The War On Teachers Part Two: Working Conditions - Testing. Obviously.

I've written several times about the savage testing regime that has gripped U.S. education the last twenty-plus years and about the bogus data it generates. This post looks specifically at how testing and its diabolical siblings, standards (generally some iteration of the Common Core Standards) and accountability (h/t Steve Nelson via @nancyflanagan), function as weapons in the War On Teachers. 

Testing stands at the center of the evil trinity--standards, testing, and accountability--and acts as a transformer taking the energy stored as potential in the standards and delivering it as kinetic in the sorting system of accountability, a system whereby certain students, teachers, and schools are glorified and the rest labeled as "failing" and punished.

It's a crazy circular shell game where each part of the trinity only exists because of the other two, and underneath it all is the assumption that teachers are not doing their jobs. 

We need standards because teachers are not teaching.

We need tests because we have standards.

We need scores because we have tests.

We need rankings because we have scores.

We need consequences because the scores "prove" teachers are not teaching.

Rinse. Repeat.

• We want to look like we're serious about education so we need to ensure teachers are teaching. 
• Therefore we create standards so we can hold students, teachers, and schools accountable. 
• Then we test to see if students are meeting the standards. 
• We use the scores to punish teachers and schools for not meeting the standards we created. 
• See? We are serious about education!

How does this cerberus of testing function as a weapon in the War On Teachers?

1. It narrows the curriculum.

The devotion to Big Standardized Testing (h/t Peter Greene @palan57) strangles the curriculum leaving only certain kinds of knowledge, expressed only in prescribed ways, as legitimate--and measured. 

As Alfie Kohn described it in 2001: "From high-quality high school electives to focused discussions of current events (such as last November’s historic election), some of the richest learning opportunities are being squeezed out."

To defend standardized testing, you are likely to hear some version of business management guru Peter Drucker’s assertion that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” I once heard “We measure what we value,” which I thought was ridiculous because my students and I valued respect, collaboration, flexibility, curiosity, creativity, humor, persistence, and lots of other things depending on the day. 

None of these ever showed up on the standardized exams--not that I’m discussing what did show up because, of course, that would be breaking the oath they make us all sign to protect the market share and business model of testing companies.

We value what we test because we can easily measure it. Over the last two decades, schools have come to value only what they measure, and we've mostly only measured English and math. Not art. Not theater. Not music. Not dance. Not even history. In California we dabble with science (though not in the Big Smarter Balanced "SBAC" Summatives), but only because, when reminded that the testing is flawed because we only test English and math, their answer was "Then let's find a way to test more."

All this testing results in an impoverished curriculum, not simply in the subjects emphasized but also in the broader, more potent sense of "curriculum" which considers "all aspects and dimensions of the educational experiences which pupils have during any period of formal education, and of their underlying principles and rationale" (A.V. Kelley, The Curriculum: Theory and Practice).

The Standards that dictate curriculum are bad enough in and of themselves, but once they are run through the test compactor things only get worse. From Peter Greene in 2019:

In Florida, as in all states, it is not the standards that drive curriculum--it is the Big Standardized Test. For example, the Common Core language standards include standards that address speaking and listening, but nobody worries about aligning to those standards because they won't be on the test. The standards about reading literature could be met by doing deep dives into complete works, but that's not how most schools are teaching those standards, because that's not how they're assessed on the Big Standardized Test.

I would argue--and have--that the Standards are like air cover for the BS Test blitz. The Enemies of Public Schooling and their collaborators invented a rationale--Common Core--then they use it to justify the entire testing-industrial complex.

An important 2007 report written by JenniferMcMurrer for the Center on Education Policy and based on CEP's "nationally representative survey of 349 responding school districts"  found that "about 62% of districts reported that they have increased time for English language arts (ELA) and/or math in elementary schools since school year 2001-02 (the year NCLB was enacted), and more than 20% reported increasing time for these subjects in middle school since then." 

In order "[t]o  accommodate this increased time in ELA and math," the report found that "44% of districts reported cutting time from one or more other subjects or activities (social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch and/or recess) at the elementary level." 

Corresponding data from middle and high school was not included, likely because of the lack of schedule flexibility and graduation requirements.

However, the study did take note of important changes taking place beyond elementary school. Describing a table titled "Changed Their Curriculum to Put More Emphasis on Content and Skills Covered on State Tests Used for NCLB," researchers found that "[a]t the middle school level, about 43% of districts reported that they have changed the English language arts curriculum to a great extent, and 42% said they have changed the math curriculum to a great extent to put greater emphasis on tested content and skills." And "[t]he responses were very similar in these subjects at the high school level."

Just a note: The percentage of districts reporting some level of curriculum shift was 90%.

Additional notes: The shift toward time spent on tested subjects was significantly greater in "districts with at least one school identified for NCLB improvement." Furthermore, "Districts with at least one school in improvement also reported in greater proportions than districts without schools in improvement that they have decreased time in social studies, science, and art and music." (emphasis mine)

And the curriculum has not just gotten narrower, but thinner as well as schools have devoted more time to test prep "and skills covered on the state tests used for NCLB."

In his study titled “High-Stakes Testing and Curricular Control: A Qualitative Metasynthesis” published in Educational Researcher in 2007, author Dr. Wayne Au has this to say:

"The primary effect of high-stakes testing is that curricular content is narrowed to tested subjects, subject area knowledge is fragmented into test-related pieces, and teachers increase the use of teacher-centered pedagogies." 

Of course, you know this. It was true in the mid-2000s and it's true today. Whatever Common Core may have meant in the imaginations of hopeful teachers and some of its architects ("designed to help students grow as thinkers"), when standards are fed into the Big Standardized Testing Pulverizer, teachers are often left "bereft of joy in their profession."

There is no dimension of the curriculum--not the formal curriculum, not the informal, not the hidden curriculum, not the planned curriculum and not the received curriculum, that is not negatively impacted by our testing obsession. And because of the incessant focus on two specific areas, English and mathematics, all other dimensions of schooling, from social studies to chess club, suffer from atrophy until they shrivel up and die.

All this is to say that no, it's not a dream. The testing monster really has eaten a lot of what we used to call school and a lot of what students used to love about it. For the best teachers, those who don't believe that the things on the Big Standardized Test are the only things worth learning, who believe that we are being stripped of something valuable beyond words, it's nearly impossible to endure. 

2. Testing is a huge time suck.

Not only has testing narrowed the curriculum by shifting instructional time to tested subjects, the tests themselves and the attendant preparation for them devours whole weeks of class time. 

Teachers are profoundly aware that simply getting to know 30+ human beings (times five, at least) and getting them pointed in a meaningful direction and figuring out what each of them needs in order to make progress in that direction--takes every minute of every day. 

Now ask teachers to spend a large chunk of that time going in an entirely different direction and you know what they have? A lot less time.

For example, a 2015 study from the Council of the Great City Schools, which describes itself as a coalition that "brings together 78 of [the] nation’s largest urban public school systems," found that "In the 2014-15 school year, 401 unique tests were administered across subjects in the [then] 66 Great City School systems" and that "Students in the 66 districts were required to take an average of 112.3 tests between pre-K and grade 12." This number did not include "optional tests" or other teacher- or school-developed tests.

