Don't make yourself crazy.

This goes out to all of you starting up your school years, whether it's for the first or thirtieth time. In addition to having to learn names and do your actual jobs, you are going to be inundated with tons of crap that seems meaningless, counterproductive, and irrelevant to your present needs. 

If you are a rookie, you're going to be tempted to take it seriously. If you're a vet, you may forget how unserious it all is. This post is to remind you.

Rule 1: First, second, and third, pay attention to your kids. 

Get to know them well enough to enjoy them. Listen to them and they will tell you how you can help.

Do what you have to to hold on to your job, but all the rest of the nonsense foisted upon you by not-teachers doesn't even make the top ten.

Rule 4: Do not sweat your test scores. 

They are not your test scores. They are your students' scores. They reflect the SES of your students and their families, not your value (added or otherwise) as a teacher. The bosses know this. 

As long as you look like you care about the tests, you'll be fine. But for the love of John Dewey, don't let yourself be fooled into believing that they mean anything beyond the fact that this country continues to fail to address child poverty.

Rule 5: Don't sweat your job (too much). 

They need you much more than you need them. When they go on about "student performance" or "proficiency," they really only mean test scores, and that's something you have very little control over. Scores on the big standardized tests are not reliable and not valid, and they have nothing to do with what you are trying to teach. Pretend to care, but don't.

Rule 6: Other things you can't control.

Attendance. My administration used to try and chastise me for students missing class. By all means, cover your ass and make sure phone calls are going home and you reach out to the PSA counselor, but you have a job. Whether getting students into your room is a job for administration or the parents, it's definitely not yours. Again, pretend you are committed to whatever they think will work.

It might be somebody's job to check hallway passes and track down the wanderers and police the restrooms, but you have 20-40 human beings in a box and that's your job.

You can't stop every bad idea that trickles down from superintendent to local district to principal to you, but you can limit the damage. You can ignore some, and what you can't ignore you can sometimes modify. 

Rule 4: You have a job.

It is not your responsibility to make sure there's a teacher in every classroom. Cover a class if you want the money or can't get out of it, but either way make sure you get paid. When you cover, your job is not to teach geometry if you're an art teacher. It's to take attendance, get to know the students, and make sure nobody gets hurt. If they want a geometry teacher, let them find one.

Finally, join your union. My first union was the United Auto Workers in 1975. I'm a member of SAG-AFTRA and a life member of UTLA. UTLA is not perfect, no union is, and I've had my fights with them, but if you think things are tough now, imagine how much worse they could be. Then imagine worse than that, and that's where you end up without a union. 

The only thing between you and fifty kids in a class and unpaid training days and zero say in what you teach, is your union. The only thing between a satisfying if challenging career and being ground into dust ten years too soon, is your union. 

And if you are somebody who just takes the collectively bargained money and the delineation of duties and doesn't pay union dues, then fuck you.

Here's to a good start and smooth sailing. If you have tips of your own or any questions, don't hesitate to comment here or reach out to me at nowwaid@gmail.com.  In the meantime, good luck. Try to enjoy the ride.

Back to School: It's the tests.

It's August, and for millions of U.S. students that means the first day of a new school year. Here in Los Angeles, LAUSD classes started on Monday, and so the last week or so there have been loads of stories in the paper and on local news about Covid precautions, the new superintendent, and of course why in the world we start school in August.

Didn't it used to be different? Didn't those idyllic endless summer vacation days used to dissolve to the sound of that first bell just after Labor Day? Turns out the answer is yes and no, and yes.

As we were sipping our coffee the other morning and watching one of those stories on local morning news, the smartest person I know turned to me and said something to the effect of "Why does school start so early?" To which I replied, "Testing." "What?" "Yeah. It's so kids have more time to prepare for the big tests in the spring."

She couldn't believe it. "I had no idea." Then I couldn't believe it. I had no idea everyone didn't already know that. But it's true. And I'll bet there are lots of people who don't know.

For anyone who's spent a significant amount of time working in schools, the addiction to testing and the "data" it generates is common knowledge. In fact, it's hard to explain to outsiders how thoroughly the testing imperative dominates all other dimensions of schooling. It often feels as if the testing schedule determines and controls every hour of the school year, and in important ways that's true. 

In this wag-the-dog world, your pacing, the standards you are directed to teach, the way you structure your lessons and craft your assessments, even the language you are instructed to use with your students, are all dominated by the impending big test in the spring. Even Advisory activities and school assemblies seem to exist in service to the testing. The start of the school year, too.

I've included here once again the testing schedule for LAUSD: 

And here's the current table:

I've highlighted the exams with what I would call the highest stakes for administrators and their schools and their districts, and you can see that even though the second semester of school is particularly impacted by this madness, the most intense window of high stakes testing begins in February.

It starts with the ELPAC for English language proficiency reclassification, on which the district and state base their estimation of how well you are serving your English Learners. Then, in March, you begin the big math and ELA Smarter Balanced Assessments on which the bosses base everything else. And don't be fooled by the long window or the June completion date. Schools are forced to begin as early as possible in order to ensure as many students as possible complete the assessments. So the principal doesn't get yelled at.

Throw in the AP exams in May and you've got a busy spring spent under a lot of pressure.

It wasn't always this way. I don't think. In an effort to avoid being the "when I was a kid" guy, I did some digging around but the data is... elusive. In fact, when trying to answer the simple question "Are students going back to school earlier than they used to?" even Pew Research Center, in an article titled "‘Back to school’ means anytime from late July to after Labor Day, depending on where in the U.S. you live," admitted that   "[f]inding school calendars from years and decades past for our sample districts proved to be beyond the reach of this analysis." This one, too.

