The Puppet Masters
The education community is getting bombarded with new acronyms all the time: OTES, SLO, SGM, etc. Figuring out what they stand for is difficult. Figuring out their impact on public education in the short and long term is nearly impossible.
However, they are probably missing one very important acronym from their lexicon, one that represents the most influential corporate-funded political force operating in America today, one that has worked to dilute collective bargaining rights and privatize public education. ALEC.
ALEC, which stands for American Legislative Exchange Council, is a conservative organization that develops policies and language that can be used as part of legislation by multiple states across the country.
That probably doesn’t clarify much of anything.
In more concrete terms, ALEC creates legislation for elected officials to introduce in their states as their own brainchildren. ALEC is comprised of legislators and corporate leaders and has been operating in the shadows for about 40 years. They don’t solely focus on public education either. ALEC was the group behind the controversial “Stand your Ground” legislation in Florida, which was at the center of the Trayvon Martin shooting case.
In the documentary “United States of ALEC,” Bill Moyers calls the group “an organization hiding in plain sight, yet one of the most influential and powerful in American politics.”
Moyers’ comment about ALEC is absolutely on point. ALEC is more or less unknown in teacher circles. Teachers, who are focused on their students, generally don’t dabble in the political realm. They have not been interested in knowing or getting to know ALEC, at least until recently.
After the 2010 election — with the assaults to collective bargaining rights, the expansion of voucher programs and education reforms that emphasized testing and “accountability” — teachers in the Midwest got to know ALEC the hard way, though they still probably couldn’t identify it by name.
Think back to those bills that were signed into law in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio in early 2011. Ask yourself, how was it that different state legislatures came up with virtually identical anti-labor bills at the same time? The answer: ALEC. The group crafted the language and legislators waited for the most opportune time to introduce it. In Ohio they found it following the 2010 elections when Republicans took control of the Governor’s office and the legislature.
ALEC’s strategy is like the kid’s game of whack a mole. If they were to put out one piece of legislation at a time, education groups and organized labor could easily defeat each one in succession. Instead they toss out a slew of legislation all at once, so there isn’t enough time or resources to educate and mobilize the public. There is no way to effectively beat back all the reforms.
In “How Online Learning Companies Bought America’s Schools“ Lee Fang summed up ALEC’s strategy: “spread the unions thin ‘by playing offense’ with decoy legislation.” Spreading the unions thin has resulted in radical changes to classroom teachers’ everyday lives — changes that were made without the input of local school boards or educators.
As states have expanded voucher systems, schools have had to drastically reduced funding. These programs take money away from traditional public schools and give it to unaccountable and very often less effective private and charter schools. This means larger class sizes for us, less extra help for students and fewer electives.
They have also increased standardized testing, bringing with it the stress that goes along with constantly prepping students for high stakes tests. It’s frustrating because we all know that these tests are not a true indication of students’ progress and understanding. And now teachers are also experiencing the stress of state-mandated teacher evaluations.
These ALEC-induced policy changes have devastated teacher morale and driven many to retirement.
It’s astonishing how much impact one group can have without 95% of the public even knowing it exists.
By Dan Greenberg, Sylvania Education Association
Just Say No to More Vouchers
I am baffled as to why Governor Kasich is in favor of increasing private school vouchers for nearly half of our school children in Ohio. Under Kasich’s new budget, 45% of our 1.8 million students will qualify for $5000 vouchers to attend private schools, even if they are currently attending a public school that is rated as “excellent.” Currently, Ohio offers vouchers to students assigned to low-performing schools and the Cleveland schools, and to students with special needs and students with autism.
While private school backers often tout the benefits of private education, studies have shown that public school students consistently outscore their private school counterparts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. And unlike public schools, which are vigorously tracked through testing and will be required to teach common standards in English and math, private schools are not required to teach any standards or administer any tests other than the ones they choose. In a nutshell, they are far less accountable than are public schools. In many cases, charter schools are not required to disclose financial reports to the IRS, much less the parents of the children who attend the schools.
At the same time, private schools do not have the same mandate to serve as do public schools; they do not provide the same level of service as public schools. For example, they do not have to provide free lunches for needy students or special services for children with learning disabilities. They are not required to hire highly qualified teachers who are certified in the areas that they teach or provide transportation for their students. They can choose deny admission to students based on income, race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, and they are not required to offer any explanations for their decisions.
Parents who are considering sending their children to private schools need to be informed. They need to understand that a voucher is no guarantee that their children will be allowed to attend the private school of their choice. Many private schools are cash strapped and can only keep lower tuition rates around the $5000 mark because they depend on corporate and non-corporate subsidies such as donations and endowments from generous alumni. Some schools require parents to not only pay the tuition, but also make huge donations to keep their doors open.
