All posts by plthomasedd

P. L. Thomas, Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English), current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Brill), and author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means (IAP, 2019) and How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP, in press). NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He co-edited the award-winning (Divergent Book Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research) volume Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America (Brill, 2018). Follow his work @plthomasEdD and the becoming radical (https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/).
VAM

South Carolina Officially Vamboozled

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If anyone is wondering why the “bad” teacher crisis remains central to what political leaders want the public to hear, South Carolina offers a heaping dose of why: Political leaders are enormously incompetent and need us all to remain distracted from that fact.

Case in point: SC has now been officially vamboozled, passing a new teacher evaluation system that includes the new sham word “growth” nearly 50 times in a little over 30 pages—notably (in part):

The changes described in this document will result in a support and evaluation system that is valid, reliable, and fair and that will

…use multiple valid measures (including but not limited to observations, professional practice, and student growth) in determining performance levels, with data on student growth for all students (including English Language Learners and students with disabilities) being a significant factor in the calculation of the overall effectiveness score (growth measure for teachers of tested grades and subjects include growth based on statewide assessments as a component)….

Of course, the most important point here is that VAM (teacher evaluations based on student test scores, or now euphemistically “student growth”) has been proven again and again to fail against the measures of “valid, reliable, and fair.”

SC political leadership has emphasized that their hands are tied because of federal mandates linked to opting out of NCLB and the lure of “filthy lucre” promised therein—a baffling stance taken by a state infamous for taking the most preposterous stances just to shun the federal government.

It is well past time to stop listening to political leaders who have no credibility (hint: If you hear a politician or read a politician, you are in the presence of one who has no clue) and to turn our gazes away from the distractions (hint: “bad” teachers are not the problem).

It is time to invoke the Oliver Rule about claims about and policies including VAM; thus, here is the enormous body of evidence so far refuting VAM (see related research cited within the following):

There is, however, a growth we should be concerned about because it is cancerous; that growth is VAM. Let’s remove it before it spreads.

Teach for America

Listen to Gary Rubinstein: “TFA…thrives on greed, deception, and fear”

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Gary Rubinstein’s Advice to the 2014 TFA Corps Members is, I assume, intended for TFA recruits directly and about specifically TFA as a reform agenda.

Thus, I do first recommend that those drawn to TFA should read carefully, and then heed Rubinstein’s words, notably this:

TFA 2But I am compelled to go further and note that Rubinstein’s central point is also applicable to the entire education reform agenda built on accountability (standards and high-stakes tests), value added methods for evaluating teachers, and charter schools.

The loudest and most frequent advocates of these policies thrive on greed, deception, and fear. Period.

So everyone should listen to Rubinstein, and not just about TFA, but about everything Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and their ilk stand for.

education, Teacher Evaluation, Teaching, VAM

What We Tolerate (and for Whom) v. What the Rich Demand: On Teacher Quality

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Two of the best teachers and education advocates I respect and listen to carefully, Nancy Flanagan and Susan Ohanian, had an important exchange on Twitter recently:

Prompted by the Vergara court case in California and a related article in The Atlantic, Flanagan and Ohanian share a concern about the political, popular, and media claim that “bad” teachers work in “bad” schools with “bad” students (all of which is the result of a flawed misreading of the conditions common in high-poverty schools that serve high-poverty communities).

Before examining the issue of teacher quality raised above, please take note of a Big Picture problem at the heart of the Vergara ruling: All professions, including teaching, have elite, solid, and weak practitioners, but to suggest that teacher quality is the or one of the primary causes of educational problems is simply false, a manufactured scapegoat to keep the public view off the real problems facing us—mostly social and educational inequity.

Let’s look carefully, now, at how the complex issue of teacher quality is further complicated by high-poverty schools:

