Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
teachers
Los Angeles Leads the Way on Data-Driven Reform With Teacher Scores
010 months ago
Move over, D.C. Watch out, Newark. Los Angeles has taken center stage in the national education reform debate. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Unified School District released its controversial “value-added” measurements of teachers’ performance. The data was aggregated to show whole schools’ performance; individual teachers will receive their own scores confidentially next month. It’s the first step in several aggressive school reforms planned for the district, which was spurred to release the school-level data after the Los Angeles Times published the scores for 6,000 individual teachers, alongside their names, last year.
The scores are now available for math and reading in elementary and middle schools and 9th grade reading on the LAUSD website. Value-added measurements track an individual teacher’s performance over time by following individual students’ progress through the years. Using a complicated algorithm, teachers are evaluated based on students’ improvement on standardized tests. Supporters hail value-added measurements as reliable teacher evaluations because they compare students to themselves, rather than each other, and thus theoretically control for poverty, race and English proficiency, which affect kids’ standardized test scores.
School districts are increasingly considering the evaluation method.
In Los Angeles, anticipation is building around the district’s plan to confidentially inform its teachers of their own value-added scores next month. The city’s teachers union has opposed the system and the release of the data, arguing that the numbers will be used punitively instead of constructively.
These high-profile moves are part of Los Angeles’ march toward an aggressive brand of market-driven school reform that is sweeping across the country. The policies that are being adopted reflect a popular idea that individual teachers are the decisive factors in a student’s education, and therefore the prime culprits in the failing U.S. school system. What’s needed, school reformers argue, is a system that demands accountability from teachers by rewarding those who can raise student test scores and punishing and eventually firing teachers who can’t.
The Obama administration has latched onto this narrative–Education Secretary Arne Duncan backed the Los Angeles Times’ decision to publicly release the teacher data last year–and has pushed policies that tie teachers’ jobs to their students’ improving test scores. Schools that don’t improve their test scores adequately get shut down for dramatic overhaul. Charter schools are invited to take over some schools, while others get split up and, in one of the Obama administration’s more drastic overhaul options, a school’s entire faculty and staff are fired en masse, and no more than half may return.
Critics argue that the singular focus on standardized testing, and the faith in test scores as an accurate measurement of student learning and teacher performance, are distracting educators from the actual work of educating kids. They argue, too, that such reforms ignore the many other structural forces that influence a child’s educational opportunities.
Los Angeles is pushing aside those criticisms for now. Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is set to focus on education in his State of the City address today. Villaraigosa, who supports the Obama brand of school reform, has frequently criticized the city’s teachers’ union for being the “one unwavering roadblock to reform.” Villaraigosa is expected to make education reform a top priority before he leaves office in 2013. With this week’s release of Los Angeles schools’ value-added scores, he just got a head start.
Yale Cuts Teaching Program, Funds College for New Haven Kids
01 year ago
A week after announcing that it plans to fund an initiative to pay New Haven kids’ way to college, Yale is shutting down its urban education teacher training program.
The program opened in 2005 and trained 20 teachers, 14 of whom are still teaching in local schools, free of cost as long as they committed to teaching for two years in New Haven’s public schools. The intense program offered teacher training and mentorship, and lots of classroom experience for young teachers. Many saw it as an important avenue for Yale to support New Haven’s public education system.
Tara Stevens, a graduate of the Yale program who still teaches in local schools, had harsh words for the school. “Yale has made the decision to avoid getting down and dirty with the problem. Instead, the university had decided to throw money at it, as though New Haven schools were a charity just waiting for Yale’s benevolence,” she wrote in an op-ed, the New Haven Register reported. The school said it is shuttering the program because of low enrollment.
Meanwhile, Yale’s New Haven Promise Initiative was kicked off to great fanfare last week. The school has dedicated $4 million yearly through 2014 to pay for local kids’ undergrad education if they go to a state school, or $2,500 a year if they go to a private college. Yale’s endowment is $16.7 billion.
