Translate

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

And as long as we're still talking about this...

There's this

Saturday, September 3, 2022

Teacher Shortage? Don't disbelieve everything you hear. (part one)





And this



at No comments:

Just sayin'

 


Good article. Thought I'd re-up this from a year ago, just for fun.


Monday, August 8, 2022

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:

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.


at No comments:

Thursday, March 23, 2023

Union.

 



at No comments:

Monday, March 20, 2023

Union

 

This is what it looked like then:

    (from nea.org)

la teacher strike

                Photo: Joe Brusky



This is what it looks like now:



Please remember to appreciate your teams, your captains, and your chapter chairs. See you out there.




at No comments:

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

Stickin to the Union

 See you tomorrow.


 




 



at No comments:

Captured

Public school and schooling stands as perhaps the last best bulwark against the complete capture of public institutions by private, anti-democratic, theocratic, elite capital. That makes education an inevitable target.

There is lots of nonsense that places schools in the crosshairs: masks, vaccines, CRT, "sexualizing children" and what-the-actual-fuck genital mutilation. 

The "war on woke" makes the test scores/failing schools battle seem positively old-fashioned.

It's almost always about money, of course, as privateers turn curated culture-war outrage into opportunities to divert public money into private pockets.

But lately I've been more and more concerned about powerful elite actors and the deliberate destruction of public education because of its power as a democratizing mechanism and a promoter of equity. This article from ProPublica on the organization Teneo, a network designed to become "[a] Federalist Society for everything," did not make me feel better. 

On one hand, it's no surprise that rich white guys have formed a secret society to promote the interests of rich white guys. On the other hand, the righteous zeal with which they pursue their interests--as if those interests are immutable features of a  moral universe--is disturbing. The "Teneo Community Vision" doc outlining Teneo's principles and strategies is at once shocking and familiar, a manifesto for a congregation of far-right, far-out true believers. It gives off a creepy, cultish vibe as it declares, among other things, that "We acknowledge a transcendent order, whether founded in tradition, philosophy, or theology." 

When I hear "transcendent order," I think about who is at the top making the rules. I think about empire, maybe because I just watched RRR. If there is a point to the recent infatuation with "classical education," it's the reinforcement of this purportedly unassailable "transcendent order," the natural hierarchy of power "founded in tradition, philosophy, or theology," with you-know-whose tradition and religion at the top.

Teneo's vision consists of some basic "beliefs" that are pretty familiar: limited government/individual liberty (of course), and free enterprise presumably protected by the strong national defense they advocate, and also god. Most of the vision doc deals with how they plan to accomplish their goals, rather than what those goals actually are. In fact, the document cautions that "Ideological organizations can end up in difficult positions," and therefore Teneo describes itself this way: "With respect to ideology, Teneo is thin and facilitative" where "thin" means "to resist further definition as an organization":

This position makes the questions like, “Does Teneo support gun control?” Or “Does Teneo support Donald Trump?” easy to answer: beyond our core convictions, Teneo takes no positions, though our members certainly have positions.

Indeed they do. Though the language is vague and prophylactic, it's clear that, as with any cult, everyone knows what to believe. Teneo is merely a facilitator helping members actualize their individual beliefs.

"Teneans" are masters of the universe who magnanimously support other masters in the project to strengthen (and in some cases restore) a power hierarchy threatened by the progress I grew up celebrating. These people deride the notion of a multicultural, multiracial, pluralistic, egalitarian democracy as a proper goal and reject it as fundamental to the creation of "a more perfect union." 

Instead, they are certain of their superiority and the superiority of their ideology and their vision of culture. 

In a misty blend of vague bromides ("We are conservative in ideology but innovative and entrepreneurial in our methods" and "We are a membership of values-aligned leaders) and weird religion-inflected language ("Teneo works to care for its members across personal dimensions of human flourishing" -- they call themselves Teneans, ffs), the vision document sets forth a chilling formula for power and for winning "a battle for the heart and soul of our culture." Whose culture?

Make no mistake, creating a culture in their image is the goal. It is mentioned in the document sixty-five times (Republican Party is mentioned once, "voting" and "elections" not at all). Manipulating the culture is central to the mission and vital to the accomplishment of all other goals.

Teneo's Community Design Principle 5 is titled "CULTURE IS UPSTREAM  OF POLITICS" and acknowledges that "While politics and public policy are some of the legitimate domains we seek to shape," it emphasizes "Focusing on culture first, knowing that politics will follow." 