An average eighth grader spent over four days taking these mandated tests, and that "does not include [extra] time to administer or prepare for testing, nor does it include sample, optional, and special-population testing," which anyone can tell you is where the majority of time is spent. The actual number of days testing is bad, especially since many of the tests have no time limits, and running into weeks of make-up testing compelled by the pressure to be sure schools aren't playing games and every single student is tested. 

LAUSD is one of the "Great City Schools" that participated in the survey. 

I've shared this before, but a picture is worth a thousand...

 

Or, to put it another way:

For California's user-friendlier version redesigned to cloak the endless testing in endless jargon, you can go here. And once again Florida shows us that it can always get worse.

But that's just the actual testing, the most visible part of the iceberg. Ninety percent is underneath the surface, sucking the life and time out of every week in the semester. Here's a brief look at the submerged portion of the iceberg in my last couple of years in the classroom.

In ninth grade we were not required to give the mandated Common Core exam, or "SBAC" (they save that for eleventh grade), but we did give--in addition to the practice PSAT (that's right, a practice test for the practice test)--an additional five periodic assessments, "encouraged" by the district and therefore mandated by our school, assessments designed to raise their scores on the SBAC, a test they'd be taking two years later. 

Five mandated tests. And after each one our school would devote an entire PD day to analyzing the scores, and each teacher would need to prepare a presentation explaining their performance. I'd like to say their students' performance, but it's never really framed that way. So that's two weeks before the assessment prepping and sweating, one day for the test (plus make-ups), a week of preparing your explanation, and a half-day of humiliation. More on that later.

Four weeks of teaching, two weeks of test prep, a week of analysis. A day of humiliation. Rinse. Repeat. Where does all the time go?

3. The tests are invalid and misleading.

Nothing drove me crazier than being forced to hack up our curriculum and cut out great units that students loved. Each year new ninth graders would come in with questions based on what they had heard from older sisters or brothers or friends. "Are we going to do the debate? Are we going to do poetry?" 

Because of the need to accommodate growing testing expectations, more and more often the answer was "No. I'm sorry." And for what? As I've written many times (here and here, for example), the score data produced by these Big Standardized Tests is bullshit. 

In other words, the test scores do not mean what they say they mean. Why? As UCLA professor W. James Popham wrote all the way back in 1999, "Employing standardized achievement tests to ascertain educational quality is like measuring temperature with a tablespoon."

In their "Standardized Tests Do Not Effectively Measure Student Achievement" (rpt from Ch. 3 of The Myths of Standardized Tests), Phillip Harris, Joan Harris, and Bruce M. Smith write that 

Contrary to popular assumptions about standardized testing, the tests do a poor job of measuring student achievement. They fail to measure such important attributes as creativity and critical thinking skills. Studies indicate that standardized tests reward superficial thinking and may discourage more analytical thinking. Additionally, because of the small sample of knowledge that is tested, standardized tests provide a very incomplete picture of student achievement.

Testing is a sorting technique that tracks poverty and propels a "failing schools" narrative. The data are both invalid and unreliable and, at best, measure the degree to which a student reproduces a set of favored knowledge within prescribed terms of expression, in a single-session time period.

As any teacher (and anyone else who cares to know) can tell you, a test only represents a sample of what a teacher wants the student to know and be able to do. Give a student a test on the same information on Monday and again on Friday and the scores might go up or they might go down depending on any number of variables: sleep, hunger, the temperature, who's been fighting at home, and whether the student studied the selected information. 

To focus so intensely on the Big Standardized Test is distracting and dishonest. The time and attention we devote to testing signifies that testing is the most important thing we do in school and that students' scores are meaningful measures of their achievement. It's worse than worthless. It's destructive.

4. The testing and the scores it produces are weaponized against teachers, schools, and the students themselves.

Schools. 

Test scores are fed into the sorting bin and then published without context, magnifying their importance and giving observers the impression that the scores are reliable indicators of the quality of their schools. Schools are ranked and subject to public shaming as the media beat the "failing schools" drum. Malinformed, lucky parents gloat over the misimpression that the scores make their school the best. Malinformed sometimes angry parents shake their heads and spring into action looking for a new situation for their kids. 

Until the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, the law of the land was No Child Left Behind which allowed for schools that failed to meet their "adequate yearly progress" to be sanctioned. Edweek broke it down this way:

1. A school that misses AYP two years in a row has to allow students to transfer to a better-performing public school in the same district.

2. If a school misses AYP for three years in a row, it must offer free tutoring.

3. Schools that continue to miss achievement targets could face state intervention. States can choose to shut these schools down, turn them into charter schools, take them over, or use another, significant turnaround strategy.

Number one is a corker. It theoretically lets students jump to another school, but in L.A. a lot of those seats were all booked up. Never fear, there's a charter opening just across the street. 

Number two is interesting, because every school I ever worked in offered tutoring, and I can't even fathom what the alternative to "free" would be.

That last one we used to call the death penalty. Reconstitution is firing everybody and replacing the entire staff--occasionally permitting some to re-apply for their jobs. That's one of those other "significant turnaround strategies."

(For more fun reading, here's a requirements and sanctions comparison of NCLB and RTTT.)

Now ESSA is the latest wrinkle and it looks like it broadens the standard definition of "high-quality education" and pays more attention to equity and fairness. It also looks to shift a lot of the headaches--including the punitive stuff--to states. More than likely they'll oblige. Stay tuned.

Teachers.

We are talking about The War On Teachers, after all. Test scores have been used extensively in teacher evaluations and as an incentive (merit pay). Beyond that, testing and test scores can result in everything from private "talks" in the principal's office to public PD humiliation. 

Humiliation, you say? Remember those five periodic practice tests from earlier? The ones that carved fifteen weeks (plus) out of every school year? The ones that were supposed to raise actual test scores two years later? This is about that, from March 2022:

And so, after each test we would look at how dismal our scores were and compare them to the previous test to see if they went up or down. In a PD about *data* we would assemble in the elementary cafeteria and show each other our dismal scores (our students’ scores) and make up a story about why our scores might have gone down or up, and we’d make posters and cut out student names and put up the posters around the cafeteria and go one-by-one around the room and tell our stories and answer for our sins. That is, those of us in the math and English departments. All others adjourn to your rooms to work on teaching stuff.

The tests were all different and tested different standards and skills. We were told we could not test the same things twice to see if we had made progress. We compared scores from different kinds of tests and had to pretend that the improvement or decline from one test to the next meant something. “Wow, those kids really got it this time.” “Oh (downward inflection), that’s disappointing. What did you do differently?” “I taught different stuff!” And we did this for years.

I tried several times during the early days of this catastrophe to point out that we were not actually measuring progress or the lack of it. “It’s apples to orangutans!” “Five answers to five questions is not a valid measure of proficiency!” “Who chose four correct answers as the benchmark for proficient? And why?” “Skills? Standards? I looked at the data and my student scores precisely tracked their reading levels. Aren’t we really just assessing their reading?” I was... unheard.

Our analysis didn't mean anything because the scores didn't mean anything. Nevertheless, every five to eight weeks we engaged in this round-robin flagellation and excuse-fest, and we nodded and made posters, all the while knowing it was nonsense and getting sicker and sicker because there was so much more we could have been doing for our students. Humiliating.