If parents want to send their child to an independent day school, $5000 is merely a drop in the bucket. Some private elementary schools in Ohio cost upwards of $30,000 a year. If a private school must choose between the child of poor parents and the child of wealthy parents with the potential of donating tens of thousands of dollars over the next 50 years, who do you think will get the open slot?
Bill Phillis, Executive Director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy, thinks this is just the beginning. This voucher scheme opens the door to a complete unraveling of the public school system, Phillis says, and it forges a path to allow vouchers for families of all income levels.
I am just amazed that Ohio is going to the trouble of changing the Common Core when it appears our governor is determined to destroy our public schools. The state already spends more than $100 million a year on vouchers for more than 20,000 students. Not to mention that taxpayers already subsidize private schools by virtue of their nonprofit status. Kasich’s voucher expansion plan is money poorly spent, especially when our public schools continue to be underfunded in his proposed new budget.
By Susan Ridgeway, Wooster Education Association
SLOs, OTES, SGM, Value Added …
While teachers and students were busy celebrating the holidays, the Ohio legislature was moving full steam ahead, putting the final touches on House Bill 555 (HB 555). This “present” was completed during the holiday season, yet it has taken weeks to unwrap and understand the true impact it could have on individual teachers. It is causing, concern, anger and frustration.
The HB 555 legislation sets new guidelines for the use of “Student Learning Objectives,” or SLOs, to measure student growth, which will account for 50% of each teacher’s overall rating in the newly-established Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES).
SLOs are basically goals that teachers want their students to work toward, which will demonstrate student growth over the course of the year. These are not one or two sentence descriptions, but multi-page documents that outline the means of assessment, curricular standards covered and many other categories.
SLOs offer teachers the chance to maintain some of the individuality and autonomy they seek as professionals. SLOs can outline a plan for teachers to get beginning and end-of-the-year data, demonstrating student learning and progress. Many teachers have seen SLOs as an opportunity to break away from the over-reliance on data gathered through standardized tests.
SLOs are not without their problems, however. In my district, a teacher and administrative representative returned from an SLO writing conference and shared an example of what was deemed an excellent SLO. In this example, written for a choir teacher, the growth measurements included “tonal quality and accuracy” and “effort during performances” — completely subjective criteria. The choir teacher would then be responsible for reporting the students’ progress, as it would be nearly impossible for an administrator to evaluate these things without having a choral background. So the obvious question is, why wouldn’t a teacher, who believes wholeheartedly in his/her program, report stellar results and progress for all students? If hard-working teachers across all grades and subjects believe in what they are doing, and are able to create subjectively measured SLOs, they could all report outstanding progress. Wouldn’t that nullify the attempts to use these measures to show which teachers are more effective than others?
Another issue is manpower. If hundreds of teachers are writing SLOs, who in each district will be responsible for evaluating each plan and managing all the data collected? Districts are already strapped for cash and hiring another administrator as an “SLO guru” doesn’t sound like the best way to spend precious money that could benefit students in so many other ways. One suggestion was to have a Building Leadership Team (BLT) at every school, comprised of teachers, to approve SLOs. That may sound good in theory, but how many teachers will want to reject as sub-par SLOs that their colleagues worked on for umpteen hours and that they truly believe are appropriate?
Nevertheless, many teachers tried to get ahead of the legislation by creating their SLOs now, instead of waiting until OTES is fully implemented next year or the year after. However, HB 555 will penalize the teachers who worked proactively, demonstrating professionalism and commitment to their students, for all their hard work. In the last days of the legislative session, when many in the education community were not focused on the dealings in the State House, legislators inserted language in HB 555 that precludes reading and math teachers, grades 4-8, from using those SLOs that they spent countless hours developing. In lieu of the SLOs, standardized test scores must be used to measure student growth. This type of legislative maneuver frustrates teachers and makes it hard for them to buy into education reforms. They fear that their efforts will all be for naught as regulations and programs change without notice.
Why reading and math in grades 4-8?
Simple. The state will have “value added” data for these grade levels, where they do not for all other levels and courses. For reading and math teachers in grades 4-8, the “Student Growth Measures” will be based on the progress students show on standardized tests. Students, no matter what their level of achievement is at the beginning of the year, will have to show a year’s worth of learning when they take standardized tests in the spring — regardless of the external forces that impact each child’s learning and achievement, which have nothing to do with a teacher’s competency.
