Teachers Speak Out

My friend from another blog and fellow teacher sheba reminds us today about the connections between the Bush administration and the makers of standardized tests. Specifically, she points to this startling article from The Nation from January 2002, the month George W. Bush signed ESEA 2001 (aka NCLB, IYKWIM). Just some highlights:

[T]he Bush legislation has ardent supporters in the testing and textbook publishing industries. Only days after the 2000 election, an executive for publishing giant NCS Pearson addressed a Waldorf ballroom filled with Wall Street analysts. According to Education Week, the executive displayed a quote from President-elect Bush calling for state testing and school-by-school report cards, and announced, "This almost reads like our business plan." The bill has allotted $387 million to get states up to speed; the National Association of State Boards of Education estimates that properly funding the testing mandate could cost anywhere from $2.7 billion to $7 billion. The bottom line? "This promises to be a bonanza for the testing companies," says Monte Neill of FairTest, a Boston-based nonprofit. "Fifteen states now test in all the grades Bush wants. All the rest are going to have to increase the amount of testing they do." [. . .]

The big educational testing companies have thus dispatched lobbyists to Capitol Hill. Bruce Hunter, who represents the American Association of School Administrators, says, "I've been lobbying on education issues since 1982, but the test publishers have been active at a level I've never seen before. At every hearing, every discussion, the big test publishers are always present with at least one lobbyist, sometimes more." Both standardized testing and textbook publishing are dominated by the so-called Big Three--McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin and Harcourt General--all identified as "Bush stocks" by Wall Street analysts in the wake of the 2000 election.

While critics of the Bush Administration's energy policies have pointed repeatedly to its intimacy with the oil and gas industry--specifically the now-imploding Enron--few education critics have noted the Administration's cozy relationship with McGraw-Hill. At its heart lies the three-generation social mingling between the McGraw and Bush families. The McGraws are old Bush friends, dating back to the 1930s, when Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed began to establish Jupiter Island, a barrier island off the coast of Florida, as a haven for the Northeast wealthy. The island's original roster of socialite vacationers reads like a who's who of American industry, finance and government: the Meads, the Mellons, the Paysons, the Whitneys, the Lovetts, the Harrimans--and Prescott Bush and James McGraw Jr. The generations of the two families parallel each other closely in age: the patriarchs Prescott and James Jr., son George and nephew Harold Jr., and grandson George W. and grandnephew Harold III, who now runs the family publishing empire.

The amount of cross-pollination and mutual admiration between the Administration and that empire is striking: Harold McGraw Jr. sits on the national grant advisory and founding board of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. McGraw in turn received the highest literacy award from President Bush in the early 1990s, for his contributions to the cause of literacy. The McGraw Foundation awarded current Bush Education Secretary Rod Paige its highest educator's award while Paige was Houston's school chief; Paige, in turn, was the keynote speaker at McGraw-Hill's "government initiatives" conference last spring. Harold McGraw III was selected as a member of President George W. Bush's transition advisory team, along with McGraw-Hill board member Edward Rust Jr., the CEO of State Farm and an active member of the Business Roundtable on educational issues. An ex-chief of staff for Barbara Bush is returning to work for Laura Bush in the White House--after a stint with McGraw-Hill as a media relations executive. John Negroponte left his position as McGraw-Hill's executive vice president for global markets to become Bush's ambassador to the United Nations.

Again, NCLB is not our main thrust here, but it's so hard to avoid talking about all the other Things We Are Up Against. One of these days, I'll turn it into a real list. It will not be pleasant.

In the meantime, don't forget to Speak Out. Email us or click on "Speak Out!" below. Maybe take this time to talk about how NCLB has changed your classroom . . .

Every once in a while, I would get a little jealous that I would probably never be on that list of suspected insurgents who always get stopped at the airports and the Canadian border, that list of people so dangerous to the government that we must be stopped before we do irreparable harm to society or the world.

You know, terrorists.