It uses as an example "The Gay Rights Campaign (knowing that if homosexuality became accepted in pop culture, the law would change)" and specifically references the TV show Will and Grace, 

which introduced many Americans to the gay experience in a friendly, non-threatening way. Will and Grace was written, filmed, and distributed by a small number of elites in Hollywood, yet its reach was enormous. It was a small but effective part of a much larger, self-conscious effort that changed Middle America’s view of the gay community.

Who will design the culture and the politics that will follow? According to Principle 5, it is "intrinsically a conversation of elites because not everyone has access to the institutions that shape culture."

This conviction that some people are born to rule dominates our private sphere and has captured most of our public assets and institutions. Private, anti-democratic, often theocratic, elite capital controls not only how we buy things, but how those things are delivered (a brief history of the post office and its transformation into a "government-business hybrid" here). Prisons, garbage collection, the freaking parking meters in Chicago have been sold off or contracted out. 

On ostensibly public lands, private capital obtains rights to drill out oil and gas (permits around ten grand and royalties going up for the first time in literally ever). Big ranchers get permits to graze livestock (155 million acres). Sometimes they forego the permits. What belongs to we the people anymore? If you said at least we've still got the army...

Three quarters of the military budget goes to contractors. 

The transfer of public assets into private hands is a longstanding and very successful project. Private, anti-democratic, often theocratic, elites want control of the schools, too. They want to acquire and transform public schools into private assets, destroy unions to increase their return on investment, and recreate their vision of hierarchical power with themselves sitting at the top. And they have a plan to do it. 

In one of the most resonant sections of this remarkable "vision" document, the founder (sounds about right) Evan Baehr and the vision team describe two competing "THEORIES OF CULTURAL CHANGE." One is democratic:

Americans like to tell themselves a story about how cultures change: the “bottom up” method. This view holds that culture is the accumulation of values held by the majority of people. 

<snip>

According to this view, if you want to change culture, you need to change the hearts and minds of the majority of people, and the culture will shift as a result. Although this view is comfortingly democratic, it is flawed.

What's wrong with it? From the document:

This view does not take into account the fact that powerful minorities have the power to shift the views of the majority. If culture were truly democratic, then you would expect the power of any minority—whoever it might be— to be minute. It is not. 

Political scientist Byron Shafer says, “No issue, not even a grand issue ‘whose time has come’ can triumph without the support of some organized group or groups to serve as carrier(s). An individual or a small set of individuals can argue the attractiveness of an issue. But a larger network of elite actors must press it forward.”

And there you have it. In their own words. All the talk about how people support public schools and LGBTQ+ protections for students (and everybody else), the talk about gun legislation and climate change mitigation, all the polling--maybe even the elections--it all misses the point. 

The members of Teneo's network ("We are welcoming, but elite") are determined to shape the world in their image regardless of "the hearts and minds of the majority of people." In spite of the majority. 

If you think they can't succeed, just remember that Leonard Leo is running the Teneo "Federalist Society for everything" show now, and ask yourself how the "majority of people" is faring before the Supreme Court. 

These anti-democratic free-market fundamentalists are elite power brokers and they have a plan. It has worked for much of the judiciary including the Supreme Court; now they want everything else. If we don't stop them, our failure will be complete.



at No comments:

Thursday, March 2, 2023

We're not the bad guys. They are the bad guys: The Teacher and the Fascist

Finishing off DeSantis (for now): 

Things can always get worse.


Well, now I feel as if I know Florida Governor Ron DeSantis a lot better. If you're still here, I hope you feel that way, too. That last one was really long, but I didn't even get to the College Board bullying, or stacking the school boards, or thumbing his nose at Biden's attempt to protect vulnerable schoolkids from harassment and discrimination, or the "grooming" shit, or vouchers and even more vouchers, or 86ing Common Core--which would have been okay if he hadn't replaced it with even dumber dumbness. 

And that's just schools. This is much bigger than schools.

There's also DeSantis's trolling and flexing and bullying over a private army, kidnapping migrants, removing insufficiently servile elected officials, troublesome media (so he went out and got his own), and drag. The list is growing.

For those of you thinking Florida used to be a nice place but now it's a swamp full of Republicans and deserves what it gets, you're absolutely right. For those of you thinking DeSantis is going to stop there... 

DeSantis is not going to stop in Florida. 

Business Insider reports: "Florida is hoping its strict law regulating how race, gender, and sexuality are taught in school will soon be applied to students nationwide as the College Board revamps its African American studies class that the state vocally rejected."

"The Florida of Today is the America of Tomorrow" Kathryn Joyce writes in Vanity Fair. She's writing about the takeover of New College, the cancer that is Hillsdale College, and Christopher Fucking Rufo, but DeSantis has no intention of stopping, not with Florida and not with schools. 

DeSantis aspires to be president--at least--and that would be really, really bad. 