Reporting from CNN is a little more helpful, relating that while districts around the country vary depending on who's running the show in which state, generally up until the mid 1980's Labor Day was still a common boundary between summer freedom and back to school. By the mid 90's things were changing and the change continues today.

Los Angeles and LAUSD is an interesting case, as we were evolving our present calendar while also emerging from the mayhem of year-round schooling, the workaround initiated in 1981 for overcrowded schools. By the 2000s, as enrollment eased and schools moved from multiple tracks back to a "traditional" calendar, the trajectory was clear. However, the question remained as to when that calendar would start. 

In 2008-2009, the first day for schools on the "traditional" track was September 3. But by 2012 LAUSD had moved its single-track start date to August 14, and in 2017, when Bell Senior High School became the last year-round LAUSD school to return to a single-track schedule, that schedule started in August.

Of course, the world is full of Big Test promoters who are happy to tell you that the first day of school is different from district to district decade to decade, and that's true-ish. But anybody with a brain and a calendar can see it's different. 

The same bunch will also offer that it makes it easier on teachers and students to finish the first semester before winter break, or that shorter summer vacations produce less summer learning loss, or even that more breaks during the year make the early start necessary (instead of, perhaps more plausibly, the early start requiring more in-semester breaks in order to avoid finishing the 180 day year in April).

But here's the truth: All of those things would have been true for about a hundred years. What's different today, is testing. Beginning with Bush's "No Child Left Behind" (more about Bush 1 and Clinton some other time) and continuing through Obama's "Race to the Top," free market education became the neoliberal wet dream. And the market means competition, and competition requires metrics, and our present testing derangement was born. 

But we aren't encouraged to talk about that. Even in this CNN piece, although we are given lots of reasons for the change, number one is more instructional time before the testing begins, and yet nobody goes on the record. Only "several experts" who "agreed" that this was the big one. Reminds me of when I was still teaching and we brought in a bunch of consultants to help us with text prep, only we had to call it formative practice or some bullshit. Testing is the Voldemort of the education biz.

I guess maybe they're worried that if parents actually understood how much of their kids' school lives are devoured by test prepping and test taking and test talking, they might not think that the numbers which don't mean a thing to their kids -- You mean they don't need it to graduate? It's not for a grade? Will it at least help them get into college? -- are a good tradeoff for drama class or driver's ed.

Parents also might wonder why the family trip to Yellowstone or Las Vegas that they used to take with their parents every year as the end of summer/beginning of school is now unavailable to them and their children. Every year I taught, I had students miss the first week of school or the last week of school for family vacations. 

Sadly, come to think of it, I spent a significant portion of those years being mad at kids, which was stupid, because one of the most important lessons I learned later than I should have was how little control students have over their own lives. Lots of parents have very little flexibility with respect to trips and time off. Their kids have none.

In any event, the news stories ran back to back  one morning this week, and one was on starting school in 90 degree weather--117 in Palm Springs! (there's no air conditioning on the basketball courts or in the cafeteria) and one was on so many absent kids. I wonder if there's a chance the early start and the absent kids are connected. I don't wonder, really.

With the August 15 return to school, students have approximately three more weeks to prepare before the SBA and AP exams roll around, and three fewer weeks to just fool around learning afterward. What a waste.

Summer is not over. Testing is not that important. Or it shouldn't be. If you don't know, now you know.

 

How Shitty Is It? Updated.

There are numerous reasons people leave teaching careers prematurely or avoid them altogether, but as I wrote here and here, shitty pay is surely at the top of the list.

An outstanding new report by Sylvia Allegretto @Sly21 at the Economic Policy Institute uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to comprehensively illustrate what I previously described from my own experience at LAUSD.

I've included a couple of pertinent graphs here:

And here:

The pictures tell part of the story, but the report has a wealth of important information and connects the teacher pay issue to the teacher shortage and school funding overall. 

To the teachers out there: 

• No, you are not imagining things. I was getting screwed when I was in the game, and you are getting screwed now.

To the teachers in LAUSD and UTLA members in particular: 

• You have a right to the raise you're asking for.

To all the education reporters out there: 

• You need to include this information on pay every single time you report on the teacher and school staffing shortage. 
• You need to stop pretending that the staffing shortage is a mystery or a force of nature. Its causes are known. Enumerate them.
• You need to report the staffing shortage for what it is: a policy choice.

listen to "In Local News..."

In Local News...

The carnival comes to town. 

Can it live up to the advance publicity?

Students return to classrooms tomorrow and in lots of ways it will be like every other first day of school: seeing friends, sizing up new teachers, having the rules read to you over and over again. 

But for the first time the Los Angeles Unified School District will be back-to-schooling with its new boss, and he promises things are going to be different.

Alberto Carvalho took the reins at LAUSD in February after 13+ years running Miami-Dade County Public Schools. By all accounts, he is a good talker who enjoys the limelight. His pet patter includes "Skill set will set," "Academic temperature," and talk of "lost children" for students the district has lost track of.  

In addition, Alberto Carvalho loves him some tech. "Digital Empowerment." During a Discovery Education confab "Transition to Digital Classrooms" speech he gave in 2013, he pumped technology as "the most noble and dignifying of investments in our country at this time." In 2011, eSchool News selected him as "one of 10 winners of the 11th Annual Tech-Savvy Superintendent Awards" for, among other things, "increasing virtual school enrollment by 800 percent." That aged well. 

Carvalho is a slick salesman, but does what he says always add up? This morning he was on Face the Nation ostensibly to talk about the school staffing shortage, and when asked why teachers are leaving the classroom, his answer was a medley of insufficient pay, the pandemic with its "virtual learning," and somehow those dumb teachers who take early retirement before they even qualify for full benefits. Unsurprisingly, there was no mention of the other 150 reasons the job has become unsustainable. (see Edxit or: Where'd Everybody go?)