I guess it was easier than I thought: Turns out I've been a terrorist since the day I became a teacher and joined the National Education Association. At least according to U.S. Education secretary Rod Paige:

Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation's largest teachers union a "terrorist organization" during a private White House meeting with governors on Monday. [. . .] "These were the words, 'The NEA is a terrorist organization,'" said Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin. [. . .] Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, a Republican, said of Paige's comments: "Somebody asked him about the NEA's role and he offered his perspective on it." Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, a Democrat, said the comments were made in the context of "we can't be supportive of the status quo and they're the status quo. But whatever the context, it is inappropriate — I know he wasn't calling teachers terrorists — but to ever suggest that the organization they belong to was a terrorist organization is uncalled for."

I'm not really sure what else needs to be added, except perhaps that this off-the-cuff remark really demonstrates three things about the current (Republican) leadership in this country: They hate teachers, they hate public schools, and they really, really hate unions.

At the very least, Rod Paige should be out. At best, this may open up dialog about why we need teachers' unions in the first place, and how messed up public education would be with no or weak unions to protect our rights and support our colleagues.

And we can add this to that ever-growing list of Things We're Up Against.

UPDATE: Some other versions of the AP story cite NEA president Reg Weaver: "The education secretary's words were 'pathetic and they are not a laughing matter,'" despite Paige's insistence "that his comment was 'a bad joke; it was an inappropriate choice of words.'"

Why are we speaking out? Who can speak out? What are we speaking out about? What is this "blog" thing anyway?

These are all reasonable questions my fellow MPS teachers may have after hearing about Teachers Speak Out or dropping by this site for the first time. Well, I'll try to add some answers.

TSO is an organization designed to help teachers get their own message out. We want you, the teachers, to have a voice, to be an active, informed, and engaged part of the debate. What debate? Well, any debate--as you can see by tooling around this site a little bit, the range of issues that we discuss is broad. Sure, we formed initially in response to the media's and the superintendent's attacks on us and the benefits that we have earned, but we know that there is more to you than just that.

Perhaps the most powerful thing you can do as a teacher is tell your own story--speak out about your successes, your failures, your classroom, your life and how it is affected by these issues in education. That's what this "blog" is all about. "Blogs"--short for "web logs"--started as journals of a sort, on-line diaries that people could share with their friends. It didn't take long for "bloggers" to venture outside of themselves, though, and now you can find blogs dedicated to news, politics, sports, the arts, writing, and more. This blog is dedicated to us, the teachers in MPS who need a place to begin to speak out.

So, this is our call to you: Tell us your stories. Speak out. Get involved. There are three ways to speak out here at the blog:

Click on the "Speak Out!" links at the bottom of the stories to add your comments on whatever is being discussed. You can even write your story in the comments section, and, if you'd like, we can "promote" it to the main page.

Email your story to teachersspeakout@hotmail.com, and we will post it here for you.

Become a regular member of the Teachers Speak Out blog team. Send an email teachersspeakout@hotmail.com, telling us who you are, where you teach, and what your focus will be as a poster here on the blog, and we'll set you up with access so you can start speaking out.

Thanks for coming by; don't forget to check back often for updates, calls to action, and stories of your colleagues speaking out!

The headline is provocative: No. 1 in birth rate for black teens

Teachers have been saying this anecdotally in the staff room for as long as I have been teaching in Milwaukee, but here it is in the voice of Pat McManus, executive director of the Black Health Coalition: "We've got 30-year-old grandmothers, mothers of teen parents who have teen parents. That cycle is going to continue if it isn't broken somehow."

Again, the evidence is clear and mounting that what we are facing in Milwaukee is not a breakdown in education but a breakdown in economic and societal structures necessary to make quality education happen. I don't have a lot of time tonight to blog about this, but I did want to make sure that this is added to the collection of articles I've been posting here about what's afoot outside of the classroom in Milwaukee to make it difficult to do our jobs inside it.

Good news, bad news, and interesting news on the Milwaukee voucher front this week. Well, not exactly: No good news.