The public shaming over test scores is disgraceful. The use of evaluation methods based on test scores, such as "value-added measurement," is, in the words of Dr. Au, "Neither Fair Nor Accurate." 

Douglas F. Warring, in his 2015 article "Teacher Evaluations: Use or Misuse?" in the Universal Journal of Educational Research sketches out the requirements for a more accurate system, offering that "to be fair and to provide trustworthy estimates of teacher effectiveness, value-added measures require complicated formulas that take into account as many influences on student achievement as possible."

One of the things worse than VAM evaluations that aren't honest is merit pay that is. Or may be. Here Lam D. Pham, Tuan D. Nguyen, and Matthew G. Springer from Vanderbilt University show that bribing teachers for higher test scores that, again, are not meaningful ... works. Sometimes. "In some contexts." 

Evaluating teachers based on test scores doesn't improve teaching. It doesn't produce achievement. It doesn't raise test scores unless that's all you want, and you're okay with the curriculum getting further squashed, and you've got a bunch of extra cash. 

It. Doesn't. Work. And everybody knows it. More humiliation.

Students.

Students are punished in ways gross and subtle. A study by David Figlio published in 2006 in the Journal of Public Economics found that from 1996 to 2000, Florida schools found an "incentive to re-shape the testing pool through selective discipline in response to accountability pressures." In an article published in the University of Florida News, Figlio described it this way: 

Introduction of high-stakes testing to improve school accountability has apparently led these schools to disproportionately punish low-performing students during the testing period to try to ‘game the system.’

Although Florida has changed "accountability rules" to prevent this abuse, other penalties remain. Florida uses test scores for retention/promotion decisions, which can be discriminatory and closely associated with dropout rates.

For students who fail to excel on practice exams there's extra homework focused solely on the tests.

Dr. Peter Gray writes in Psychology Today from earlier this year ("Standardized Testing and the Destruction of Education") that testing suppresses creativity and that "the more we test, the more we reduce students' interests." 

In her 2016 paper for the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Christina Simpson underscores the stress, either from direct threat of retention or implied consequences to their teachers and schools, that students are under. 

Citing Dutro, E., & Selland, M. (2012), “I like to read, but I know I'm not good at it” published in Curriculum Inquiry, Simpson writes, "how students perform on high-stakes testing can affect their beliefs about their own competence and potential as learners." 

Professor David C. Berliner, educational psychologist and Regents' Professor Emeritus of Education at Arizona State University, has this 2003 research report reviewing the negative impacts of the testing regime on student motivation, graduation rates, and learning. It makes so much sense that it's no wonder education bosses ignore it.

What we are doing to students is incredibly destructive. There was a moment, sometime during the pandemic, when it looked like we might break the cycle. We would sober up and realize what shits we had been. Alas, no. Our "industry demands" Education Secretary decided that somebody--perhaps (the testing) industry?--needed data during a worldwide health crisis. Turns out that glimmer of hope was nothing but a mirage. We have returned to our regularly scheduled programming and we can get back to torturing kids.

Just imagine being one of those students--one of the ones you know quite well because, you know, you teach them every day. And imagine that you have been taking tests for what seems like your entire school life and that these tests are calibrated to yield a certain number of “not proficient”s every year, and that for as long as you can remember you have been one of them.

If you are reading this right now and you’re thinking “well that’s one kid” or “a few kids--intervention!” you have not done your homework. We’re talking about fifty to seventy percent of our kids in California.

And even though you are “not proficient,” you have been going through school and learning stuff and passing your classes and doing pretty well, but every time you think you know something the test gets harder and you are once again one of the “not proficient”s. And imagine you don’t even find that out until the next year when there’s nothing you can do about it.

It must really suck, right? And so after having been battered and beaten with a number two pencil for long enough, a lot of those kids get discouraged and give up. Not all of them, but certainly enough for us to ask, “What significant and actionable information are we collecting by putting kids and parents and teachers and schools and districts through all this every year and sometimes every month? Why are we even doing this?”

And this, for many of us, is the breaking point. It was for me. It was terrible being shamed for something that had been years in the making when I had only known these kids for a few months. It was scary being threatened and punished for something over which I had little control. It was frustrating and miserable losing whole regions of learning and instead devoting so much time to something that did not reflect the most important things we were doing together in the classroom.

But all that was nothing compared to what it does to kids.

As I watched my students struggle each year, or give up, or do well and think that meant something, I got more and more discouraged. No amount of evidence or activism could steer the ship away from the iceberg. We seem perpetually unable to examine the data and change course accordingly. 

I couldn't in good conscience--and mine is only fair--be a part of it any longer. I felt it was abusive and damaging, perhaps deliberately so. I was not alone. 

I know it is all part of the plan. I know that testing is another battlefield in the War On Teachers and on public schooling, and that if the Enemies of Public Schooling can degrade the teaching profession enough that nobody wants to do it, then the entire institution collapses.

On the off chance somebody is out there listening and actually wants teachers to stay, here are some ideas.

In the project to destroy public schools and replace them with a "free" marketplace of schools, no strategy has been more important, more effective, and more broadly supported--even by people who should have known better--than testing.

Here it is through the eyes of a student: 

Standardized tests are ineffective and overly stressful for the students. Students may perform worse because of tests that are supposed to measure how well they are doing. Testing doesn’t even serve the purpose it is intended to. In the crusade to record student performance, standardized tests are driving grades and student morale into the ground.  Schools need to focus more on mental health and less on testing!

If Charlie West understands it, we all should.

LAUSD Up -- Periodic Reporting on the Los Angeles Unified School District - Episode Three

ITEM 1.   UTLA had a nice rally on Monday after school and it felt like old times. An eerily familiar set of demands--fair pay, smaller classes, more support personnel, less testing--are being stonewalled by an autocratic boss. It was deja-vu all over again. 

Newly elected LAUSD school board member Dr. Rocio Rivas was there and UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz along with  many others. The L.A. Times had a pretty good write-up from Howard Blume describing the situation as a "stress test for the nation’s second-largest school district" and that sounds about right to me. The question always is whether or not the district bosses will accept teachers as authentic partners in educating students.

To be honest, more people showed up than I expected. It was after school after all, and in addition to traditional end-of-day exhaustion, turnout was fighting end-of-year exhaustion and an after-school tutoring program initiated to address "learning loss." I'm retired and had plenty of time and energy to attend, but it was great to see old friends, many of whom I walked the line with in 2019. Thanks to all of you who were able to attend.

Negotiating with the district is a dance with many of the same steps as anything else to do with LAUSD. It always begins with characterizing the teachers as the problem and ends with "screw the teachers; let them figure it out." Decisions are made at the top to address political--rather than educational--concerns, and those making the decisions always seem unaware or unconcerned with the ways schools, classrooms, and students actually work. 

ITEM 2.   Which brings me to what the district calls "acceleration days," though what is accelerating is unclear. These are four extra school days tacked on to the school year either in the middles of weeks (first district bad idea) or in place of the first two days of both winter and spring vacations (second district bad idea). 