When asked about using alternative certifications and permits to fill vacancies and whether that lowered standards, Carvalho replied that "these are fully credentialed individuals" who have college degrees but "may not have the state certification." Um, what? 

He then defaulted to his talking point that the district is "for the very first time in over a decade fully staffed going into August 15th, the very first day of school." Which is, to say the least, unlikely.

The teachers union (@UTLAnow) finds it 'improbable' that @LASchools was able to fill about 700 vacancies in the last week. #LAUSD #caedu #edchat #LosAngeles https://t.co/C3qY8fA4Bm

— EdSource (@EdSource) August 12, 2022

He carried on with somethingsomething wide net and with what was apparently his safe word: micro-credentialing.

The way I read the district website, these look to me like specialized credentials available to already credentialed staff. If you're out there and you know more, please comment here or email me at nowwaid@gmail.com and educate me. Also, if the Super is hiding behind micro-credentialed newbies to say "these are fully credentialed individuals," I'd love to know about that, too.

He countered a predictable "is it really about money, though?" question with a nod to cost of living and working conditions (fleetingly) before landing squarely on "recruitment," almost as if they weren't connected. As with the "pay, pandemic, and early retirement" above, Carvalho again conflates teachers' problems (cost of living, working conditions) with his own (recruitment). It made me wonder if he is even capable putting himself in the shoes of LAUSD staff, of seeing students, families, and schools through their eyes. 

He took one more bite at the "fully staffed" apple and talked about the "lost children" who have left school, and that was it.

Nothing I've seen gives me confidence that Supt. Carvalho understands the inside of a classroom, or ways to support and recruit staff, or the limits of his own power and where to look for help. I know it's difficult right now to get young people to commit to a life in teaching, but it's not that complicated. The reasons teachers retire early are the same reasons people decline to become teachers in the first place: 

... teaching has been made unattractive and unsustainable. The drain won't stop until compensation, micromanagement & management through fear, de-professionalization, overwork & make-work, politicization of curriculum are addressed.

— Anne Lutz Fernandez (@lutzfernandez) August 4, 2022 (h/t @nancyflanagan)

You can't fix it if you won't admit what's broken. And unless Carvalho expects some nonprofit or public-private partnership send an army of teachers, he doesn't seem to have an answer.   (I discussed his Miami-Dade dependence on Teach for America here.)

Staffing is a big and chronic problem, but it's not the only thing the Super wants to tackle. Carvalho sees himself as a  transformational figure and he has plans. As I wrote here back in February, Carvalho is a big believer in school choice, which translates to competition among schools, which inevitably leads to test scores, which are bullshit. 

In fact, while boss at MDCPS, Carvalho facilitated the mass exodus of students from their neighborhood schools. This is from Answer Key back in December:

In a 2018 article, the corporate school-reform website The74 reported that then-Miami schools chief had a "sweeping vision for dramatically expanding educational choice," and went on to say this about Carvalho:

"Understand this fact: In Carvalho’s district, the fourth-largest in the country, more than 70 percent of the roughly 400,000 students do not attend their zoned public school. That’s not a typo. These students attend charter schools, take classes over the internet and at local colleges, and even attend private, faith-based schools — all with taxpayer funds or under tax credit scholarship programs." (emphasis mine)

As I wrote here back in February, another of Carvalho's favorite aphorisms is "One size fits none." It will be interesting to see if he applies that same principle to the district's standardized testing obsession. I'm thinking probably not. 

And finally, as you prepare to greet your students at the door and hand out those schedules and discuss your class rules and expectations, as you try and remember last year's names and start memorizing new ones, you apparently will be doing it without a contract. 

Of all the troubling aspects of the new boss, from his self-promotion to his faith in tech to his devotion to school choice, to a sense he just might be in over his head, nothing beats Carvalho's autocratic approach to leadership for "number one thing to be most worried about."

The UTLA contract expired at the end of June and Carvalho has refused to negotiate a new contract in good faith, instead counter-proposing language that would turn the union itself into a strikebreaker. 

Carvalho also scheduled four additional (optional) days of instruction without negotiation or discussion, further evidence of the "my way or the highway" style of leadership that has been tried--unsuccessfully--before. Nevertheless, both examples are alarming signs of what might lie ahead. 

In that Discover Education talk Carvalho declared, "Reform needs to be swift. Reform needs to be pervasive." 

He also detailed how he used the catastrophe of the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession to advance his policies in Miami-Dade. Carvalho described it this way:

We decided that the crisis was our friend. We're not going to complain. We're going to embrace the crisis and do every crazy great thing we always wanted to do today and blame it on the economy. And that's what we did.

And what were some of those crazy great things Carvalho did?

In four and a half years I have replaced, terminated, demoted, promoted sixty-four percent of all principals in [the] fourth largest school system in America. I did not renew 6,000 teacher contracts in four and a half years.

Carvalho goes on to say that they avoided national scrutiny by intentionally keeping a lid on what they were doing, thereby preventing blowback from "national forces."  

Behind the patter and the pageantry, Superintendent Carvalho is a dedicated "transformer," and intends to disrupt and break the district in order to remake it in his image. We should not allow ourselves to be fooled by the high-gloss exterior and we must not be taken by surprise. 

If any of you out there have additional information, I would be glad to receive it. If there is any way I can be helpful, please reach out. 

Carvalho Redux, Episode Two

Originally titled "Meet the New Boss," this one is from December 27, 2021. 

The "updates" were present in the original post.