Let's start, though, with something that I did not know: Apparently, according to a new study by the Public Policy Forum (for more on the Public Policy Forum, see the January 22 post, "What We're Up Against"), most Milwaukee voucher schools actually do administer standardized tests to their students. Why didn't I know that? Well, in the words of a recent Washington Post editorial (log in: teachersspeakout@hotmail.com password: teachersspeakout):

In theory, the Milwaukee program [. . .] was supposed to empower parents, allowing them to leave poor schools--which would shut down or be spurred to improve--and join good ones, which would benefit from the increased public money. In practice, so little information is made available to Milwaukee parents that the market mechanism has never worked. By the Public Policy Forum's reckoning, only one school in the city has been shut down because too many parents abandoned it. (my emphasis)

That's right: The information gathered by standardized tests used by these voucher schools--some 92% of them--seldom make it out the school door. From the first article linked to above: "But the Forum's report also advises that school administrators and policy makers develop a means to publicly report test results, which are often used solely for internal use by the schools."

Why are test results such a big deal? They should not be. In the same way that I do not feel that public schools should be under the gun of high-stakes testing, I do not think that testing is the be-all and end-all of the accountability argument. It's just that the media--particularly right-wing radio babblers and our oh-so supportive local paper--spend so much time examining every single implication of every single datum revealed by the public schools' test results. Why are not these voucher schools, which also use public funds, subjected to the same scrutiny?

The Public Policy Forum, in recommendations echoed by the Washington Post, agrees that tests are not at all the best measure.

What is needed, they argue, is not necessarily a system of special standardized tests or inspections, which might compromise the independence of the private schools in the program, but rules that require schools to publish and regularly update relevant information. For example, participating schools might be asked to publish the qualifications of teachers and administrators; the results of an annual financial audit; the curriculum; attendance, suspension and graduation rates; teacher turnover rates; class size; and the results of standardized tests, just for a start. In addition, officials have to make sure the market mechanism works: that both public and private schools failing to attract students suffer some financial consequences.

This week in Milwaukee we were treated to a lesson in exactly what can happen when there is not transparency within voucher schools. News broke early this week about trouble at the Mandella School of Science and Math, starting with "inappropriately" cashed voucher checks and two Mercedes Benz--one a convertible--bought for the principal and his wife with voucher proceeds. We also learned that the school has failed to pay teachers or its landlord since at least November.

Finally, Thursday a Milwaukee judge ordered that the school be closed. The 100 or so students at the school will now need to find their way in Milwaukee Public Schools--schools which, this late in the year, will receive no funds for their attendance. The parents are now concerned about their children's ability to catch up now that they are a half-year behind.

You might be thinking, great! This is the market system at work! But education is something that should never, ever be left to the market. In a market system, there are always winners and there are always losers. In the Mandella school incident, we see what happens to losers. The real losers here are not the officials at the school. The losers are the students and parents, who have seen more than half a year of educational opportunity squandered.

This is also a concern because it seems like there will be a surge in voucher students this fall. There have been almost fifty more schools this year clamoring to get added to the program than last year. Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle thankfully vetoed an expansion of the program last November, but the potential expansion of vouchers just underscores the point I started with: We need accountability. As more schools join up, the more Mandellas there will be, and the more students who could be the losers in this market.

And the gutting of Milwaukee's working class continues.

Multinational corporation DaimlerChrysler is moving its Dodge Ram frame production line to Mexico in 2005. Those frames are currently made by Tower Automotive, in a plant on Milwaukee's economically depressed north side. The writing was on the wall last year when the unions there ratified a six-year contract and were told the next day, basically, that six years was unlikely to really happen.

Between last November and this coming June, the plant was expected to pink-slip nearly 300; this new news of the plant's closing means nearly 500 more families will be without a good, union job in the household.

In 1997, Milwaukee had more than 170,000 manufacturing jobs; in the off-shoring and automation bonanza over the last six years, though, 20%--35,000--of those jobs have disappeared, in a city of fewer than 600,000 residents. These workers, soon to be joined by the Tower employees, do not have the skillset to fit into the growing medical or technology fields. Even if they did, or if better federal or state job-training programs were in place, they would be competing in an ecomomy saddled by a jobless recovery with few new jobs anywhere.