  • Teacher quality represents only about 10-15% of measurable student outcomes (test scores); thus, since high-poverty students are disproportionately likely to produce low test scores, it is a mistake to read raw tests scores as a reflection of teacher quality (or even student learning) since those test scores are primarily a reflection of out-of-school influences. (Also note that outliers to that dynamic do not disprove a generalization and do not suggest what the norm should be; as well, all claims of such “miracle” schools have been discredited.)
  • High-poverty schools and high-poverty students are staffed and taught by teachers who are disproportionately new, early career, and/or under-/un-certified. That dynamic does contribute to “teacher quality,” but not in ways popular claims mean (for example, a new teacher is not “bad,” but experience certainly contributes to greater teacher effectiveness—although that is not necessarily reflected in measurable student outcomes).
  • High-poverty students and their parents value education as much as more affluent students and parents, but living in poverty is existing in a state of scarcity that taxes adults and children physically, psychologically, and mentally—often leaving them less capable of advocating for education and benefitting for learning opportunities. Conversely, students and parents from relative affluence are afforded the slack necessary to advocate for education and fully engage with learning experiences. The important point here is that teaching, parenting, and learning in conditions influenced by poverty negatively impact nearly everyone involved, but by changing those conditions (and not the people), those same people would perform differently. (This contradicts claims that we need to rid schools of “bad” teachers and instill poor students with “grit”—both of which focus the problems in the people and not the system.)

Flanagan and Ohanian, then, are right that high-poverty schools are not overburdened by “bad” teachers; many wonderful teachers work in high-poverty schools (but some genuinely weak teachers are protected by the mask of affluent students, affluent schools, and affluent communities)—and high-poverty students are potentially as capable of learning as their more affluent peers (impoverished students don’t need to be “fixed” and don’t need to be taught “grit”).

But those facts are harshly clouded by the knee-jerk conclusions drawn from raw test scores—just as most people erroneously believe private schools are superior to public schools simply because the outward evidence appears to suggest so.

What do the data show, then, when we look at teacher characteristics (interpreted as “quality”) in high-poverty schools along with student test scores as that contrasts with teacher characteristics and student test scores in affluent public and private schools?

As a society, we tolerate the worst possible conditions for the students with the most need (teacher characteristics, school conditions and funding, and high percentage of children living in poverty are the failure of adequate public response and policy) while students living in relative affluence have the advocacy of their parents demanding that they do not suffer the same conditions experienced by children in poverty (disproportionately children of color): high student-teacher ratios, inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers, underfunded schools, facilities in disrepair, and worksheet and rote instructional practices aimed at test-prep.

The cruel reality is that high-poverty and high-minority schools are not staffed by “bad” teachers forced to teach “bad” students, but that those teachers and students have the most challenging conditions in their lives and schools to overcome while affluent students have slack in their lives and the best conditions in their schools.

Instead of misguided commitments to value-added methods (VAM) for finding the best teachers (which do not work), policies that address equity would serve us much better:

  • No child should be taught by un-/under-certified teachers.
  • No child should have new or early career teachers for several years in a row.
  • Teacher quality must be re-imagined as an effective matching of teachers with students and not reduced to measurable outcomes.
  • Student achievement must no longer be reduced to measurable outcomes.

As with much of the flawed education reform agenda, the teacher quality issue reflects the overuse and misuse of test scores.

Until we address the scarcity in children’s lives and schools, addressing teacher quality is a futile distraction, just as continuing to change standards and tests is a futile distraction.

Instead of labeling, ranking, and then firing teachers, our first best step would be to end the cult of high-stakes testing because the problems of education are mostly systemic (social and educational) and not the adults who choose to teach or the children we seek to serve.

education, Howard Zinn, Workers

Meditating on Teacher Unions and Tenure Post-Vergara

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[Reposting from Truthout as a response to the Vergara ruling in California to dismantle tenure. See also Adam Bessie’s A Tale of Two Vergaras: Of Stardom and the End of Teacher Tenure.]

Howard Zinn would have turned 90 a couple of days ago [24 August 2012]. I have to imagine after reading and re-reading most of Zinn’s works that if Zinn were alive today, he would remain baffled at how America is a country antagonistic to unions and tenure, especially teachers unions and tenure.

Zinn was a radical historian, activist, and in my opinion, most of all a teacher. And it is at the overlap of Zinn as historian/activist/teacher I find his People’s History of the United States an invaluable place to ask, Why tenure and unions?

On Democracy and Equity in the U.S.

The unique and powerful quality Zinn brought to history is that his volume is a people’s history. Zinn confronts directly that the truth embedded in any history is shaped by perspective.

Traditionally, the so-called objective history students have been and are fed in formal schooling is from the point of view of the winners, but Zinn chose to examine the rise and growth of the U.S. from the point of view of the common person—what I will characterize as primarily the viewpoint of the worker. I am most concerned about the contrast between the political and public message that the U.S. has somehow left behind the oppressive corporate world of the robber barons (see Zinn’s Chapter 11) and have left behind the horrors fictionalized in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. These idealistic beliefs are similar to Americans claiming we have achieved a meritocracy instead of the fact that Americans should still be working toward a meritocracy.