Update Update: I should explain that I'm still writing about new LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho because when he was in Miami-Dade he made a ton of decisions ostensibly based on "data" and he's likely to carry on the same way in Los Angeles. The problem is, data is bullshit, but education bosses are not clever enough to understand that or principled enough to do anything about it. It's a failure of imagination and a lack of courage. I wish I was wrong.

Update: When I first started this post about five ten days ago, I had a hard time finding anything on this guy. I mean I was looking through old videos of his speeches. Algorithms! Now there's stuff everywhere and you can look it up for yourself if you want. I recommend the speeches rather than the canned talking points that seem to dominate the more recent reporting.

For me, it has been an education and it has left me with a queasy feeling. Does this guy intend to do it all by himself? Is collaboration part of his skill set? Is he capable of compromise? Does he process new information and revise his position?  Is he ever just wrong?

The first word I think of when I hear him speak is ego. The second two words are enormous and gigantic. Then it comes to me: I remember the last time I watched a guy stand on a stage in front of an adoring crowd and declare, "Only I can fix it."  It did not end well.

Now, the post...

In the Los Angeles Unified School District we have selected a new superintendent who, according to reports, is just crazy about "transformation." Alberto Carvalho, late of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, talks a good and passionate game. But when he talks and says things like "invested in choice and innovation (41:35-42:10)," I see the life of public schools flash before my eyes. Is he serious when he equates district transformation with "the breaking down" and "deconstruction of the school system"? 

I will admit that when I worked in LAUSD, I frequently fantasized about "deconstructing" the system. Frustrated with the bureaucratic bumbling, angry at the arbitrary nature of policies and edicts, some of my most frequent dreams were of asteroids landing directly on district headquarters. But I don't think that's what Carvalho is talking about. 

When he talks about transformation, an outcome his cheerleaders on the school board and at the L.A. Times are eager to support, Carvalho is talking about firing people, pay-for-performance, and school choice, three terrible ideas that rely almost exclusively on what the big brains artfully call "data," by which they invariably mean test scores. (He's also talking about technology and the drive to "merge and migrate toward a digital environment." More on that in another post, but for now suffice to say that anybody who has gone through the last two years and still believes that tech is magic has no place in education.)

As a critical early step in his "transformation" of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Carvalho launched a campaign (33:50) of transfers, non-renewals and firings(18:00) based on "achievement data." What does that look like? Maybe you haul a few people downtown, you know, to make examples of them. You could put their test scores up on a big screen--or better yet, on television during a school board meeting--and demand explanations before publicly firing them. That might give the rest that warm, tingly feeling that goes with wondering if you'll have a job on Monday. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Proud of this purge, Carvalho boasts that he brought in Teach for America replacements to fill the vacancies and City Year for intervention. As if that were a viable solution.  Putting aside the mountains of evidence that experience is a crucial ingredient for effective teaching, in 2019 there were 700 TFA teachers in all of California. There are over 25,000 teachers in LAUSD. It wouldn't even make a dent.

So maybe you squeeze a bunch of district bureaucrats until they go running back to the classroom. News flash: There is a reason these people are not in the classroom. 

In our present environment, this approach doesn't pass the smell test.

It can't work. Not today and not in LAUSD. Just like other districts all across the country, LAUSD is fresh out of teachers. You can't just "bring in" a bunch of newbies to replace the "bad" teachers because nobody's out there. No one is scrambling to get in, battling to be first in line for a job that people hate you for doing and that pays barely enough to pay L.A. rent much less buy an L.A. house. It seems unlikely in the extreme that Carvalho will be able to fire his way to the top. Still, that doesn't mean he won't try. 

I'm not going to waste much time on performance pay. First, it's based on "data," which means test scores, which are bullshit. Second, the whole idea rests on the assumption that teachers are not presently doing the best job they know how to do. It imagines that if we can just sweeten the pot a little, that extra cash will get teachers off their lazy asses. Not only is this trope untrue--most of the teachers I ever worked with were ruining themselves working so hard (often trying to figure out how to teach to the test)--it's completely disingenuous. The hatcheteers don't give a shit about the top 20% of TestScoreProducers. They want to identify and eliminate the bottom 20% (for which there are no replacements). And third, if UTLA is worth its dues, it's never going to happen.*

Where Carvalho is really invested, the transformation theology for which he proselytizes relentlessly, is school choice. Time will tell, but what I've learned so far is alarming. Carvalho, from a news report back in 2012: 

"We are now working in an educational environment that is driven by choice. I believe that is a good thing. We need to actually be engaged in that choice movement. So if you do not ride that wave, you will succumb to it. I choose not to."

Aside from the fact that "there's nothing we can do about it so we might as well get on board" is a shitty ethos for a leader, it's clearly not an accurate representation of his position. He likes "school choice." He comes across as a true believer, and when he was still in Miami, Carvalho described his kind of school choice as transformational, recreating the district as "a hotbed of ideas and innovation." 

(I have to wonder what innovation even means if you and/or your principal can be fired based on data scores and the judgment of one person?) 

In a 2018 article, the corporate school-reform website The74 reported that then-Miami schools chief had a "sweeping vision for dramatically expanding educational choice," and went on to say this about Carvalho:

"Understand this fact: In Carvalho’s district, the fourth-largest in the country, more than 70 percent of the roughly 400,000 students do not attend their zoned public school. That’s not a typo. These students attend charter schools, take classes over the internet and at local colleges, and even attend private, faith-based schools — all with taxpayer funds or under tax credit scholarship programs." (emphasis mine)

The thing is, school choice is just one more reform in the never-ending search for a magic remedy for the crisis we're constantly told exists in public education. It can "theoretically"  produce some positive outcomes for some students, but creates many of the very inequities and disruptions it purports to address. Oh, and one other thing: The "choice" that parents and students make depends almost exclusively on data derived from scores on state-sponsored standardized tests. And that data is bullshit.