Earlier this week, Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said that off-shoring was a normal product of trade (and the Washington Post agrees) and "probably a plus" for the economy over the long haul. Later, he began to back off from those comments, likely under heavy political pressure.

It just plain makes me ill to think of the moms and dads of the students in my classroom as commodities, the jobs of whom are somehow "normal" to trade around the world like truck frames or computer chips or grain. When a computer chip flies around the world, it doesn'ty leave behind crumbling central city infrastructure, a family without access to health care, and a child who can't afford pencils anymore.

It just plain makes me ill to think about how empty the heart of our city--metaphorically and geographically--is becoming, and how hopeless it must seem to the families living near idled factories and forced to subsist on Wal-Mart wages.

This is all I can do--speak out for change when I can and work for change with the generation that, when they come of age, will be facing a city that provides no opportunity, no support system, and no hope.

Please join me.

TSO is meeting this Thursday, at 5 PM. Unfortunately, the Bean Head Cafe, which is a great teacher-friendly venue, was unable to accomodate us, so we'll be meeting instead at the MTEA, 5130 W. Vliet St., in Milwaukee.

See you there!

You've probably read about the charges surrounding an MPS elementary school's alleged cheating on state and district standardized tests.

I know that our union is doing everything it can to defend the legal and contractual rights of the teachers involved. I don't have any real information or anything else to share about the specific case. But I know a little something about the high-stakes testing required by the Elementary and Secondary Education Authorization Act of 2001, provisions of which are commonly called "No Child Left Behind." And let me say, as a teacher and as someone who cares about my students, school, district, and public education in general, that I can understand what may have motivated these teachers, if in fact they crossed a line.

I have written extensively about No Child Left Behind for the on-line magazine Open Source Politics (do a site search for NCLB and many great articles will come up), and there is plenty of good other information out there about how detrimental the program, its requirements, and its sanctions can be. In fact, in recent weeks, both Virginia and Utah have taken steps toward giving up federal funds to get out from under the burden. Many local districts have done so as well.

And at the school level, the sanctions are merciless. They begin innocuously enough, as these things often do, with just a label: School in need of improvement. But from there, a school can begin losing students (and therefore staff and teachers) and schools must use Title I funds to provide supplemental education services from a state-approved provider, which could mean a private or religious entity.

Eventually, the district is required to step in and start revamping curriculum or shuffling staff at these schools, because, I guess, nothing says improvement like discontinuity! As a final resort--and finality can come within just four years--the school can be closed, reconstituted, or turned over to the private sector. (Many of us, in fact, see NCLB as nothing more than a complicated ruse to dismantle public education all together.)

We have strong evidence now that the "Houston Miracle," on which much of NCLB was based and which prompted George W. Bush to promote Houston's superintendent to Secretary of Education, was largely a sham. Several different news organizations have uncovered the cheating and scamming that went on in Houston because teachers and administrators feared the sanctions.

Now, no one is suggesting that teachers either in Milwaukee or in Houston did a single thing to abdicate their responsibility to educate their students. But when the stakes get so high, the temptation can become unbearable to do anything to give your students or your school a little edge or a bit of protection from the sanctions.

My fear is that the alleged incident here in Milwaukee is just the tip of what will be a national iceberg. As more and more schools face sanctions, as more and more teachers and administrators face the very real prospect of losing their livelihoods despite doing their damnedest to educate the kids in their charge, more and more allegations of cheating on these high-stakes tests will come to light.

No Child Left Behind is not the primary focus of Teachers Speak Out, but right now there's a story out there that does not necessarily paint Milwaukee teachers in the best light. But the public should know what we know and see what we see: It is simply not true that without threat of sanctions we have no incentive to perform. This is our passion and we are tireless in its pursuit. But with the threat of sanctions, with the sword of NCLB hanging over our heads, we have a great deal of temptation to cross the line.