Still in 2014, Americans appear to be anti-union and anti-tenure, again notably in terms of how that impacts teachers. This sentiment is disturbing to me as it signals an anti-worker sentiment in the U.S.—a country that claims to embrace ideals such as equity, democracy, and hard work.

This contradiction is connected, I believe, to the exact problem confronted by Zinn as a historian: Americans’ anti-worker sentiments (expressed in anti-union and anti-tenure discourse and policy) can be traced to who controls the public narrative—the CEO elite.

If the American public considers for a moment why unions and tenure exist (as well as what tenure means), most Americans would reject the CEO-skewed messages about both.

The American worker (unlike many workers in other comparable countries throughout the world) remains shackled to working in ways that dictate any worker’s essential humanity; work in the U.S. is not a matter of just pay, but of health insurance and retirement—essential for basic human dignity. The dramatic abuses of the meat packing industry in The Jungle may appear more extreme than working conditions in 2014, but bosses and management hold a powerful upper-hand over the American worker still.

Unionization as a concept, then, came out of and remains an act against the inherent inequity and tyranny in the workplace when the powerful few control the working many. Unionization is an act of democracy, an act of equity.

To reject unions is to reject democracy and equity.

These foundational facts of why unions do not reject that specific union policies have failed. It is certainly legitimate to confront individual union policies and outcomes (I have and continue to do that myself), but this discussion is about the broad anti-union sentiment in the U.S. that reveals anti-worker sentiments.

Tenure is more complicated, but certainly grows out of the same commitment to democracy and equity—especially for teachers.

The tenure argument is often distorted because the term itself, “tenure,” is misrepresented as “a job for life” and rarely distinguished between tenure at the K-12 level and the college/university level.

Tenure is an act of democracy and equity, as well, because it creates power for workers as a guarantee of due process and, for teachers, it secures a promise of academic freedom.

Are there failures in how unions and tenure have been and are implemented in America today? Yes.

Should those failures be addressed? Yes.

But the broad anti-union and anti-tenure agenda being promoted by the CEO elite and embraced by the American public is a corrosive rejection of equity and democracy.

When unions and tenure are not fulfilling their obligations to equity and democracy, they both must be confronted.

But unions and tenure remain needed and even necessary mechanisms in America’s search for equity and democracy—both of which are being eroded by the American elite indebted to and dependent on the inequity that drives American capitalism.

Although speaking directly about Americans’ embracing war, Zinn makes an important point for this discussion:

We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

Without, then, the democratic and equity-based purposes of unions and tenure, the American public remains “ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives.”

Zinn also personified a message of rejecting neutral poses, of democracy as activism. Writing about Sacco and Vanzetti, Zinn shares questions raised by Vanzetti, questions still relevant today against the knee-jerk and self-defeating anti-union and anti-tenure sentiments persistent in the U.S.:

Yes, it was their anarchism, their love for humanity, which doomed them. When Vanzetti was arrested, he had a leaflet in his pocket advertising a meeting to take place in five days. It is a leaflet that could be distributed today, all over the world, as appropriate now as it was the day of their arrest. It read:

“You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the capitalists. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, Bartolomeo Vanzetti will speak.” (A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, Howard Zinn)

[1] As a life-long resident and worker in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, I want to clarify here that I am not now and have never been a member of a union, I never had my pay or any sort of public school tenure negotiated for me by a union, but I have been awarded tenure by my private university during my most recent decade-plus as a professor.

education, education reform, Workers

This Week in “Please Shut Up”: Arne Duncan

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This Week in “Please Shut Up” should have been aimed at George Will and that he really needs to shut up about rape.

But, instead, let’s look at Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who has held forth on the Vergaras ruling in California:

The ruling was hailed by the nation’s top education chief as bringing to California — and possibly the nation — an opportunity to build “a new framework for the teaching profession.” The decision represented “a mandate” to fix a broken teaching system, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said….

Duncan, a former schools chief in Chicago, said he hoped the ruling will spark a national dialogue on a teacher tenure process “that is fair, thoughtful, practical and swift.”

At a minimum, Duncan said the court decision, if upheld, will bring to California “a new framework for the teaching profession that protects students’ rights to equal educational opportunities while providing teachers the support, respect and rewarding careers they deserve.”