For many, the new program does little to assuage the contentious relationship between the elite Ivy League school and the surrounding town of New Haven. Yale’s student paper commented that the Promise Initiative will likely do little to actually bring local students to the school.
Is Arizona Targeting Teachers through Unfair English Standards?
01 year ago
The Department of Justice has launched another high-profile probe into Arizona–this time in its public schools. The civil rights question isn’t segregation, per se, but discrimination against teachers whose English doesn’t make the grade.
Arizona schools are becoming ground zero in the state’s anti-immigrant political storm. An untold number of children saw their education jeopardized as SB 1070 terrorized parents and in some cases, forced families to consider leaving the state altogether. Then in August, Latino kids in the remote Ajo Unified School District saw their schoolhouse gate turn into a border checkpoint, as Arizona schools chief Tom Horne tried to thwart unauthorized students who had allegedly crossed over from Mexico.
And now teachers have to look over their shoulders, too. In a supposed quality-control effort for English-language-learner (ELL) programs, the Arizona Republic reports, education authorities are pressuring districts to get rid of teachers deemed not proficient enough in English.
Arizona officials have disputed the Wall Street Journal‘s unflattering coverage of the policy in April, insisting that they’re merely trying to comply with standards under the No Child Left Behind Act.
The Justice Department inquiry focuses on whether Arizona is using “fluent English” as a pretext for discriminating against educators who aren’t native speakers or simply speak with an accent. The probe relates to a wider debate about who gives and receives ELL instruction, and the state’s obligation to educate immigrant children.
In the background is a tense legal battle of Miriam Flores v. State of Arizona, which centers on whether the state’s ELL programs are effective and compliant with students’ civil rights. The controversy escalated in 2000, with a state referendum mandating that schools implement “English-only” instruction rather than bilingual curricula.
As with many aspects of No Child Left Behind, the squishiness of the standard invites political manipulation. The “fluency” question invokes an old debate over the politics of dealing with linguistic diversity in the classroom, whether in the form of slang or an accent.
Horne’s defense of the policy sounds sensible. “This is common sense,” he told the Republic. “If you want to teach math, you need to know math. If you want to teach English, you need to be fluent in English.”
But just outside that ELL classroom, clouds of anti-immigrant hatred are thickening in the political arena. While police prepare to escalate the crackdown on undocumented immigrants, Gov. Jan Brewer–who appeared rather linguistically challenged herself at a recent televised debate–has enacted a bill to bar schools from teaching ethnic studies, which was widely condemned as a racist attack on progressive education.
In this context, Horne does seem to know his math: each calculated strike against cultural inclusion in public schools adds to Arizona’s expanding right-wing agenda.
Louisiana’s Trafficked Filipino Teachers Take Recruiter to Court
01 year ago
Universal Placement International Inc. defrauded and illegally trafficked 350 teachers from the Philippines to teach in Louisiana public schools since 2007, says a new class action lawsuit filed in federal court last week by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the labor union American Federation of Teachers.
According to the lawsuit, UPI and a partner company in the Philippines set up illegal contracts and charged exorbitant fees for teachers to come to the U.S. on H-1B visas. Navarro and her accomplices promised teachers $40,000 salaries, and successfully got people to sell property, raid their savings and go into massive debt to sign onto her scheme. Teachers say that they were forced to pay $16,000 up front to even leave the Philippines, the equivalent of three years of income in that country.
Once in the U.S. they endured shoddy housing and intimidation, and were threatened with deportation if they ever spoke up. Teachers were forced to give 10 percent of their wages for their first two years of employment, which is against the law in Louisiana. Recruiting agencies are allowed to skim workers’ wages for one year.
Business Week reports that the lawsuit also names the East Baton Rouge Public School System and other school districts in California as cooperative parties to the exploitation. According to the SPLC, UPI’s owner Lourdes Navarro was convicted of ripping off the MediCal program in California to the tune of $1 million. She served a year in jail in Southern California, but turned up in New Jersey in 2003, where she pleaded guilty to money laundering.