Today's Times reviews the chaos over the district's attempt to look as if they're serious about helping students impacted by the pandemic and remote schooling. It seems that the district has never developed a real plan for implementing extra instructional time but has instead opted for blaming teachers and their unions for pointing that out. 

Shocking only when compared with what people have a right to expect from their school district. Surprising to absolutely no one who has ever dealt with them.

The article by Blume, is titled "Only 1 in 9 Los Angeles students will attend extra learning days. What happened?" apparently for comic effect. Anyone from Blume all the way up to LAUSD Superintendent and world-class suit-wearer Alberto Carvalho--and every school employee in between--knows one thing for certain: you can't make kids do anything. A teacher's life is consumed with concocting ways to get students to believe they want what you want. It's really the whole ball game.

But, just as in their dealings with UTLA, the district thinks "because I say so" is an adequate strategy. In the article, parents complain that the details of the "program" have been missing (pause for laughter) and school board member Nick Melvoin acknowledged "[parents] don’t necessarily know what these days look like... This, I think, was one of the first public presentations we’ve done, but I’m hoping we’ll continue sharing that with parents.” Hope is not a plan.

That was yesterday's school board meeting--Tuesday, December 6--the first public presentation of details less than two weeks before parents are being asked to send their kids, often to unfamiliar schools to work with unfamiliar teachers (if the district can dig them up). And send them during what they've planned as a break and perhaps a vacation. And how will it work? "We're working on it," says the district. What could go wrong?

One parent quoted in the article is not sure her children's IEPs will be followed. One parent said their kid was doing fine in school and thought the extra days unnecessary, once again highlighting the difference between learning (parents' concerns) and test scores (bureaucrats' concerns).

The district is lucky to get 1 in 9.

Other elements highlight the disconnect between the district's "plan" and what students and teachers actually do, not to mention what district families need. The shortage of details this close to launch is LAUSD to a "T." The notion that their website has "gradually answered more of the questions" is simply a sign that they did not know enough about what they themselves were proposing to anticipate the questions in advance.

 The fact that the district's decision "to keep open special centers for students with disabilities" was "in response to concerns" and not perfectly foreseeable shows once again how out of touch they are. The district's cavalier, haphazard approach disregards the needs of families to make plans for childcare and travel. It mocks families' efforts to decide what's best for their students. 

In addition, we learn from the article that the district thinks it's a thing for teachers, who probably won't know their students, to have access to individual test scores, enabling teachers to "adjust their instruction accordingly." Really? When would that happen? 

The district has already blown through a couple of deadlines before admitting at Tuesday's meeting that "there would be no hard deadline and last-minute arrivals would not be turned away." 

Picture this: Monday morning the first day of winter break, you get your roster (if it's ready). You look at test scores (if the district has provided you proper access). You start formulating individual instruction plans for each student including the ones you think are just late but are not coming at all, including the ones who are not yet on your roster because they just showed up. You gather the necessary materials, and then you... teach? I guess.

Tuesday half the students are gone, replaced by brand new ones. Um... teach?

Wednesday vacation begins.

It's a dumb plan. You know what else is a dumb plan? The district's first idea was to insert an "acceleration [Wednes]day" in the middles of several actual teaching weeks throughout the year. By filing an unfair practice charge with the California Public Employment Relations Board, the union reminded Carvalho and his merry band that the length of the school year is an issue for collective bargaining, and no amount of "well, it's voluntary" makes it not. 

That's right. just when the dumb starts to run over the top, the district just gets a bigger cup. The district's original proposal would have thrown schools into chaos as nobody would know how many students or how many teachers were going to show up for which classes. 

It was a slick attempt to coerce working parents into relying on schools as childcare, and cow and con teachers and students into working an extra four days, but it was such a bad idea that when teachers said "Voluntary? No thanks" the district scrapped the plan and went back to bargaining, exactly where they should have started in the first place.

ITEM 3.   And now this (h/t John Oliver): 

Covid Takes Over LAUSD Headquarters at Beaudry 
Forty-one cases over four floors.          

Hope they all get better. 

Just going to leave this here. 

The War On Teachers Part Two: Conditions of Employment

Brief Update: Please pay attention to what's been happening in the Covina-Valley Unified School District. A strike has apparently been averted, but the fact that health care was the last issue to be resolved is important. Healthcare (district-paid health insurance) is a major inducement for teachers to enter and stay in the profession, and it's also a major expenditure for school districts who provide it. 

Covina-Valley was attempting to negotiate a multi-tier system that would have capped spending for dependents of new hires. The union wanted a system that would continue to treat all members equally. The tentative compromise appears to maintain that uniformity, thereby dodging the "divide and conquer" scenario, while employee contributions to dependent coverage will rise for everyone.

Setting veteran workers against new hires is a classic union-busting strategy (see pensions), and it's good to see it fail here. If you are now in contract negotiations (looking at you, LAUSD), stay vigilant.

Now, The War On Teachers: Working Conditions.

In the last two posts I focused on money and how the Enemies of Public Schooling squeeze pay and pensions (and benefits--see above), making the job less attractive. Next up on the teacher hit list is something even more important for many teachers: the conditions under which teachers are required to work.

Working conditions are a major factor in people leaving the profession prematurely and may be THE major factor in teachers thinking about leaving the profession early. I know it was for me.

When I started teaching I knew I wasn't going to get rich. I was only able to do it because I have a spouse who works as not-a-teacher and because of the health care. What I didn't know, what I don't think anyone can know in advance, is how hard a job it is. 

Like most new teachers, I'm guessing, I spent my first couple of years trying to figure out what the hell I was doing in the classroom. My first two classes had 48 and 46 students. Most classes were 29 to 37. On top of that I had boring faculty meetings every month and pretty good department meetings periodically. I was also going to school nights to clear my credential and I started a drama club after school. Because I was young.

It was hard, partly because I was doing too much but mostly because every time I got a little better I was determined to do more. I remember the third year being the hardest. I finally knew where the class should be going, but I wasn't yet good enough to get us there. Even so, it felt like progress.

I taught English to ninth graders because I loved it and the veteran teachers... didn't. Class sizes were actually capped in those days at something under thirty students, so that was good. Admin handed me the keys to the dormant theater one day, and the club moved in and started performing on stage. The next year they gave me a drama class. It was actually pretty cool.

It didn't last very long. The California Charter Schools Act passed the legislature in 1992, but I started feeling it around 2000. That's when voters passed Prop 39 requiring school districts to take facilities bought and paid-for by taxpayers and fork them over to charters. The next year we got No Child Left Behind and the beginning of the Big Standardized Test lunacy (h/t Peter Greene @palan57 for BS Test), and that created the conditions for ruthless competition in the student-market. 

Principals, the best of whom once were actual educators who protected their staffs from the district's worst ideas now became wholly-owned widgets in the machine. The "failing schools" narrative took over the discourse and test scores became the reason schools even exist.

A lot of the terrible things that have happened in the last twenty years--the reform-a-go-round and know-nothing consultants and ridiculous "Professional Developments," the endless testing and test prepping and test analysis, the constricted curriculum, the bizarre evaluations, and the stupid rules--are responsible for the teacher shortage (yes, there is) and can be traced back to those early days. The turn of the century.