Of course, in this devotion to choice orthodoxy Carvalho has lots of company. Right this minute, the federal government's website continues to pimp "school choice." Powered by the radioactive decay of No Child Left Behind, their guide "Choosing A School For Your Child" urges parents to consider charter, private and religious schools, and it even recommends websites to compare them. First on the list:  www.greatschools.net (which is really .org and may have changed or been a typo in the pub) and which I will not link to because fuck them. 

GreatSchools, which got its seed money from a venture capital fund and has received substantial funding from the Gates and Walton Family Foundations (and free advertising from the Department of Education!), is one of several school ratings websites and one of the most well-known. They claim that their big, overarching "Summary Rating" is "based on four ratings, each of which is designed to show different facets of school success: the Student Progress Rating or Academic Progress Rating, College Readiness Rating, Equity Rating, and Test Score Rating." Sounds solid, right? Probably does to most parents, too. The thing is, every one of those measures is based on the same test scores. In fact, each "rating" is just another way of saying test scores.

More perniciously, even websites like Niche.com that claim to factor in reviews and information from "dozens of public data sources" are running a rigged game. Academics (test scores) count for 60% of the school's overall score, while teachers (teacher quality?) comprise 10%. And I bet you can't guess one of the ways their super duper algorithm determines teacher quality. If you said test scores, give yourself a round of applause. 

And here's a fun thought experiment: Those reviews? All that feedback from students and parents? Imagine the review for a teacher who is forced at the point of a termination letter to spend fifty percent of their time test-prepping, testing, test-analyzing and testing again.

Finally, when parents are surveyed, they list "Quality of teachers, principals, or other school staff" as their highest priority in choosing a school. Remember, these are schools they don't know and their kids haven't been to yet. What are the criteria for evaluating the "quality of teachers, principals, or other school staff"? Well if they're using GreatSchools or any of a number of other ratings sites, it's likely to be--wait for it--test scores. 

The bottom line is that all of these terrible ideas that Carvalho is bringing to LAUSD--school choice, performance pay for teachers, the firings--all of them depend entirely on "data," by which they mean "testing" by which they mean state-sponsored, corporate-controlled assessments.** 

It always comes down to test scores. This is the measurement to end all measurements. That teachers are forced to administer these assessments is akin to digging our own graves.

And The Funniest Joke in the World? The data is bullshit. Next time, some of the why.

*I'm not saying they aren't, but I still haven't heard the union's position on the choice of superintendent. 

**They might also refer to graduation rates. These, it turns out, are much more easily massaged. Stay tuned for a future post on "Mastery Grading."

Carvalho Redux, Episode One

In Los Angeles schools open up next week and this week we heard from new LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. And by we I mean other admin and big shots in LA business and politics. Big show in the Microsoft Theater. 

These state of the district back to school pageants are often packed with blustery promises and a feel-good plan. I hear this one was no different. Thought it might be a good time to re-up these two Carvalho posts from December. 

I'm working on a post that incorporates whatever new stuff I can find--including the extra days Unfair Labor Practice with the California Public Employment Relations board--so stay tuned for that one.

In the meantime, I think you will find that these two provide important context for understanding the Super and his vision for LAUSD. 

Here's the first one, from December 14, 2021

We interrupt our regularly scheduled post for some breaking news!

LAUSD Taps Long-time Teacher, Charter School Skeptic as 
New Superintendent!

"I think there's a tendency to reduce human beings to data points, and I'm absolutely convinced there's entirely too much standardized testing in our schools," said the new LAUSD schools chief...

...in the middle of a ridiculous dream I had two nights ago. 

Now I'm not saying Alberto Carvalho is a bad guy. I'm not saying he's a good guy, but that's because I don't know the guy. What I do know is that he's a "reformer" who is very popular with people who want to destroy public education or simply define it out of existence. If public education to you means any building or digital platform that can be accessed by human beings and that awards certificates of completion, then you hate public education, assuming you know enough about it to hate it.

I worry for my former district. Then again, I've been worried for a while. But if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then the friend of my enemy is my enemy. When I saw Nick "a charter for you! and a charter for you!" Melvoin pumping this guy on the local morning news shows, I knew there was trouble in purgatory. 

Like the Republicans who run for office on a platform of hating government, Carvalho could turn out to be a guy who hates the "public" part of public school but wants to be the boss of it anyway. Because? The guy is 57 years old. In three years he will be a billion dollar asset for the privatization zealots and that's a nice retirement.

(I wonder why he didn't take that New York job? Maybe our school board is more philosophically compatible? More aligned with his priorities?)

Again, I don't know the guy and if I hadn't worked in LAUSD for twenty-five years, I might be persuaded to hope for the best. 

The L.A. School Report had this to say about Carvalho:

"An advocate of school choice, nontraditional schools and known champion of undocumented student rights, Carvalho, 57, has run Miami’s schools for more than a decade."

and

"In his 13 year tenure as superintendent, he’s pushed for the expansion of charter and magnet schools throughout Miami and encouraged families to use publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools."

and

"The 'privatization' of the district, and its hefty payouts to expand school security, have garnered national scrutiny for years over concerns that they’ve siphoned funds from existing, traditional schools."

Of course, "school choice" has routinely been code for racism, white flight and resegregation. It has crippled the public system in L.A., and I can't see how supporting the use of "publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools" solves a single one of the myriad problems the district is facing.

But maybe Mr. Carvalho has a different idea. Maybe he doesn't really intend to divert public money to private companies. Maybe he hates segregation and loves students--all of them. And maybe he even likes and respects teachers. 