Predictably, local teachers were not been happy to find out they’d been passed over for recruits from overseas. American teacher unions have been staunch supporters of the exploited teachers. At AFT’s annual gathering in Seattle this year, the Filipino teachers were honored for their fight for justice.
France Castro, the secretary general of the Manila-based Alliance of Concerned Teachers, emphasized the globalized nature of this latest labor exploitation. “It is due to the lack of adequate compensation that our teachers are being forced to leave our country to teach in classrooms in a foreign land,” Castro told Filipino outlet ABSCBNNews.com.
“There is also a shortage of teachers here in the Philippines, and yet our teachers would choose to go to different countries for decent wages, even if it means being exploited by greedy placement agencies.”
Teachers have been maintaining a blog since 2008 documenting their struggle to bring Navarro to justice. After the lawsuit was filed, bloggers posted a new missive addressing Navarro directly:
Well, you have underestimated us. You have underestimated the power of our unity. You have underestimated the strength of our resolve to get justice. You have underestimated the depth of our determination to bring a stop to your oppressive schemes.
Senate Passes $10 Billion Teachers’ Fund
01 year ago
The money won’t last long, but it’s still something. Today the Senate passed a last-minute $26 billion aid package for ailing states crippled by the recession. In it was a $10 billion fund to help save more than 100,000 public school teachers and school support staff positions this fall. The AP reports the other $16 billion will be sent to bolster Medicaid.
Many school districts have had to already make contingency arrangements for this fall. Mass layoffs were announced months ago, but some school districts have even been forced to cut out instructional days–San Francisco school kids will get four fewer school days than this year. Other strapped school districts have moved to four-day school weeks next year.
All told, the $10 billion could help states rehire hundreds of thousands of public employees, including police officers and firefighters. An earlier version of the $10 billion fund was cut out of a war-spending bill after President Obama threatened to veto it because it would have taken money out of Obama’s education reform programs. That fight pitted school districts’ short-term emergency needs against Obama’s long-term education reform initiatives like Race to the Top.
War Spending Bill Won’t Pay for Teachers’ Jobs
01 year ago
Late Thursday night, the White House successfully intimidated the Senate into passing its war-spending bill without $10 billion for teachers’ jobs and other domestic spending that the House included weeks ago.
Part of the money inside the war-spending bill was meant to go to an emergency fund to stave off over 100,000 imminent teacher and school worker layoffs this coming fall. The resolution, introduced by Rep. David Obey from Wisconsin, would have also set aside an extra $5 million for Pell Grants, which are distributed to undergrads from low-income families. In order to pay for this $10 billion emergency fund, which itself was whittled down from an original $23 billion, Obey suggested shaving off a total of $800 million from some of President Obama’s pilot education reform initiatives like the competitive grants program Race to the Top, a charter school fund and a new program that ties teachers’ pay to their students’ performance.
Earlier this week, the possibility that the Senate would include the $60 billion in domestic spending for social programs seemed unlikely (“dead” was the actual word used by some education policy bloggers) after President Obama announced a veto threat for any program that touched his flagship education reform agenda and a suite of Democrats backed Obama against David Obey. Obama administration officials reiterated the threat again last week.
Except that Obama’s Race to the Top program was allocated $4.35 billion for this year alone, and got renewed again for 2011, even though it’s still got more than $3.6 billion in unused funds. In light of the numbers, dipping into Race to the Top’s coffers to pay for students to have teachers in their classrooms this fall seems like a relatively painless and logical step. The big picture remains that a last-ditch effort to save teacher jobs had to be shoved in at the last moment for a $33 billion supplemental war-spending bill to keep the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq going.