“The students who brought this lawsuit are, unfortunately, just nine out of millions of young people in America who are disadvantaged by laws, practices and systems that fail to identify and support our best teachers and match them with our neediest students. Today’s court decision is a mandate to fix these problems,” Duncan said. (as reported by Michael Martinez)

Now, let’s consider the context. First, Arne Duncan has no education or experience in teaching as a profession. But, Duncan has a long list of political appointments:

In 1992, childhood friend and investment banker John W. Rogers, Jr., appointed Duncan director of the Ariel Education Initiative, a program mentoring children at one of the city’s worst-performing elementary schools and then assisting them as they proceeded further in the education system. After the school closed in 1996, Duncan and Rogers were instrumental in re-opening it as a charter school, Ariel Community Academy. In 1999, Duncan was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff for former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas.

CEO of Chicago Public Schools Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed Duncan to serve as Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Public Schools on June 26, 2001….

Duncan was appointed U.S. Secretary of Education by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate on January 20, 2009. [all emphasis added]

For the record, having no background as a teacher and then having spent his entire professional career as a political appointee depending on his privileged connections, Duncan has no appreciation for teaching or for workers’ rights.

And thus, this week, we must implore: Arne Duncan, please shut up.

CCSS, education, Gates, Testing, VAM

Gates Moratorium Another Scam: Beware the Roadbuilders pt. 2

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The road to hell is not paved with good intentions. [1]

The road to hell in the U.S. of the 21st century is paved with the appearance of good intentions fostered by billionaires.

Billionaires are our roadbuilders, and in education reform the main roadbuilder is Bill Gates.

Gates is a billionaire education hobbyist who started a road to small schools, only to bail, but has since shifted his roadbuilding to value-added methods (VAM) for evaluating teachers and his tour de force superhighway, Common Core.

Now that Gates has issued a call for a moratorium on the intersecting roads to hell (VAM linked to next-generations high-stakes tests of the Common Core), we must return to two important points:

  1. I cannot stress or repeat often enough: If Bill Gates had no money, who would listen to him about education reform? No one–the same as who should listen to him now.
  2. Beware the roadbuilders.

To the first point, Gates has never had and does not now have any credibility as an authority on education or education reform. Zero. His commentaries linked to his huge bribes should be ignored when he advocates for policy, and his call for a moratorium should be ignored as well.

Delaying a road to hell still means we will have a road to hell.

To the second point, as Nettie and the Olinka learn in the Color Purple, the roadbuilders have an agenda to be done to those in their way and to benefit the roadbuilders. Words such as moratorium, philanthropy, and entrepreneur are thinly veiled code for not good intentions but the self-interests of the roadbuilders.

The roadbuilders are powerful because money speaks louder than words; however, the option before us is not a moratorium but a collective non-cooperation to end their roadbuilding.

—

[1] The best version of this cliche is in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises when Bill responds to Jake with the wonderfully ambiguous nod to the corrosive power of materialism: “‘Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs'” (p. 78). In a capitalist society, the consumer’s hell is all the fake crap that consumer does not or cannot buy. The consumer doesn’t need the fake crap, of course, and there is never an end to the fake crap dangled before the consumer.

Charter schools, education, education reform, grade retention

Twitter Truth (and The Onion Gets It Again)

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As I have catalogued on this blog and elsewhere, when it comes to education policy, my home state of South Carolina is A Heaping Stumbling-Bumbling Mess of Ineptitude.

And while we have garnered a sort of unwanted but fully warranted 15 minutes of fame by being the repeated source of ridicule for The Daily Show, SC has now achieved what I am calling Twitter Truth through the actions of Governor Nikki Haley, as reported at The Huffington Post:

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) wanted to tout her state’s education reform plan Monday — but it all went horribly wrong.

Here’s what Haley tweeted about the plan:

nikki haley tweet

Haley, or whichever member of her staff posted the tweet, was the victim of Twitter’s 140 character limit. An Instagram photo caption longer than 140 characters in length is cut off mid-sentence, followed by a link to the original post. The full caption makes much more sense than the above tweet:

nikki haley instagram post

The tweet was deleted a few hours after it was posted.

If we put Tweet 1 (clipped by Twitter Truth) together with Tweet 2, we find that Tweet 1 actually makes an accurate commentary on how SC continues to plow the wrong road in our claimed quest for educating the children of SC, a large percentage of whom are living in poverty and suffering the burdens of their racial and language minority statuses.