True story: I got a call this week asking if I wanted a long-term sub assignment in spring semester. I politely declined. I'm not a sub. I'm not on any list nor have I ever indicated a desire to be. And it's not all about the money.

It's no mystery why it's become hard to staff schools. Anne Lutz Fernandez bullseyed it in August:

https://t.co/xdXe0GPjB1

— Anne Lutz Fernandez (@lutzfernandez) August 4, 2022

Teachers are disappearing. And again, it's all part of the plan.

Many observers--some honestly, some not--wonder how we got here. Some of them pretend and argue that it's not really happening at all. But teachers are leaving the classroom. Lots more are deciding to never become teachers in the first place because why would they? The job is being made unsustainable, impossible, and it's not an accident. 

A word about rhetoric. I know some people might not be comfortable with the use of war as a metaphor for the ongoing project to privatize public schooling, and I respect that. I mean no disrespect to people who have endured the death and destruction of a shooting war. But war also means an organized effort to stop or defeat something seen as dangerous. This is definitely that. 

The War On Teachers should be seen as just that -- a war. But instead of two evenly matched armies facing off across a plot of disputed territory, it's more like a juggler on a unicycle on a highwire being pelted with rocks and feces. 

Teachers are often too busy or too exhausted to fight back. 

If money is the frontal assault, working conditions are the pincer movement. Degrading teachers' work environment--and students' learning environment--is a multi-dimensional campaign to grind teachers up and run them out of the classroom. Let's take a look at one of the battlefields.

1. class sizes

One of the most consequential components of a teacher's work environment is the size of their classes. It makes the difference between talking to every kid every day--and not. It makes the difference between giving quality feedback and "Good Job!" It's the difference between spotting a kid who's being bullied, a kid who's crying and trying to hide it, a kid who is wearing long sleeves to cover up the bruises, and not spotting it.

Note: A great resource on this subject is Leonie Haimson at https://classsizematters.org/. 

And let's stipulate from the outset that yes, anyone who has ever spent time in a classroom teaching kids knows this. But a lot of decisions are being made by people outside the classroom, and they are being made based on expediency, political agendas, and faulty information.

As I said, I started in LAUSD back in the '90s with most of my classes in the thirties and a couple in the forties. That wasn't unusual then, and you did the best you could. There wasn't anybody looking over my shoulder, and there was a general recognition that fewer humans in a room would be better for everyone and that we were only in that particular spot because we had to be.  

Then the district hired some more teachers and  some legal things happened  and more teachers were hired and classes got smaller. Not all of them and not by a lot, but it felt like progress.

Then it got worse. Squeezed funding got squeezed even harder. Enemies of Public Schooling saw an opportunity to make teaching even more difficult when some Big Thinkers got it into their skulls that the number of students in a classroom doesn't really matter. These professional pundits have made a good living saying just that to bosses and politicians who are relieved and happy to hear it. Saves money, don't you know. Someone please save us from the economists.

A lot of the advertising involves running the same flawed studies through the media spin cycle over and over. These analyses suffer from a cornucopia of problems, from the omission of ESL to selection bias to stopping at short-term (one school year) effects to simply lying about results.

The studies compare across nations and cultures, glossing over the idiosyncratic funding and infrastructure features unique to U.S. education systems. The studies concentrate on moderate class sizes and seldom address the class sizes (30-40+) that teachers routinely experience (and try to muddle class size with student-teacher ratio, just for effect). And most important, critics of class size reduction efforts focus almost exclusively on two factors: the relative costs of class size reduction vs other potential actions, and test scores.

For the critics, it's never a question of whether smaller class sizes are better across a whole range of criteria, but whether smaller classes are economically feasible. Talkers talk about whether reducing class size is the best use of funds, which they portray as fixed, and about whether smaller classes result in higher test scores.

From the critics' point of view, test scores are identical to student achievement and the only metric worth recording. Forget about student engagement and long-term student success. And especially forget about teacher retention. 

And where you gonna get all those extra teachers anyway?   We're in the midst of a teacher shortage, after all. In a circular case of causation malpractice--

"We can't reduce class sizes because we don't have enough teachers!" 

"You don't have enough teachers because class sizes are huuuge." 

 --critics ignore the fact that the shortage of teachers is directly connected to class size. 

Or do they? The truth is, not expanding the workforce, a large part of which is unionized and supports progressive policies is some people's argument against smaller classes. Just sayin.

I was an English teacher, and putting aside just the logistical issues of working with each kid every period, and class management issues of having 30 instead of 20 kids in a class, and the added difficulty spotting the really important stuff, there's one other thing that drives veteran teachers out of the business but that new teachers might not think about until they're up to their ears.

Every extra kid means another ten minutes (being conservative) of prep/feedback time outside of class each week--what we used to call "grading papers." So that class just went from 200 minutes of extra time every week (or weekend!) to 300--an extra hour and a half per week. Now multiply times five or six sections and you get an extra 8-9 hours. An extra entire work day. Per week. Extra. You can see class size makes a big difference.

Don't let anybody tell you it doesn't.

Next up: Even More Working Conditions

The War On Teachers Part One: It's the money, Stupid - Pension Edition

 And then there are the pensions!

If salaries are the money front door in the war on teachers, pensions are the side entrance. One of the trade-offs for being paid so dismally is a promise of a stable retirement pension. If you work long enough, the story goes, you'll be able to stop working some day and not go hungry.

Your mileage may vary as different states have different rules, but California public school teachers pay a percentage of each paycheck into a separate retirement system--the California State Teachers' Retirement System--and drawing that pension significantly reduces any Social Security benefits earned from non-public school employment. For most of us, CalSTRS is the centerpiece of our retirement benefits.

As I've mentioned, I failed to follow the very good career advice given by my colleague Nick Deligencia: Give yourself a raise. Teachers do this by taking extra classes and working for a long time--both of which are really good things for our profession and for the kids we serve. A smarter and more stable workforce is a good thing.

You won't make a million bucks or anything, so do what you can.

For many of us, one of the good reasons to raise your pay is that it raises the pension you can receive when you retire. Pension critics and the public they disinform tend to fantasize enormous sums of cash rolling into the bank accounts of teachers who retire young and use their boatloads of pension funds to travel the world on yachts. Sadly, no.

The California State Teachers' Retirement System, commonly referred to as CalSTRS, states on its website that "Your CalSTRS retirement benefit will replace, on average, about 54% of your current salary," and that seems about right. 

Side note: Los Angeles police and firefighters can get up to 90%, and unlike teachers their overtime and extra pay counts to boost their final salaries. I'm not saying they don't deserve their pensions. I'm just saying nobody else is saying that, either.

My own pension, including a ten-year "defined benefit supplement" I earned by doing extra work is a bit over $4000 a month which, although not as much as it could have been, is not nothing. There's more than a little something left over after I pay income taxes and now medicare premiums, but no yacht for me.

So why all the hubbub over teacher pensions? 

Chad Aldeman is a reformster, to adopt Peter Greene's term. But Aldeman has a particular focus: He doesn't like teacher pensions. He says so over and over again. He is founding editor of something called "TeacherPensions.org," which is the spawn of reformster outfit Bellwether Education Partners. He's not the only anti-pension huckster out there, but an impressive number of them cite his work for support.