Another wrinkle in the value added component is that many 4-8 teachers don’t teach strictly math or reading all day. Value added data would factor in for these teachers in proportion to the part of the courses where the data is applicable.
SLOs, OTES, SGM, Value Added…
Who can keep it all straight? And yet, these acronyms represent things that will determine our teacher ratings and potentially our careers.
When it came to determining how to implement these things, as it pertains to HB 555, there was no consultation with teachers. There was no “heads up” about the changes in this legislation. The only growth I can be sure will come from these changes is not student growth, but a growth of disenfranchisement from quality, hard-working teachers, who tried to get ahead of the changes coming in the fall, only to be tripped up by lawmakers. They earn an F in the category of understanding what’s best for Ohio’s students.
By Dan Greenberg, Sylvania Education Association
February 2013 Ohio Schools
- IN THIS ISSUE
- OEA joins statewide coalition to promote importance of ties between communities and public schools
- OEA Crisis Response Team aids Newtown students and staff in wake of tragedy
- Grab your hat and read with the cat
- Legislative update, Association news, and more
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Radical Rhee and the so-called education "reform" movement
The trend of blaming teachers for the problems in education probably won’t fall out of favor any time soon. Last week, School Choice Week, so-called education “reformers” did their best to scapegoat teachers instead of acknowledging the real systemic problems — such as school funding and poverty — that lead to poor performance and problems in education. Self proclaimed “reformer” Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of the D.C. schools and founder of the political lobbying organization StudentsFirst, has said, “We will no longer describe failure as the result of vast impersonal forces like poverty or a broken bureaucracy.” For Rhee, and other so-called reformers, well-established facts confirming the correlation between poverty and the achievement gap don’t matter.
Neither do policies that work, like having smaller class sizes, increasing pre-kindergarten programs, and hiring more school psychologists and school librarians. But these reformers, with limited to no experience or training in the education field, refuse to listen to the experts, classroom teachers. Again, Rhee is a perfect example. “If there is one thing I have learned over the last 15 months, it’s that cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated,” Rhee said. If she’s not interested in input from educators, where do her ideas for education reform come from?
Rhee never studied education. She majored in government after attending an elite private high school. Her preparation for classroom teaching consisted of a five-week stint with Teach for America (TFA) after which she was placed as an elementary school teacher in Baltimore, Maryland, where she was known for not having much control of her students. After three years, she left the classroom — 80% of TFA teachers do — and she started The New Teachers Project (TNTP), which acts as a teacher training and placement program for poor, inner-city school districts.
Rhee’s organizations, like most in the “reform” movement, are revenue-generating nonprofits and their services don’t come cheap. TNTP charged the Oakland Unified School District $807,446 from 2006-2008. Fortunately, not everyone is so entranced by her spiel. In 2011, John C Liu, New York City Comptroller, denied a five-year contract to the TNTP for $21 million He remarked, “Twenty million dollars to recruit teachers, as the Department of Education insists on laying off thousands of teachers, seems curious at best.”
In 2007, without having any experience as a principal or superintendent, Rhee was recommended to head D.C. public schools in 2007 by her friend and TNTP client, former New York public schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Frontline’s documentary, The Education of Michelle Rhee examines problems Rhee had as Chancellor of the D.C. schools. The documentary’s most startling revelation is that test scores appear to have been doctored in many schools, showing significant gains in math and English for students. Rhee paid principals, vice principals and teachers tens of thousands of dollars in merit pay for those test scores. Perhaps Rhee hasn’t never heard of Campbell’s Law, which predicts that when huge stakes are attached to quantitative data, the data becomes subject to tampering and manipulation, or of the Vanderbilt University study that found no evidence that merit pay raised student test scores.
Rhee’s new organization, StudentsFirst, has pledged to raise $1 billion in order to overturn teacher tenure, create tax credits for private school vouchers, institute parent trigger laws, and increase merit pay, expensive testing and profitable charter schools. With a wealthy cadre of hedge fund managers, nonprofit foundations, right-wing conservatives and fundamentalist religious groups, she managed to raise $4.6 million in 2010-2011. In return, she spent over $2 million in early 2012 to support candidates, reform groups and state legislation that supports the privatization of public schools.
It’s time to end this teacher-bashing, public school trashing trend. Rhee and her anti-public school cohorts demonize public education, teachers unions and educators. Their simplistic messaging — charters are good and teachers unions are bad — thwarts thoughtful discussions about improving public schools. We need to keep the discussion focused where it should be: on the students and those who know best how to transform public education.
By Susan Ridgeway, Wooster Education Association