If you support Ron DeSantis because he's a willing protector of your tax tricks and you think "How bad can this be?" or the word "guardrails" springs to mind, take a breath. Then get counseling. If you support him because he's mean to the people you don't like, you should be ashamed of yourself. Either way, if you guys win, DeSantis wins, and if he becomes president, the United States as a pluralistic, multicultural democracy will cease to exist.

That very well may be the plan. 

The fabulous Jennifer Berkshire tweeted out a paragraph from The Big Myth, and it was for me one of those rare moments of clarity, where everything suddenly made sense and cohered in a Unified Theory of Inequality. Here's the tweet:


I immediately ordered the book, but even before I start reading, a few things have become all too clear to me.

Something clicked and school choice and parental rights and book banning joined up with taxes and policing and reproductive rights and the railroad tragedy in Ohio. 

"They believed that men were inherently unequal." Not to mention everyone else. 

They believed it then and they believe it now. The cruelty and the raw exercise of power to discriminate and dominate isn't just a utilitarian strategy. It's the inevitable result of their view of "human nature" and the way the world should naturally be ordered. Is ordered.

Teachers are in the way. We are purveyors of truth and compassion, promoters of equity. We encourage individual agency. We are dangerous to traditional power hierarchies. That hasn't always been the case, but it is right now. 

We are dangerous to DeSantis and his dream of unchecked power. We are dangerous to fascists and because we are dangerous, DeSantis and the rest of the fascists need to drive us out or break us. They do it with shitty pay and poor working conditions and public humiliation. They do it by accusing us of the very things they themselves are doing. 

They break teachers by making us do things we know are bad for our students, sometimes by passing bad laws.

We have this nostalgia for some imaginary old days when teachers were revered professionals who were acknowledged as experts, but that was never really true and it was very much not true in many places and times. The fact that we are experts only makes it more important to eliminate us. The vilifying and scapegoating--we've seen it before and we know where it ends up. 

If you think this sounds overheated, remember that with fascists every accusation is a confession. From indoctrination to discrimination, this "accusation in a mirror" is a calculated strategy, and the objective is precisely what they pretend to be fighting against. We have to recognize the accusations as admissions, declarations of deadly serious intentions. 

Resisting the authoritarian attack on teachers and schooling can not be simply "No we're not" and "That's ridiculous" or  “I do want to stress that no union dues are used for political activities.” This defensive posture limits the discourse and legitimizes the attacks. 

It's crucial that we avoid regarding our enemies as foolish or unhinged, and we have to push pack against those of us who describe them that way. To think of them as merely clowns doing anything they can to hold on to their circus jobs, to fail to take them seriously, would be a big mistake. Huge.


You might say most people aren't paying attention and don't give a shit. You might say most people don't support what DeSantis is doing. You might say it's a small, loud minority, and you may be right. 

It might not be a majority voting for monsters who hate the "right" people and want to hurt them. Maybe lots of people aren't for racists and fascists just because of their racism and fascism. Maybe lots of people vote for the bad guys because of taxes or regulations, or just because the bad guys act tough. 

But it doesn't take a majority. All it takes is enough true believers and enough people who don't give a shit.

Next time we'll take a look at the wizards behind the curtain and where this all ends unless we give a shit. 

Update: It's getting worse. 


Do not imagine that their proposals are too evil or foolish or absurd to become real. This is not a drill. It can happen here. It already is.

Next up: What's next?    





at No comments:

Monday, February 27, 2023

Don't believe everything you read in the papers.

The L.A. Times is at it again.


The Times has a well-known history of opposing unions, and not just for their own reporters. You might have thought things were getting better. Not necessarily. 

On the first page of the California section in today's print edition you will find this headline: "Powerful L.A. teachers union to elect leaders." Predictably, the online headline is "What an off-the-radar teachers union election means for the education of L.A. children." That way, the union can be scary in two ways: both domineering and sneaky.

Under both headlines, however, is a first sentence that is not accurate and seems to be a lede manufactured for effect:

"When L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho wanted to extend the academic year, the teachers union stopped him."

In an otherwise generally even-handed article, a couple of things stand out. First, that lede. "[S]topped him"? This is from Mr. Blume in December: "Thousands of L.A. students show up for school on first day of winter break."

How can both be true? I don't speak for the union, but my understanding is that UTLA forced the district to adhere to the law and bargain. One of the union's objections was always that the acceleration days were an inefficient use of resources, and this article from January seems to confirm--"At $611 a day per student, some question if L.A. schools’ extra learning days are worth it." 

The union was right. But instead of clumsy staffing efforts and poor planning, the six-hundred-dollar-a-day article goes on to blame teachers for not promoting the boondoggle they warned against from the beginning. Phooey.