"More like Detroit, less like Minneapolis: That's what Milwaukee will become without fundamental change," according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.

The WPRI, a conservative think-tank based in the northern Milwaukee suburbs, draws a big red circle around some facts that we teachers have known for a long time: Milwaukee's economy is in crisis. (Technically, they say we are a city at a "crossroads," but they do throw in this gem: "Public and private-sector leaders must shake off the notion that the Milwaukee economy is generally OK--it is not"--emphasis thiers!)

We have a declining base of employed people in the city--down 44,000 in the last 30 years. Milwaukee's average income is $5,400 less than the national average. Our per capita income is 44th out of the 50 largest US cities. We are not attracting enough college-educated people to the city--and we are not producing enough of our own, either.

Milwaukee teachers face real challenges because of these drastic economic conditions in the city. The declining tax base means that on a per-student basis, we are dead last out of the 50 southeastern Wisconsin school districts in property tax revenue. We collect a mere $1672 per student (the state average is around $3,000), while our immediately-to-the-north neighboring district collects more than $10,000 per student.

Our per-pupil spending, therefore, has increased very little in real dollars over the last fifteen years. At the same time, we have seen a 30% increase in children at or below the poverty level, a 53% increase in students with special needs (who can require many times the average per-pupil cost), and a 63% increase in the number of students with limited English proficiency.

The economic conditions in the city that force kids to stay home to care for little brothers and sisters, or work to help pay the rent, mean that we face increasing drop-out rates. The achievement gap in the Milwaukee Public Schools between eighth-grade black and white students is now the largest in the nation.

We know, from study upon study upon study, that the home environment and early development are key factors in the achievement gap. When we can't afford lead-paint abatement, when we can't afford prenatal care, when we can't afford to take off of work to come into our children's schools, we fall further and further behind.

This is what we're facing, folks. MPS teachers have a far greater challenge than teachers in other districts; we have more to overcome and fewer resources to do it with. But our kids are the economic backbone of Milwaukee's future: If they cannot succeed, then their children will fail worse, and their children, and so on. It is imperative that we stop this cycle now.

Let me interject here that I do not want to completely exonerate the schools. I know that we can improve, and in my building, at least, we're working as hard as we can to find successful strategies and focus on them. In fact, our state test scores have steadily improved over the last several years. And there is certainly room for district-wide reforms supported by research and guaranteed to be a long-term investment (remember the Literacy Coaches?).

The WPRI study recommends a number of changes to MPS that I can certainly get behind, but they go too far in the wrong direction sometimes, too. Here's their plan:

• Measure individual school performance
• Raise standards and tailor them to meet the needs of Milwaukee's businesses
• Merge MPS with the city [ed note: This is a bad, bad, bad idea] giving the mayor the flexibility to direct funding where it's needed [ed note: The flexibility is a good idea, though]
• Tie state funds to performance
• Reallocate funds from ineffectual money pits such as bussing; as they say, "[T]he scarce education dollar [is] best spent [. . .] improving [students'] attendance and their educational attainment."
• Change the state focus to improving student performance

You'll note that none of these recommendations involves cutting salary and benefits from teachers. Of course, none of them say a thing about teachers at all.

I believe, and Teachers Speak Out and the MTEA--not to mention the research!--concur, that the most important thing we can do to improve the education in MPS is to ensure that we have a quality, caring teacher in every classroom. We need to attract new teachers and retain the ones we have. Teachers bring resources to the city, they have a dedication to the city's well-being, and they can play a key role in reshaping this city's future. If the MPS administration continues to focus its attacks on teachers, rather than the challenges we face, they will only make all of the problems identified by the WPRI even worse.

The Superintendent's demeanor, attitude, and comments at the second of his Town Hall meetings was decidedly different from last Wednesday's. I am interested, of course, in hearing your take on the meeting, if you were there or if you saw the coverage on WTMJ tonight. Click on "Speak Out!" below to comment.

