didn't have to play this game, but they did; now they've alienated 75,000 literate teacher-readers (bravo to GothamSchools.org for standing up to this crap), and lord knows how many parents.

And Tweed can swear up and down that it looks out for its teachers and principals, but Bloomberg's been running his little fiefdom for years, and everyone knows the score. Beating up on teachers has been priority number one since the days long before Joel Klein ran off to be Murdoch's consiglieri. What little loyalty the NYC teaching corps has left to Walcott is gone, with maybe the exception of sycophants like Little Evan and Princess Sydney (shout out to SBS!)

The fact is that both the press and Tweed screwed up, and screwed up badly. And, for once, they can't blame it on teachers or their unions. This is all on them. Deal with it.

Public Employees Are Not Slaves

Let me explain a few things to those of you who think that public employees should lose their rights as workers because you think you "pay their salaries":

1) You and I, as taxpayers, do not have unlimited rights over public workers. I don't care if we "pay their salaries" or not; all workers have certain rights, even though we seem to have forgotten that these days.

One of those rights should obviously be the right to some basic level of privacy in the workplace. While there are undoubtedly private sector employers judging their employees by arbitrary criteria based on the work of others, I don't see those evaluations being published for public consumption. It's obviously a bad business practice and antithetical to the best interests of private sector employers; there's no compelling reason it should be any different for public sector employers.

2) "You" do not hire teachers or cops or firefighters or public sector nurses. School boards hire teachers; police departments hire cops; fire departments hire firefighters; public health facilities hire nurses. That's their job; if they do a poor job, they or the politicians who appointed their leaders get voted out. But even though you "pay the salaries" of public workers, you are not their employers, and you are not entitled to view their evaluations.

3) Every time you erode the rights of public sector employees, you erode the rights of private sector employees. I know that's fashionable right now, and many of you drank the Kool-Aid and want to live in a world where Scrooge can give you Christmas Day off only if he feels like it. But maybe you ought to take a look at the miserable state of the American worker - even in the face of massive corporate profits - and ask yourself if the answer is to raise up the protections of the private worker, or destroy the protections of the public worker.

4) I know that Christie and Walker and Kasich and Corbett and Scott and Daniels and Cuomo and Emanuel and Bloomberg and all of their acolytes in the press have convinced many of you the public workers are living in some sort of accountability-free paradise. But I have to wonder - especially because so many of say you are against "big government" and the "liberal media" - since when do you believe everything a politician or the press tells you?

The fact is that public employees with a college degree make significantly less money than private employees with the same education. And teachers make less money than similarly educated workers, even accounting for the fact they work 5/6 of the year. Benefits don't make up the difference. Sorry, it's true, no matter what the latest stupid, think-tanky study says.

5) There is not an inexhaustible supply of qualified people willing to teach in poor neighborhoods, or strap on Kevlar vests, or run into burning buildings. The public worker bashers have played a seemingly paradoxical game of slashing compensation and protections while talking about how public service is a "calling," but the reason for that is clear: they want people to think that good public workers must act like nuns or priests, renouncing any ambitions to enjoy the American Dream.

I am telling you folks a hard truth now, and if you care at all for the future of this country, you'd better listen: young people are watching all this, and they are making decisions about their futures based on what's happening. They have seen mendacious politicians go back on their words to public workers, and they will not forget it. 

Yes, some will still become teachers and cops and firefighters and social workers and civil engineers and DPW workers and all the rest - but many will not. They will sadly come to the conclusion that they simply cannot afford to work in the public sector. They are not bad people for admitting this; they are realists. And most of these qualified, well-educated people will find jobs in the private sector. If you think they can't make it in the "real world," you're fooling yourself.

But those public sector jobs will still have to be done. So less qualified folks will do them, and the quality of services will erode. I predict that, if we continue down this path, within five years there will be serious discussion of hiring public school teachers without college degrees. Standards for acceptance into police academies will drop; requirements for all sorts of public service jobs will degrade.

And then we will have a huge mess on our hands, the economy will collapse again, and all of you who railed about how you "pay the salaries" of pubic workers will live in a country with inadequate safety, education, infrastructure, and public services. Let's hope you've all made enough to lock yourselves into gated communities with private schools and private health care.

And if you didn't? Well, don't say I didn't warn you...