The jettisoned domestic spending package wasn’t all going to go to social programs. NPR reports that another $700 million that would have gone to bolster border security measures didn’t make the cut either. Unlike teachers jobs’ though, we can’t say Americans will notice the absence of that extra money at the already-flush and heavily militarized border.
The bill will now go back to the House, which will have just a few weeks to pass it before they go on August recess.
PHOTO: KANSAS CITY, MO – Students prepare to leave on school buses
from Westport High School on March 11, 2010 in Kansas City, Missouri.
The High School is among 29 in a district of 61 schools that will close
due to the new budget plan that is making the cuts to ward off
bankruptcy. (Photo by G. Newman Lowrance/Getty Images)
White House: Let Food Stamps Pay for Teacher Jobs
01 year ago
Rep. David Obey from Wisconsin, who’s been trying to create a $10 billion emergency fund to cover national education budget shortfalls and save more than 100,000 teachers’ jobs, opened up about the intraparty conflict his effort has sparked.
Obey spoke with the Fiscal Times last week, and shared the Obama administration’s suggestions for where to find money for teachers’ jobs:
Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change.
The whole fuss began on July 1, when Obey–who’s supposed to be taking a victory lap before he retires later this year–won a resolution on a war-spending bill that moved a total of $800 million away from well-funded Race to the Top and other White House reform programs to help save an estimated 100,000 teachers’ jobs this fall. The Obama administration, in a move of striking pettiness, responded with a veto threat for any bill that dared take money away from Race to the Top.
Race to the Top is an ongoing competitive grants program that hands out money to states that can prove they’re sufficiently committed to the Obama administration education reform agenda. The White House won $4.35 billion for the program’s pilot year and after one round with only two winning states (Delaware and Tennessee), it still has $3.6 billion in unused funds. And so the Obama administration’s whining seems terribly unnecessary–besides the fact that without teachers inside classrooms, there won’t be anyone to carry out the reforms the Obama administration is so intent on implementing.
While President Obama’s got the support of a pack of other Dems led by Sen. Evan Bayh, he might be sensing a shifting tone in the debate. Last week, he dispatched Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his director of the Domestic Policy Council, Melody Barnes, to speak to reporters about the current intra-party fuss. Both Duncan and Barnes were heartily supportive of the teachers’ fund, to a point.
“We don’t have to make a choice between reform and making sure that teachers will stay in the classroom,” Barnes said on a phone conference with press, adding that if funding for teachers’ jobs came at the expense of funding for Race to the Top, the charter school fund and other education reform initiatives, she and Duncan would recommend a veto.
David Dayen from Firedoglake discusses why the Obama administration can’t have it both ways:
Incidentally, increased class size, which comes with the firing of teachers, LOWERS THE AMOUNT OF MONEY states can be eligible for under the RTTT program. So denying the education jobs fund by vetoing the bill over a $500 million cut to RTTT (less than a 20% decrease) actually lowers the amount states can receive. It’s a cut EITHER WAY, and arguably a larger one if the education jobs money doesn’t go through.
Barnes and Duncan could not explain why a $3.8 billion dollar Race to the Top program would somehow be less successful than a $4.3 billion dollar program.
Education Week reports that Rep. David Obey helped set aside $800 million for the reauthorization of Race to the Top in 2011, and that bill passed a House appropriations subcommittee on Thursday. It’s a tad short of the $1.35 billion Obama requested for Race to the Top’s 2011 budget–and we’re likely to hear some fussing from them on the topic–but it’s a very mature gesture from Obey, who’s taken plenty of heat from the Obama administration.
He had plenty of other choice words for the administration in his Fiscal Times interview:
The secretary of Education is whining about the fact he only got 85 percent of the money he wanted …. So, when we needed money, we committed the cardinal sin of treating him like any other mere mortal. We were giving them over $10 billion in money to help keep teachers on the job, plus another $5 billion for Pell, so he was getting $15 billion for the programs he says he cares about, and it was costing him $500 million [in reductions to the Race to the Top program]. Now that’s a pretty damn good deal.