His criticism seems to be based on the fact that, unless you work for a pretty long time, you don't get a good return on your contributions. Which is basically true, and also a good thing. Again, a more experienced, stable workforce benefits students and the institution, and incentivizing teachers to remain in the classroom is a stabilizing influence. When the incentives disappear, teachers do, too. Look around. 

Aldeman likes to point out that much of today's pension expenditures by states and school districts go to teachers who aren't working anymore because they are, you know, retired. He cleverly blends teachers into "education employees," and connects statistics that sound ominous but really are vague and unconnected: "From 2001 to 2020, schools increased payrolls by 75% while their pension costs rose by 275%." 

"Payrolls" include what workers? Same or different pension systems? What schools where? And what are these costs you speak of? Did lots of people retire? Did more schools offer their employees a plan? Did schools hire lots of people (?) and you're counting future retirements? Did schools and states get ripped off on their management fees? Aldemen neglects to say.

However, he doesn't hesitate to offer solutions to the problems he posits. Shorter version of his four-part plan? Get rid of pensions. That's it. No promises, raises don't count, and employees assume the risk. Sounds pretty appetizing, right? Well, if not, Aldeman has a solution for that, too: let teachers opt out. Let them take a defined contribution plan or just the cash. 

Ultimately, Aldeman's "solutions" promote even greater teacher turnover by suppressing salaries and benefits, which of course is the point. To achieve this reformster paradise, he wants to drive a wedge between teachers who are retired or approaching retirement and youngsters who are left to worry that promises of a stable retirement might not be kept. It's a potent strategy.

Aldeman is a public policy guy who also works for something called the Edunomics Lab. I guess the pseudo-scientific name implies that he and the Lab know something about economics, but based on their work I can't confirm. 

The director at the Lab, Marguerite Roza, is also a policy hotshot who, per Diane Ravitch, "was for many years a fellow at the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, a pro-school choice think tank" and "has been critical in her writings of class size reduction and has recommended saving money by cutting teachers’ pensions and benefits (which she called “Frozen Assets” in a 2007 paper of that name)." 

In spite of being part of the McCourt School of Public Policy at  Georgetown University, the Edunomics Lab primarily seems to be an advocacy squad on a mission to reform public school by destroying the village in order to save it.

For an excellent breakdown of Aldeman and his flimflam, here's a one-pager from advocacy group the National Public Pension Coalition. Here's Monique Morrissey, an actual economist from the Economic Policy Institute, taking down Aldeman and other pension critics for their deceptive tactics and bad-faith arguments. And finally, here's a study from the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education about why Aldeman and the pension-haters are wrong

So are these pension-haters just confused? Misinformed? No. They are coming through the side door in an effort to squeeze educational resources and, most important, make the teaching profession even more untenable than it already is. In other words...

If the Enemies of Public Schooling can degrade the profession sufficiently, we see exactly what we're seeing now: teachers leaving early, or in the middle, or not becoming teachers at all because who would? 

Defund. Degrade. Destabilize. It's a war.

Next: The War On Teachers Part Two: Working Conditions

The War On Teachers Part One: It's the money, Stupid - Salary Edition

One of the crucial elements of the war on public schools is the war on teachers. If the Enemies of Public Schooling - EoPS? -  degrade the profession sufficiently, we see exactly what we're seeing now: teachers leaving early, or in the middle, or not becoming teachers at all because who would? 

Side Note: I am reminded that when I told my parents  I was going to New York to be an actor, the howling could be heard all the way to Cleveland.

Imagine today telling them "I'm going to be a teacher!" "Couldn't you just be an actor instead?"

The EoPS have lots of strategies for make the teaching work space unworkable, from enormous class sizes to extra duties to lack of administrative support to ridiculous "professional developments." But there is one area that dominates the landscape because, unlike the size of your class or the pressure to pass all your students, or the number of idiots who are going to stand in front of meetings and tell you what you are doing wrong, this is one you can look up on The Google before you ever make the mistake of telling your folks "I'm going to be a teacher!" It's money.

Don Ohlmeyer famously told then-Washington Post reporter Tony Kornheiser that "The answer to all your questions is: Money." That's not entirely true in every case, but it's a good place to start.

Salaries 

As I've written before in How Shitty Is It? and in How Shitty Is It? Updated.: 

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. 

And furthermore...

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 LAUSD 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. Semester units may be earned in the form of college classes and/or salary point courses, almost all of which the teacher has to pay for.

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. 

That's 56,000 - 58,000 = -2000    98,176 - 106,000 = -7824

Yes in LAUSD we get health benefits which are presently valued by the district at $16000 per year, but we had health benefits in 1995, too, so the decrease is still the decrease. And we do get a break on taxes for our individual retirement contributions and a district contribution to the overall fund. More on that next time. 

But those incentives are basically offered instead of getting paid more. If you think there's a teaching crunch now, try making it even less attractive.

The Economic Policy Institute broke it down here and here it is in living color:

The point here is nobody gets rich teaching. In fact, we've been going backwards as pay has actually declined since 1995 while the cost of living has doubled. Furthermore, considering that buying a house in L.A. seems hopeless (the median price up over 400% since '95) and even rental housing is up over 150% , the likelihood of a new teacher in LAUSD being able to live anywhere near their school workplace is microscopic.

(The NEA discusses the situation here, and UTLA has a good description and overview here.)

So what's all the noise about? Why are the internet tubes filled with assaults like this scare-signaling from anti-union, pro-competition reformster Mike Antonucci? Why this excrement from poser and competition advocate Matthew Yglesias? Why are there so many articles about the "myth" that teachers are underpaid? 

That's right. Pretending that teachers are fine or even somehow overpaid allows the enemies of public schooling to attack two of their favorite targets: school funding, and teachers themselves. That allows them to squeeze resources for education and make teachers' lives miserable. Win Win.

The result is a defunded, degraded, destabilized 

public school system. Win Win Win. Win.

Salaries is the direct route, the frontal assault. Next Up: Pensions. 

Of course you realize, this means war.

Election week had some good news for educators, which is bad news for our enemies. The forces that mobilized to frighten parents and turn schools into precisely the type of political indoctrination machines they pretend to oppose lost a few contests, and took a particularly delicious drubbing in Michigan. Ohio did okay but unfortunately Missouri was a mixed bag. North and South Carolina continue to spiral into the sewer, and Florida and Texas are all-around disasters, proving once again that you can indeed fool some of the people all of the time. Additional information including ballot initiatives here.

It wasn't a uniform rejection of the haters, by any means, and they certainly are not going to surrender and quit. But there are indications that the tactics used by these vandals are too boorish even for some folks who otherwise share their views. And there is clear evidence that some candidates all the way up to governor's races found traction in declaring support for what most people understand to be public schools and the people who work there. 

The project to destroy authentic public schooling is sweeping and ferocious. It has a long history going back at least to Brown v Board of Education and the fight over desegregation, back to Milton Friedman's "The Role of Government in Education," and it continues today with vouchers and charter management organizations and resource deprivation, with the testing regime and attacks on schools via CRT, LGBTQ+ intimidation, trans descrimination, and the book banning that follows.