From my perspective, the Superintendent approached the evening on the offensive. I think last week he was genuinely surprised that teachers and the parents who came out to support us were unified in our message. A lot of the credit there goes to our union officials, who have stayed in top things and not only kept us informed but supported as well. But more than that, I think there was a genuine sense of betrayal among us, that we have sacrificed and sacrificed now only to be blindsided by the districts "preliminary final offer" that has us paying $6000 a year--plus up to $4500 in deductibles--to maintain our current level of health benefits.

I think he was also surprised last week to see that his attempt at driving a wedge between young and veteran teachers would fail. (He has said this to the press: "What young people are looking for is a higher wage. They're not interested in a pension. They're not even that interested in the health insurance." Not true, sir.)

So tonight he took a much more strident tone, and as a result, he got a lot of gruff from teacher after teacher who, at some point in their remarks, said they felt disrespected.

In all, it was not the most pleasant of experiences. I firmly believe that now the Superintendent is mad, and I'm afraid things will get far worse before the get better. I hope now he may be willing to sit down at the table and talk about some of the things that his "preliminary final offer" neglected, and make a good-faith effort instead of a media charge.

Here are two headlines, from different newspapers, about the same story:

MILWAUKEE STUDY: Oversight lacking at voucher schools

Reinforce choice, researchers say

We public school teachers have, for more than a decade now, repeatedly asked that voucher schools be subjected to the same scrutiny and held to the same standards as our public schools. What newspaper is it that believes the study agrees with us (regardless of the content--which will go unread by many, anyway--judge by the headline). Is it our hometown paper? No, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is running the second headline.

The paper that echoes Milwaukee teachers' sentiment is, believe it or not, The St. Paul Pioneer Press. Yes, we have to go out of state to find reporters on our side.

To be fair, Sarah Carr, the author of the Milwaukee story--and, it must be pointed out, not the author of the headline; the reporters do not write their own heads--does delve into what the authors of a new study (Emily Van Dunk and Anneliese M. Dickman, School Choice and the Question of Accountability) have to say about accountablity. From her article:

The authors call for creation of an independent organization that would ensure greater accountability. The entity, which Van Dunk and Dickman envision as a public-private partnership between the schools and the state, would disseminate information about the schools to parents. Schools that failed to adhere to the reporting guidelines laid down by the agency would lose taxpayer money--after a probationary period.

We also get some good info on other problems with voucher schools. Again, from the Milwaukee paper:

They found that parents had to clear numerous hurdles to gather information about some choice schools. Even the entrances to a few schools were difficult to find, they report.

"We didn't expect them to be wary of parents," said Van Dunk in an interview. "That was a little surprising, that when it was an actual parent on the doorstep, some of the schools didn't want to be forthcoming with information."

Moreover, the book concludes that the response of public schools to competition from voucher schools does not follow "market theories."

But the St. Paul paper does a much better job at providing good background information, delving into current legislative proposals to deal with the issue and contacting State Superintendent Burmaster's office. The Milwaukee story merely notes that the usual "partisans on both sides of the debate responded Wednesday primarily by reiterating their embedded positions on the issue." In fact, reading in the Pioneer Press, we find

• Voucher parents are often forced to rely on incomplete data in assessing schools, and rely on cues such as the school's appearance, opinions of friends or family, or school location.

• Private schools competing with public ones have not improved Milwaukee Public Schools; performance on standardized tests is lower in areas where there is a competing private school.

• Public school teachers say they have seen few changes, mostly marketing or extracurricular changes to attract students, not curricular ones.

You should follow the links above and read both articles in full.

In the end, of course, one study and one set of articles will not make a difference in the sea of information surrounding vouchers here in Milwaukee. But it is important to note the tone and bias of our Milwaukee media, which is a big part of what we're up against.

Teachers and anyone else who attended the superintendent's "Town Hall" meeting tonight, leave your reactions and responses by clicking on "Comments" below.

Also let us know what you thought of the media coverage--we here at TSO can't watch every channel at once!