…
It blows my mind that the White House would even notice the fight [over Race to the Top]. I would have expected the president to say to the secretary, “look, you’re getting a good deal, for God’s sake, what this really does is guarantee that the rest of the money isn’t going to be touched.”
Apparently, the president did no such thing.
Photo: Creative Commons/talkradionews
Obama’s High-Stakes Teacher Bashing
01 year ago
It’s been a week since the House approved a funding measure pushed by Rep. David Obey to save teachers’ jobs by taking $500 million away from President Obama’s Race to the Top education reform initiative, and the chatter about it is yet to die down. Obey’s effort and the must-pass war spending bill to which it was attached have scooted along to the Senate, but Obama has already threatened to veto any bill that dares touch his signature education reform, setting up an uneasy conflict between congressional Democrats and the White House.
Here’s the big picture: the ongoing recession, the accumulated impact of chronic underfunding of public education and the competing priorities of two wars have taken their toll on schools. Back in April, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin pushed an emergency $23 billion proposal to save thousands of teachers’ jobs for the upcoming academic year. That went nowhere. So Rep. David Obey stripped it to a bare bones package and attached it to the House’s war spending bill.
The Obey package would provide $10 billion to an emergency fund to keep 140,000 teachers on schools’ payroll and set aside $5 billion for Pell Grants, which are federal grants for low-income undergrads.
Obey found the money by skimming a bit off from Race to the Top, which is a competitive grants program that awards cash to states adopting the Obama administration’s education reform agenda. He took another $300 million from a charter school fund and other Obama education initiatives. The $800 million package now awaits review by the Senate when legislators get back from summer break next week.
The hullaballoo Obey’s measure creates would be more understandable if Race to the Top weren’t already so well funded. Obey’s cuts are relative pennies to the initiative. It’s headed into a second round of awards–just two states made it through the first round–and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has still got $3.6 billion to work with, on a pilot program. Race to the Top has also already been promised $1 billion for next year.
The Obama administration has long fought to characterize the controversy surrounding its brand of education reform, of which Race to the Top has become the flagship program, as one between stubborn defenders of the “status quo”–teachers and the unions that represent them–and those courageous enough for change. And the administration, seemingly eager to make a fight out of Obey’s resolution, promptly issued a statement last week:
It would be short-sighted to weaken funding for these reforms just as they begin to show such promise. The administration urges the House to include education jobs funding in a version of H.R. 4899 that does not rescind education reform funding. If the final bill presented to the President includes cuts to education reforms, the President’s senior advisors would recommend a veto.
Why this openly confrontational stance? It’s just the wrong fight to have. Forget for a moment the fact that the reforms states are being forced to adopt as they compete for Race to the Top are built on a model of intense testing and privatization of schools. And put aside the fact that even Race to the Top’s champions hail it primarily as an attention-getter. The initiative has in fact received plenty of criticism from folks in Chicago, where Secretary of Education Arne Duncan tried many of these reforms before moving to DC, with little success to show for them.
We’re now used to seeing Obama’s willingness to openly take on not just teachers’ unions, but public school teachers everywhere. Obama’s education reform policies demand pay-for-performance programs that don’t encourage teachers so much as they punish those who don’t raise test scores. Under both Race to the Top and the proposed Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the re-re-named No Child Left Behind bill that’s up for renewal, teachers can be flat-out fired if their students don’t show test score improvements. At its core, these programs just end up blaming the country’s education woes on teachers, never mind the broader political and bureaucratic systems they work within.
What Obey’s doing is trying to make sure there are actually teachers available to implement the reforms Obama wants. Obey isn’t even anti-reform. He defended himself last week with what seems like common sense: “I would suggest there is nothing wrong with providing the secretary a modest amount of funds to promote educational change. God knows we need it. But to suggest we are being unduly harsh is a joke.”
Photo: Getty Images/Scott Olson