The forces waging war on the institution of public education fight on multiple battlefronts--often simultaneously--utilizing extensive resources and a variety of weapons. Sometimes those weapons look harmless, but they are not. Sometimes those enemies look like allies, but they are not.

Many of these enemies are familiar, like craven politicians and corporate hustlers. However, some of them are exotic and hard to process. The strategies vary in the details but essentially are focused on depriving authentic public schools of the oxygen that keeps them alive: students. 

How? School budgets are sliced up with large portions diverted to consultants and outside programs and "educational materials." Unions are demonized and marginalized resulting in increased administrative control and suppressed employee compensation. Public money is grifted for private schools or private school management companies (charters). 

You starve schools of students, and therefore funding, by degrading existing schools, by diverting and denying schools essential resources, by driving off their workforces. You test incessantly. You mount propaganda campaigns that promote a "failing schools" narrative. You make parents and students and education writers believe that schools are dangerous and hopeless. 

Then you present your preferred alternative as a solution to the problem you created. 

The enemies of public schooling often have specific, sometimes idiosyncratic reasons for their participation in the campaign, but it almost always comes down to money in some form. 

It's helpful to think of the war on public schooling as having one overriding objective: the privatization of public resources. The goal is the transfer of money in our national, state, and local joint bank accounts into their own. 

How do they get away with it?

Let's start with the godfather of the movement: Milton Friedman.

In 1955, Milton Friedman published his famous essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” which was included in revised form in Capitalism and Freedom in 1962. In it, Friedman argued for government to get out of the education business altogether, except for maybe providing subsidies for parents to go out into the free market and find themselves a school. And he wasn't particularly enthusiastic about that. 

This was, not coincidentally, the year after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. Deniers gonna deny, but Friedman's voucher proposal was weaponized by pro-segregation Jim Crow forces to oppose desegregation and promote segregated private school alternatives. It is still being cited today as a rationale for school choice. 

There are a million things wrong with the paper from commodifying learning to commodifying families (at one point described as "responsible 'units'"). Essentially hypothesizing in support of a worldview, to me it reads like an extended justification for what Friedman already believes and wants everyone else to believe is self-evident or inarguable. His pontifical tone takes everything for granted, as if saying it confidently enough can make it true. 

Now, there's a lot of people who swear by this guy, I think mostly because he tells them what they want to hear. And they use his work to justify what they wanted to do anyway. As Friedman sermonizes, he expresses the arrogance of faith as he assigns characteristics to invented terms (words mean what he chooses them to mean), for instance presuming to identify and assess the "social gain" inherent in "neighborhood effects" and making guesses about all of it.

Serving mainly as academic cover for greed merchants as it exalts capitalism as a state of nature, the paper and the guy who wrote it get away with shit I wouldn't take from my ninth graders. If I had to make a case for sustained silent reading or writer's workshop, for my Master's or to my principal, I'd have to show something--some data--some evidence. Friedman gets by with saying it's so.

The paper reads like the bloviating of a drunken sophomore philosophy student telling all his roommates how things are and how they ought to be. It reeks of the neoliberal stench that permeates every facet of our civic life since at least the 70's, the cultish worship of markets and competition that Elise Castillo calls the Neoliberal grammar of schooling. 

Daily Reminder: Competition is good at exactly one thing: sorting winners from losers. 

So how did the Republican army get recruited into this anti-public schooling neoliberal free market battle? It might feel as if it's always been this way, but that's not precisely true. Top marginal income tax rates under Eisenhower were never under 90%. He advocated for and signed the bill that authorized the interstate highway highway system, called by Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks "the greatest public works program in the history of the world." 

Free market faith and fervor marked the emergence of the Reagan Republican and the conviction that the private sector should control and could better perform functions previously understood to be the shared responsibility of all community members (i.e. the government). 

Reagan had a complicated history with organized labor, having served several terms as the president of the Screen Actors Guild while also acting as a secret informer for the FBI, naming names of perceived "communist sympathizers" in the Guild and ultimately testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  

A mouthpiece for General Electric in the fifties, Reagan was influenced by GE's vice president Lemuel Boulware who helped Reagan marry his own existing anti-communism to a growing distrust of labor as he was becoming "the true-believing face of a propaganda campaign for US-led global capitalism." 

As Reagan developed his fantasy of individualism and free markets, he quit GE to become more involved in politics as a registered Republican. He proceeded to campaign against Medicare, saying that "it's a short step to all the rest of socialism" and that, if it became law, we would one day tell our children "what it once was like in America when men were free."

Reagan continued to fortify his conservative credentials by opposing other federal initiatives such as food stamps and a minimum wage increase, and stumping for Barry Goldwater in 1964. As governor of California, Reagan also bolstered his "tough guy" image and authoritarian street cred in clashes with protesters and support for the death penalty. He then used that image to distinguish himself from Jimmy Carter, even wooing Democrats and unionized workers (ironically, and against the counsel of their union leaders).

And then the guy becomes president. 

Call it mass delusion, or a practical joke gone wrong, or just being too tired to pay attention (Iran, Nicaragua, oil oil oil), the conservative Right capitalist marauders finally had their man in Washington, and they made the most of it. As Reagan kept dangling the shiny object of international conflict over there, he achieved the objectives of regulatory demolition and tax vilification under the rubric of "supply-side economics" over here. He also recruited evangelicals (prayer in schools!) and the racists Nixon had cultivated (Neshoba County) creating the modern Republican coalition--and a star was born. 

After having used his history as a union president to dupe the rank and file, Reagan reverted to form, firing the striking air traffic controllers in 1981 and inspiring companies all over the country to aggressively "reshape" their work forces, ultimately cutting the number of significant strikes from an average of 300 per year from 1947 to 1979 to 187 the year Reagan was elected to 40 his last full year in office, 1988.

Through his rejection of organized labor and the positive potential of government, Reagan appropriated the free market fundamentalism of Friedman and built the modern Republican Party on top of it. 

Ronald Reagan was the pathway to power that Friedman and Neoliberals had been waiting for, the mechanism to impact policy and get things done. If his personal journey is one of conversion--from nominal progressive to fanatical reactionary--his story reflects the parallel transformation of the Republican Party.

If you're saying to yourself that Trump appears to break with that traditional Republican prime directive, that's true only in the level of cruelty and disregard for policy. The end result--power in the hands of capital--remains the same. For the entourage of political elites who have supported and enabled and protected Trump, the ends (substituting private enterprise for government agency) justify the means (MAGA violence and treason), or at least make the means palatable to the ruling class.

That's why it often feels like the Republican Party is an avatar for the war on authentic public schooling. We should be cautious, however. Even though the Republican Party is composed of many of our enemies pursuing the objective of turning public money into private and using many of the strategies--both familiar and exotic--I'll be discussing, there are other malign actors who are just as dangerous. And closer to home.

 

"This Time, It's Political" Revisited and Edited

I'm watching political coverage leading up to the election and I thought it would be a good time to revisit this. Mostly for myself. 

Please, please vote. 

First posted June 14 of this year. Slightly edited for relevance.

This is going to be part rant, part call for help, and it's going to be long. If you want, you can tune back in next week for a regularly scheduled post on charter schools.  But if we don't deal with this it won't even matter.