On the other hand, he is quite popular with the bunch over at Education Next, and that is alarming. According to the progressive nonprofit watchdog Center for Media and Democracy, Education Next is "a propaganda outlet for corporate education reform  policies such as charter schools, school vouchers, and merit pay." It opposes teacher unions and "attempts to increase or equalize funding for schools." Think of it as the love-child of the Hoover Institution and Harvard University's School of Drunken Government.

The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education has made its choice and it's a done deal. As I suggested in a previous post, I wish the union--come on UTLA, get your shit together!--had weighed in forcefully and publicly regarding the sort of superintendent we supported and had chosen a candidate to advocate for. I mean, it's not like we didn't know what a shitty superintendent can do to the district. 

What the hell did we strike for if not a seat at the table? The membership deserves to know where we stand. If no one listens and we lose, at least we'll all know that we fought for something. It's important. There will be another strike one day. 

As for the new guy, I guess time will tell. I hope he's great; I have a lot of friends and former students still out there, in the arena every day. I'm worried and I want to be wrong. But still, the friend of my enemy...

Always hopeful. Seldom optimistic. Maybe this time we'll win. 

How Shitty Is It?

 Re-upping the Update:

And how shitty is the pay? When I started with LAUSD in 1995, my starting salary was just short of $30,000. I just did a Google thing and that translates to about $58,000 today. A quick look at LAUSD's 2021-2022 salary table tells me that teachers in the district start today at just over $56,000. Teachers have actually lost money in the last 25+ years. Furthermore, unless they take extra classes, it takes them seven years of step increases to surpass my 1995 starting salary. 

If you are thinking, "Yeah, but teachers make up for it at the top end of the scale," and "stick around long enough and you make Hollywood money," you are incorrect. It's true that we have the opportunity to work our way up the scale, but it takes time and it's not as easy as it looks. For example, today's salary table (21-22) shows a top number of $89,245 after ten years during which the teacher completed an additional 98 semester units of study. 

The table defines a semester unit as "a minimum of 15 contact hours with an instructor and 30 hours of outside preparation" which comes to an additional 4410 hours of work in ten years on top of, you know, your job. For you math enthusiasts out there, that's 441 hours or 55.125 eight-hour days per year. It's no wonder that teachers find ways to take easier classes or cut corners if they can. Still, that's a shit-ton of work. Is it worth it?

Short answer: definitely. A colleague of mine used to say to new teachers: Give yourself a raise. He said it to me but I didn't listen. It cost me.

Long answer: not as worth it as it should be. Assuming you work those years and get to the top of the scale, then you have to work twenty years at the top of the scale and get a doctorate to max out at the biggest number on the table: $98,176. 

By comparison, in 95-96 the L.A. Times reported the recently settled contract paid $54,703 at the max. That's over $106,000 in today's money. 

Teachers will always look for ways to augment their actual salaries. We take extra assignments and work extra periods. We mentor and coach and teach during vacations. We work second jobs. 

What we don't do is get rich from teaching. In fact, we're going backward and a majority of teachers here in L.A. can not afford to live in the neighborhoods where they teach. Schooling is expensive, but don't blame teachers. And with all the bad bosses, the surveillance and screaming over "CRT," and gender identity, and sexuality, and test scores, and fucking books, don't blame teachers for leaving.

Edxit, or Where'd Everybody Go?

After teaching in LAUSD for twenty-five years, I retired on January 1, 2021. I get why people don't become teachers. I get why people leave.  I don't get why this is a big surprise. And what I really don't get are all these breathless stories about teacher shortages you see all over the news. For at least twenty of my twenty-five years every teacher I know was telling anybody who'd listen that this was coming. Now it's here, and everyone from big-shot reporters to little-town principals is waving their arms and wondering, "Where'd everybody go?" What a riot.

The Washington Post published an article on August 4 calling out a "catastrophic teacher shortage" nationwide. But rather than clearly identifying the reasons for this present education exodus (edxit?), the article avoids pointing fingers, opting instead to offer up hand-wringing explanations from loads of teaching-adjacent folks along with a cornucopia of mostly feckless solutions. 

We hear from school administrator associations and superintendents associations and the superintendents themselves. We hear from teachers union officials. We even hear from a director of a health services tech company. You'll note the omission of actual teachers. I suppose that's understandable, as the solutions rest in the hands of the bosses, but if you really wanted to know what would keep teachers in classrooms, you might ask them.

As for the article, the general tone, as it nearly always is with these articles, is a smooth blend of astonished and scandalized. Not unlike the press reaction to a violent coup attempt and subsequent promises to give it another go, we the people are once again left suffocated in "some people say this, others say that" detachment and "How could they have let this happen?" sanctimony. 

This latest from the Post is just one of the recent articles by Hannah Natanson that deal, directly or indirectly, with the teacher shortage. In July, she co-wrote "D.C.-area schools see spike in teacher resignations." Also within the year? Some places to look for answers:

"Va. set to finalize rules on ‘sexually explicit material’ in schools," August 3, 

"After court ruling, activists push prayer into schools," July 26. 

"LGBTQ clubs were havens for students. Now they’re under attack," June 28.

"Caught in the culture wars, teachers are being forced from their jobs," June 16.

"Schools face violent threats and lockdowns in wake of Texas shooting," May 27.

"D.C. students call for gun control; schools focus on security after Texas shooting," May 26.

"D.C.-area schools face rising covid cases, aren’t restoring strict rules," May 22.

"Virginia Dept. of Education releases report on student achievement," May 19. (Test scores, because that train is never late.)

"This Florida teacher married a woman. Now she’s not a teacher anymore." May 19.