For the record, “reading coaches” masks that SC has adopted 3rd-grade retention policy based on high-stakes testing, “technology investments” ignores SC’s high poverty rate and that the state needs to invest in hundreds of areas other than making technology vendors wealthy, and “charter schools” fails to note that SC charter schools, as is the case across the U.S., perform about the same and worse than public schools while contributing to the rise in re-segregation.

And with charter schools in mind, let’s be sure to give The Onion its due, once again; this time for New Charter School Lottery System Gives Each Applicant White Pill, Enrolls Whoever Left Standing:

NEW YORK—Introducing key changes to the lottery system that governs the admissions process, the New York City Charter School Center notified potential students this week that openings will now be filled by randomly distributing white pills to applicants and enrolling those left standing.

In place of the existing electronic lottery system conducted in the spring, education officials explained that applicants would receive identical white pills, among them a small number of innocuous placebos corresponding to the amount of open spots, and then wait approximately 30 minutes to determine the survivors and new charter school enrollees.

“With so many deserving students competing for so few spots in the city’s network of high-performing, tuition-free charter schools, our new lottery system ensures that each student is provided with an equal opportunity,” said Eva Moskowitz, the head of the Success Academy chain of 22 charter schools, while mixing up a tub of 118 sugar pills and 2,376 pentobarbital capsules to be blindly administered in an upcoming lottery. “Between small class sizes, longer school days, individualized instruction, and superior college admission rates, charters provide amazing opportunities for students who don’t enter a convulsive state, fall into a coma, stop breathing, and cease all bodily functions during the admissions process.” (emphasis added)

“Of course it’s heartbreaking for the families of children who aren’t accepted,” Moskowitz continued, “But seeing the look on parents’ faces when their child is still standing in a room littered with rejected applicants is priceless. They know their child is going to get the best possible education.” [1]

Administrators told reporters that the new quick and relatively painless lottery system is a welcome alternative to the notoriously long and emotional computerized drawings of past years, where all applicants received a random number and were subjected to waiting for many hours before learning whether they would attend a charter school or return to an inferior public school.

Officials confirmed that the innovative selection process has already proved a success, though not without its minor setbacks, in areas of the country where it has already been implemented.

“This year we’re making the pills a little stronger because not all the candidates were weeded out right away,” said Tim Bernard of Thrive Academy in Washington, D.C., a public charter that had 200 elementary school students apply for eight open spots last year. “Some kids would seem fine, we’d extend them an official offer of admission, and then a few days later they’d start hallucinating or slurring their speech. Meanwhile parents are scared sick we’re going to rescind their kids’ offers because too many applicants survived.”

“Luckily, we worked out all the kinks for this year,” Bernard added. “The body removal crews are already assembled outside the auditoriums and ready to go.”

Though charter school officials maintained that the new admissions process is designed fairly, critics claimed many affluent parents have already found ways to exploit the system. For example, after a lottery in Los Angeles ended with a high number of living students, officials discovered that parents had been building up their children’s immunity to the pills by giving them small doses of poison each day, or had hired tutors to help them train their bodies to overcome the effects of the pills. (emphasis added) [2]

Despite these flaws, many parents said they have no doubts about trying to get their child into a charter.

“I went through charter school admissions with my oldest son last year, but after he died I wondered whether it was even worth it to try again with my other kids,” Hoboken, NJ mother Jane Schaal told reporters. “But then my younger daughter got into Achievement First and I knew we made the right decision. There was no way she was going to succeed in public school.”

“Next year we’ll try to get my youngest son into a good elementary school,” Schaal added. “He’s not in kindergarten yet, but even if he’s not accepted to a top-notch charter, it’s a relief knowing that his future will be set.”

This should be really funny, but as with many of their other satires, this piece comes disturbingly close to everything that is wrong with charter schools driven by market forces—a commitment done to children and their families, a process that sacrifices children in very real ways.

[1] Why Sending Your Child to a Charter School Hurts Other Children

[2] Endgame: Disaster Capitalism, New Orleans, and the Charter Scam:

And even in Layton’s own article, we discover the dark truth beneath the polished sheen of charter school advocacy:

“White students disproportionately attend the best charter schools, while the worst are almost exclusively populated by African American students. Activists in New Orleans joined with others in Detroit and Newark last month to file a federal civil rights complaint, alleging that the city’s best-performing schools have admissions policies that exclude African American children. Those schools are overseen by the separate Orleans Parish School Board, and they don’t participate in OneApp, the city’s centralized school enrollment lottery.”