Second, the money quote from Carvalho fanboy and ubiquitous media source Pedro Noguera, dean of the USC Rossier School of Education: 

“The real question for the union, regardless of who’s running it is: Is what’s good for the union, in terms of what they’re advocating, also good for the students?”

A really good question, if you were in thrall to the multitudinous school choice anti-union advocacy groups that have popped up like poison mushrooms in the last twenty years. Groups like the California Policy Center, which is used as a source in the article, with a link. Noguera's quote comes distressingly close to the standard anti-union pro-school-choice talking point: unions are good for teachers, bad for students. 

  • Note: From my silo I had no inkling as to the hostility of the terrain out there. For this post I just googled "teachers unions" and the first hundred bazillion results were bs hit pieces from advocacy groups (don't call them think tanks) like Cato and Heritage. The California Policy Center even showed up in the "People also ask" rich snippet (just learned that one) answering questions like "why are unions bad for students" with predictably venomous responses. In addition to wondering how this particular ideological viewpoint manages to dominate the search results, I also have a massively heightened respect for teachers and scholars who write in the school choice space and who are subjected to an astonishing level of hostility and personal attacks. And the invective is boring. Guys, get some new talking points, will ya? Time for a new song.

Third, as always, there's the issue of who gets interviewed and how their comments get reported. An example is a pair of back-to-back paragraphs with "care to comment" quotes from parents, one from a supporter of the union's platform because, as Blume paraphrases, "it was developed in collaboration with parents and community members," the other critical, saying "'The biggest thing the union is not doing is taking the parents' into account.'" 

One would think that whether or not UTLA is collaborating effectively with parents is an important piece of where this conflict is going, but there is no context and no follow-up questioning that might provide some. Why do these parents have such divergent perceptions of their experience with the union? This kind of reporting leaves the impression that public opinion is split on the union's actions, but without doing the work of finding out if that's true. 

Even more important, the first parent says, "It has everything our children need: small class sizes, nurses, counselors, green spaces and so much more" while the other parent makes no comment on the actual issues involved. Does the second parent disagree with the union on the issues? Does that parent even know the issues? If not, why not? Are they biased? Has UTLA done a crappy job of outreach?

We don't know because the questions were never asked (or the answers were not included). Instead we get drivel from anti-union, pro-competition reformster Mike Antonucci who is, according to Blume, "a professional tracker of unions and a critic." I'll say. Antonucci is a long-time anti-union campaigner  and writes regularly for The 74,  "a nonprofit news website that focuses on and supports school-choice issues in the United States," where he periodically dances on the graves of teachers unions.

Antonucci is also the director of something called the Education Intelligence Agency "which specializes in education labor issues" according to the reformster website Education Next, where he is also listed as an author. He writes a blog called "Intercepts" where he gets to write about "The Largest Teachers Union Embezzlements of All Time" and take his snark out for a walk occasionally. 

The progressive nonprofit watchdog Center for Media and Democracy's SourceWatch describes Education Next as "a propaganda outlet for corporate education reform policies." You know who else is very popular at Education Next? Alberto Carvalho.

No wonder Antonucci gets to weigh in on the upcoming UTLA elections. It pays to have powerful friends. In any event, quoting Antonucci and identifying him as a "professional tracker of unions" and "critic" doesn't begin to tell the whole story, as Blume surely knows.

Almost done, but I have to say something about how strangely the article ends. After over forty paragraphs we get to the very last one which seems unconnected not only to the previous paragraph, but to any of the previous paragraphs. It just drops out of nowhere and consists of exactly one sentence--on how much the union president job pays!

The job of union president pays just over $121,000 a year, according to the most recent federal tax disclosures, which are for 2020.

What?? Not mentioned is the fact that the union's counterpart, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, comes in at $440,000 a year for four years, plus $50,000 a year to his retirement, plus he got fifty grand to move from Miami-Dade. We know Howard Blume knows this, because he reported it. The Super also gets a car and driver (is this you?), his own security, and the usual health insurance and benefits including vacation and sick pay.

Nice work if you can get it. 

To review: 

  • Watch the headline and lede. Lots of people don't read beyond them and think they honestly represent the substance of the articles. 
  • Watch the language used for framing the story. Look for talking points and slogans presented by the reporter as neutral or objective.
  • Watch who gets interviewed, and how their comments are presented. Sometimes you have to look them up, because sometimes the reporter won't tell you.

To my eyes, Blume has gotten better at this, but the long reach of Harrison Gray Otis remains potent. 

It will be interesting to keep an eye on the Times over the next few months as the conflict with UTLA evolves to see if they put a thumb on the scales of negotiations.



at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)