"The next book ban: States aim to limit titles students can search for," May 10.

"Va. school board proposes telling parents how students self-identify: Some fear that teachers will be required to ‘out’ LGBTQ students to their parents," May 7.

"Teachers who mention sexuality are ‘grooming’ kids, conservatives say," April 5.

Did I say within the year? These are headlines for articles written or co-written by Hannah Natanson since April. 

Then there is this beauty from the Times' Sarah Mervosh on July 31: s no more than 24 hours of training.

Trained, Armed and Ready. To Teach Kindergarten.

More school employees are carrying guns to defend against school shootings. In Ohio, a contentious new law requires no more than 24 hours of training.

Pile all that on top of micromanagement by bad bosses, twenty-five hours of work every twenty-four hour day, shitty pay, and a pandemic and one wonders why anybody stays, but there is no mystery about why teachers are leaving. The question for the New York Times and Washington Post and the rest of the fourth estate is, simply, "Why doesn't everybody know this already?"

From the August 4 Post article:

Why are America’s schools so short-staffed? Experts point to a confluence of factors including pandemic-induced teacher exhaustion, low pay and some educators’ sense that politicians and parents — and sometimes their own school board members — have little respect for their profession amid an escalating educational culture war that has seen many districts and states pass policies and laws restricting what teachers can say about U.S. history, race, racism, gender and sexual orientation, as well as LGBTQ issues.

What is it with all the vague hedging? First, the article asks the question like it hasn't already been answered, like, many times. Then we get "Experts" "pointing to" some potential answers. Surprise! They're the exact same answers as teachers--and other "experts"--have been giving for millennia:

Reporter: "Why do you think so many teachers are     leaving the profession?" 

Teacher: "Well, it's a confluence of factors."    

And "some educators' sense"? "little respect"? What the actual fuck? Look at the reporting in your own newspaper.

And, for once and for all, the "escalating educational culture war" is nothing more than a Russian-style invasion against a neighboring country, not a good-faith disagreement. These are murder attempts, not debates, and you should report them honestly. [Insert usual caveat that editors are craven climbers and can ruin a good journalist's reporting.] Moving on.

Lots of states are doing whatever it takes to get an adult human in the classroom. In Texas, some districts are going to four days a week to ease the pressure. To teach in Arizona you no longer need a degree as long as you're enrolled in college. Missouri lowered the passing score for the license assessment. 

In Florida, free-thinking governor Ron DeSantis had the unconventional idea to staff schools with military veterans, perhaps expecting them to bring their own guns. Support for the proposal was not unanimous. From the Post article (emphasis mine):

Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, said the need for teachers in his state is dire: His association estimates there are at least 8,000 teacher vacancies this year, up from 5,000 the year before. But Spar does not believe the veterans program is “really a solution,” as it may lead to unqualified individuals entering classrooms.

“I think we all appreciate what our military veterans have done for our country in terms of protecting our freedoms both here and abroad,” he said. “But just because you were in the military does not mean you will be a great teacher.”

That's the president of the union actually having to explain that the notion of bringing in military personnel as teachers  --even those with four years of service and two C+ years of college!--is a bad idea. What in the wonderful world of color would make someone look at experience in the military which has a very specific mission and then think about what goes on in a classroom full of children and say "Hey, you know what might work?" The cluelessness is breathtaking--and perfect.

Next on our tour we are treated to what in poker circles might be called a "tell." (emphasis mine)

Meanwhile, the school board and superintendent in Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District are considering making up for a dearth of math teachers — the system is missing 24 of them, along with 102 other teachers — by sending a small number of students into online learning for part of the day. The district may hire virtual math teachers from a Chicago-based online education company, the Tucson Sentinel reported. The superintendent did not respond to a request for comment.

There it is. We'll return to this at the end, but suffice to say that making teaching unbearable (when the remedies are known) is not an accident.

And finally we get to what I think is my favorite part of the whole article. It made me laugh so hard I spit out a third of a really good martini, and I hope it has the same effect on you. Again, the emphasis is mine:

In Wisconsin’s Madison school district, superintendent [sic] Jenkins said that, a month away from the start of school on Sept. 1, officials are still working to fill 199 teacher vacancies and 124 non-teaching positions.

But no children will lack an adult in the classroom come fall, he said, because the district has managed to recruit 269 qualified substitute teachers — primarily by raising substitute pay rates this spring. Jenkins said he hopes that, over the course of the year, the district can convince at least some of these substitutes to convert to full-time teachers.

“We’re just going to go after them,” Jenkins said. Initial enticements will include “some immediate supplies. Every teacher likes their calendar, right? So we’re providing calendars, little things for them — and we have some other things planned that I don’t want to reveal, because I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

This reminded me of every end of every excruciating, debilitating semester when I just wanted to go home and sleep for three weeks, and instead we were called to that last meeting--in the elementary cafeteria!--and given erasers, or Starbucks cards, or little trophies (I shit you not). This was the level of understanding the bosses had for what we do in the classroom. To be fair, Superintendent Jenkins was doing what he knew how to do: Entice the subs to "convert" to permanent using the supplies they actually need to teach, and a calendar. Because "every teacher likes their calendar, right?" That should do it.

The Post article is one of hundreds from around the country. I'm sure you've seen them. Here's ABC in Nevada from August 4. Here's WLTX in South Carolina from August 4. This one from News 9 in Oklahoma is interesting as it includes reporting on a scholarship/ employment incentive bill passed in the Oklahoma legislature and signed by the governor in May. There are a lot of them.

Still, the local news reports on local staff shortages at least describe the problem. Dispatches from the giants read like the Post article, ingenuous and ambiguous, as if no one really knows for sure how we got into this jam, and no one has an answer to how we get out. 