I try not to write explicitly about politics in this blog. It's probably a holdover from my teaching days when I avoided sharing my politics with students. I was trying to teach them to think for themselves, after all.

So when a student would ask who I supported or voted for, I would often just give them what I stood for and let them figure it out.

"I'm for high taxes on the rich, assistance for the poor, less funding for the police and military and more funding for schools and libraries and parks and transit. I support DREAM, DACA, amnesty, and a path to citizenship for anybody who wants it. I'm against putting kids in cages. I'm for clean energy and at least trying to save our lives on this planet."

That usually did the trick. They got the picture. 

I don't have students to worry about anymore, and I've changed my mind about this blog--at least for now. I need to talk to you about politics.

The school battles we're fighting today, over "CRT," LGBTQ+ rights, identity inclusiveness and trans kids, "parent rights" and banned books and school "choice" and school funding and teachers unions and whether to do anything about what-the-fuck actual murders of school children are, of course, fundamentally political. And, fundamentally, they are part of the same big war we're fighting over voting rights and police reform and climate change. It's a war that has only two sides.

The Republican Party, one of the two major political parties operating in the United States is despicable, and the people who love them and work for them are despicable, too. Some of my friends say they're crazy but they are not crazy. Their fans may be nuts, but the Republican Party and the apparatchiks who do damage on a national-now-global scale are perfectly rational. 

Their actions serve a strategic purpose: holding on to power. In their drive for political power, Republicans and their media cheerleaders have cultivated a constituency addicted to conspiracy and grievance and the taste of blood. The party is now completely devoted to supplying their acolytes with enough rage to keep them coming back for more. 

On the other hand, the Democratic Party is in love with its own virtue. It's dedicated to preserving a romantic narrative of democracy and bipartisanship, and the fiction that if only we make the best argument in a nice way we will persuade our adversaries (don't say enemies) and win the day. Or maybe there's nothing we can do because the Senate. Or maybe the Constitution. 

This will not last forever. We will either become all one thing, or all the other.

In order to survive, we have to act, and our first act has to be telling the truth about Republicans. Every time we or our elected leaders (Senator Schumer? Mr. President?) make believe that Republicans are like us, that they care about the country or *regular folks* or anything in the universe except power, we lose a battle and they win one. 

They weaponize our credulousness as proof of our impotence and they are not wrong. And when they do, their numbers grow and a few more of us give up and stay home, convinced our leaders don't see what we see or know what we know. 

The president, the vice, from the White House podium, on national tv, they need to say it, out loud and every time. Every member of Congress, every governor, state legislator, city council and school board member at every rally, in every interview, needs to tell the truth: 

As long as Republicans believe that people who disagree with them are illegitimate, that guns > children's lives, that elections they lose are fraudulent, that crimes they commit are not crimes, that climate change is a hoax, or that history ought to be a soft pillow for racists and the truth is a matter of opinion, there are no good Republicans. 

For those of you thinking, "Bullshit. I'm a Republican and I don't believe those things," you are deluding yourselves and you should stop. Tell the truth: Either you do believe those things, in which case you're a terrible person and fuck you, or you are no longer a Republican. Congratulations.

Telling the truth is not easy and getting people to listen is ten times harder in this  putrid media backwash where corporations whose mission should be to inform us have defaulted to predetermined narratives; faulty assumptions; and timid, shrugging commentary when they aren't snickering and rolling their eyes.

The media--both Big and Social--take for granted that Republicans will obstruct. What did you expect? The reporters bat their eyes and swoon over the big, strong Rs who never give an inch while shaking their heads and snickering at the "we wanted to" Ds for even trying. Silly geese. More on this to come. 

So what can we do? We need the news. Democrats need networks to interview us and invite us on shows and ask us questions and cover campaigns and spotlight our issues. We know we can't depend on the media to be fair or shrewd, and we can't count on them to rise above their both-sides horse race "journalism." Still, facts do not speak for themselves. Facts have to be spoken by someone. 

So when the media fails and falls back on their assumptions and tired tropes, we need to push back. For most of us, that might look like the simple civic engagement that almost nobody does. For example, every time we see a ridiculous, mis-framed article in The New York Times or a vapid false equivalency on MSNBC or CNN, you and I can write letters (does anyone still?) and send emails and call our media faves to hold them to account. We can call out our local papers and radio stations. We can complain louder and louder until they hear us or hang up. 

Every time one of our representatives in government does an interview where the news personality starts with "Why can't Democrats..." they need to confront that reporter and challenge the premise of the question. Everybody on the planet should understand the formula by now. We need to push back on the notion that it's our job to make the Republicans better people. We just need to beat them.

Every time Democrats tell the truth about Republicans instead of pretending they are like us, we win. We need to support candidates who will tell the truth in the White House and in Congress, but also for city council and school board where we need to show up to meetings and tell the truth ourselves. All of us can tell the truth in posts online and we can follow other people who do. We can tell our friends and our families (ouch!) the truth about Republicans especially if they are Republicans. Remember when your racist buddy used to send you racist shit about Obama? We can make our friends crazy with the actual truth. 

Honesty is an act of war. Each moment of truth is an attack on the life of the liars. Words alone won't stop the Republicans, but the truth is a prerequisite for victory. 

Now some really bad news. It's not just politics anymore. Republicans today are not only bent on the elimination of all opposition political-cultural-historical-pastoral, they and their party are armed and aimed at the entire tragically incomplete American project. All of their power-- cultural, economical, policial/judicial, as well as political-- is threatened by the prospect of an equitable, multi-racial democracy, and they mean to kill it. 

The Republican Party is a black hole at the center of our democracy. Built out of paranoia and anger, it depends for its survival on its ability to block light from getting through. Gun safety? Blocked. Voting rights? Blocked. Environmental protection? Renewable energy? Blocked. Police reform? Racial equity? Blocked. Economic justice, reproductive rights, workers rights, civil rights, business regulation, consumer protection, free and fair elections, the fucking post office? Forget about it. 

The Democratic Party is all that stands between the Republicans and the ending of American Democracy. And no matter how damaged and defective we are, what comes next is worse. We can't afford to waste our time taking each other apart. I know there's a fight among Democrats over whether our leaders are doing enough to earn the votes of would-be supporters. I get it. I've been in that fight, too. But, at least for now, it's the wrong fight. 

I voted for Al Gore. People who voted for Ralph Nader were wrong. I voted for Hillary Clinton. People who voted for Jill Stein and that Johnson guy were idiots. I voted for Biden. I wanted Warren. Others wanted Bernie--twice. People who didn't vote because they wanted somebody else don't understand how elections work. 

We shouldn't be accused of treason every time we criticize the party,  but there are only two sides in this fight. If the people we elected to do battle for us are not prepared to do that, we'll get new ones next time. But we cannot afford to sit it out. Our only hope, and the only hope for the country, is to defeat every single Republican.

When I say Democrats need to defeat Republicans, I mean we need to destroy them. We have to smash them and their loathsome ideology. They are fascists. They are powerful and intensely committed. They will not quit. They will not be defeated by good intentions. They must be demolished and their project razed.

The way the political world in the United States is now constituted, power is a zero sum game. There is no compromise. One side will win and exist, the other will fail to win and disappear. 

And all the fights over schools and libraries will be over. All the other fights, too.