On twitter, Anne Lutz Fernandez solved the mystery for those who are still confused. About the teachers, she wrote:

They are leaving because teaching has been made unattractive and unsustainable. The drain won't stop until compensation, micromanagement & management through fear, de-professionalization, overwork & make-work, politicization of curriculum are addressed.

— Anne Lutz Fernandez (@lutzfernandez) August 4, 2022 (h/t @nancyflanagan)

As Sarah Kendzior reminds us: They feign shock to avoid accountability. 

None of this is new. There was a pretty severe teacher crunch in Los Angeles in the 1990s as enrollments surged, although the extent of the shortage is debated. There were lots of emergency credentials and permits among the teachers I joined in 1995. And back in 1990 we find the article "DIAL 1-800-45-TEACH" from the Post describing efforts by districts to recruit. 

Then there's this 2001 article from the Post telling the story of teachers in D.C. who needed an extra job or two just to make ends meet. Then there's this one, from the Post a year later, describing the scramble to find teachers in Maryland ahead of ballooning enrollments and impending baby boomer retirements. From the Times in 2007 we have "With Turnover High, Schools Fight for Teachers."

Like I said--not new. But apparently so baffling that it persists today. 

Thus we get pieces like this one from the Times in September 2000, in which the author, New York City Schools Chancellor Harold Levy, complained about the quality of teachers and worried about "an impending shortage of certified teachers." He cites the DOE which, according to him, "estimates a nationwide loss of 2.5 million teachers over the next decade as teachers born in the baby boom years reach retirement age" 

He declares that "[w]e need to find more powerful means to attract the most promising candidates to the teaching profession" and recommends that to "recruit a higher caliber of college student into teaching, we must make it both more lucrative and more revered." Good thinking.

For a bit of dark humor, you can stroll through Richard Rothstein's "move along, nothing to see here" LESSONS column from the Times in 2002: "Teacher Shortages Are Usually a Myth" in which he offers this simple market solution: just pay teachers more. 

Teachers have been saying this for decades, and loudly. Nobody listened and nobody believed us when we said we'd quit. "Where you gonna go?" was first. "We'll get somebody else" was second. Now there are lots of places to go and there isn't anybody else. 

According to my own LAUSD sources, it's been virtually impossible to fill positions with living breathing humans, forget about credentialed and qualified. Instead, classes are supervised by out-of-classroom personnel, administrators, or covered by other teachers for weeks at a time. Anybody with a heartbeat and a credential will do. And it's worse elsewhere.

And in virtually every case it's the same usual suspects:    "compensation, micromanagement & management through fear, de-professionalization, overwork & make-work, politicization of curriculum." Shitty pay, high stress, bad bosses, lack of respect and autonomy.

The time to address this is not three weeks before school starts. These big-brains were in denial, pretending that they could roll over teachers and other educational professionals forever, take advantage of us because of our dedication to the kids and the mission, or because we really are not the sharpest knives just like the Hillsdale guy said in Tennessee this past July. Or maybe because we just really like our calendars. 

Now the chickens are coming home to roost. 

Only thing is, maybe it's not going to matter. Nobody I know thinks this is an accident or even bad management. Paying teachers more, or offering them education and housing subsidies, or protecting them from bad bosses and ridiculous governors and parents seething and shouting at them for just trying to do their jobs, none of this stuff is unknown. We've known all this for decades. If we wanted to fix it, wouldn't it already be fixed?

This is not an accident. This is the culmination of a plan that started with Milton Friedman's "The Role of Government in Schooling," got its fuel from "A Nation at Risk," found allies in the Bush presidents and Clinton and Obama, and is just about to pay off bigly. This breaking of the public school system is the plan. And it's going to take everything we've got to stop it.

Update:

And how shitty is the pay? When I started with LAUSD in 1995, my starting salary was just short of $30,000. I just did a Google thing and that translates to about $58,000 today. A quick look at LAUSD's 2021-2022 salary table tells me that teachers in the district start today at just over $56,000. Teachers have actually lost money in the last 25+ years. Furthermore, unless they take extra classes, it takes them seven years of step increases to surpass my 1995 starting salary. 

If you are thinking, "Yeah, but teachers make up for it at the top end of the scale," and "stick around long enough and you make Hollywood money," you are incorrect. It's true that we have the opportunity to work our way up the scale, but it takes time and it's not as easy as it looks. For example, today's salary table (21-22) shows a top number of $89,245 after ten years during which the teacher completed an additional 98 semester units of study. 

The table defines a semester unit as "a minimum of 15 contact hours with an instructor and 30 hours of outside preparation" which comes to an additional 4410 hours of work in ten years on top of, you know, your job. For you math enthusiasts out there, that's 441 hours or 55.125 eight-hour days per year. It's no wonder that teachers find ways to take easier classes or cut corners if they can. Still, that's a shit-ton of work. Is it worth it?

Short answer: definitely. A colleague of mine used to say to new teachers: Give yourself a raise. He said it to me but I didn't listen. It cost me.

Long answer: not as worth it as it should be. Assuming you work those years and get to the top of the scale, then you have to work twenty years at the top of the scale and get a doctorate to max out at the biggest number on the table: $98,176. 

By comparison, in 95-96 the L.A. Times reported the recently settled contract paid $54,703 at the max. That's over $106,000 in today's money. 

Teachers will always look for ways to augment their actual salaries. We take extra assignments and work extra periods. We mentor and teach during vacations. We work second jobs. 

What we don't do is get rich from teaching. In fact, we're going backward and a majority of teachers here in L.A. can not afford to live in the neighborhoods where they teach. Schooling is expensive, but don't blame teachers. And don't blame teachers for leaving.