A few days back I got use an old skill that I thought might have been lost forever. In my new semi-retired state I have left behind many of the day-to-day techniques that had become second nature over the last few decades. But as I was sitting in the cafeteria at the elementary school where I spend four afternoons a week corralling miscreants and practicing educational psychology, I happened to notice that one little boy, two rows away from me, was having issues.

As a professional educator when faced with a roomful of adolescents I habitually scan the enclosed area looking for behavioral malfeasance wherever it may occur and upon encountering it I have no choice but to act. After so many years it is automatic. And it is a talent or possibly a bad habit, that sometimes makes me unpopular at venues like Chuckie Cheese and Toys R Us. Mea culpa, but there is nothing I can do to prevent my interference, for a career teacher  it’s like breathing.

So it was when I saw two children taking another boy’s lunch bag in tag-team tandem just to torment him, and in spite of the fact of my being two rows away in a massive, very loud, high-ceilinged room, I clearly heard him say, “Stop it!” I had to respond. I decided to call up the old skill and put it to use.

I stood and taking one step towards them, said, “Did you hear him?” using my TEACHER VOICE.

I was rewarded with immediate and absolute silence falling upon the hundred or so formerly voluble progeny. The two tormentors in question turned to look towards me immediately and meekly nodding as the smiles left their faces, they handed the lunch bag back. Somewhere from the other end of the room, amid the surprised hush I heard a small voice say “Who? Me, teacher?”

Satisfied I had made my point, I sat back down and slowly conversation resumed and eventually regained its former decibel level. But the two chastised 8 year olds stayed quiet and minded their P and Qs for the remainder of lunch.

The boy who I had interceded for looked at me and mouthed “Thanks” and I nodded. A female colleague moved closer and said, “Well that was impressive, I wish I could call up that deep voice.”

“Yeah I replied,” finally smiling, “I guess I still have it.”

Teacher voice is a necessary skill for all who seek to instruct children, or teach anyone, for that matter. Every good teacher has one and it is not simply an issue of volume or tenor. It is an attitude that comes through their words and says, “The nonsense is over! I am serious and you don’t want to pursue this behavior any further.” While I employ my “basso profundo” some teachers rely on an even quieter than normal voice to effectively get their point across. As a teacher you use whatever works best for you.

Sometimes I wish I could make my writing echo with my ‘teacher voice’. While reading Joy Resmovits’ recent article about charter schools 1) I had one of those moments. The premise of her article is that despite the fact that charter schools are demonstrably no more effective than public schools 2) some states are rushing pellmell to encourage still more charter school development at the expense of public school.

If I could just stand and say in a clear ‘teacher voice’ that would be heard by all rank and file: “Stop fooling around and get busy working to save public education in the United States! It’s critically important to our collective futures.” I would. All the rancor and greed would dissolve; the politicians posturing to control something they do not understand would stop; the would-be entrepreneurs seeking to recreate public education as a growth industry would shrivel in their seats nodding in temerity and from somewhere a small voice would say, “Who? Me, teacher?”

Yes, all of you.

1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/14/charter-schools-growth_n_2125286.html

2) http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG869.pdf

One morning I was watching MSNBC, (Yes, I know, but baseball season is over for Cubs fans and the Bears play only once a week.) and I heard Joy Reid, one of the panelists on “NOW” with Alex Wagner, voice very succinctly the core issues currently impacting public education. To paraphrase, Ms Reid said that there were two key problems that our legislators are struggling with. First, they have realized that they don’t have to provide public funds for education. Instead of that they can privatize it through the use of vouchers and charter schools. Second, some people want to have the freedom to teach to their agenda; instruct only what they see as the appropriate subjects and curriculum to be delivered to our students in schools.

Bravo Joy, that sums it up in a very neat little nutshell.

Now that we have identified the problems, the question is what should we do about them?

Let me take a stab at it.

The initial problem I see as symptomatic of our current fascination with our economic downturn. With unusual magnanimity, I am willing to give our lawmakers a pass on this, and not indict them as being enemies of education as a whole but simply misdirected in that they see an opportunity to save critical state funds. Unfortunately they have no sense of historical precedent or long view to the fate of our potential future. The reason education is public is so that everyone gets the same opportunity. It is supposed to be an equity issue. That of course never happens, but imagine how wide the disparity will be if providing education becomes a matter of profit line.

To privatize education is to widen the gap between the haves and have-nots and further erode our already rapidly diminishing middle class. Opportunities for children of various socio-economic classes will become even less available and we will lose the key element that we have always touted as the hallmark of the United States — that anyone can grow up to be anything they want; a Governor or even President.

It also represents a dangerous precedent for other social services, some of which are already crumbling. Just think of a world where all medical services are for profit, law enforcement for profit, fire safety for profit, highway construction and maintenance for profit.The list of services goes on and on. Making any of these available on a solely for-profit status is counter intuitive in concept and would be wildly irresponsible in actual practice.

There are places we can cut costs. Some I would look at are: subsidies for oil companies, farm subsidies for people not to grow crops, tax breaks for companies that are not located in the United States, higher taxes for conglomerates — companies that swallow up smaller competitors simply to corner their market share, that is an idea that may have reached its majority.

But cutting basic services for all would make government complicit in the crimes that brought us to our present financial crisis and it is not a solution.

Then there is the second issue raised by Ms. Reid — what I like to call interest-based curriculum. In my career as an educator I have worked closely with several religion based charter schools. One of them even offered me a full-time job which I politely declined. I was there as a coach for their chess teams. And I have to say the best bunch of young chess prodigies I ever coached was at one of these schools. Being there once a week for an hour or two gave me the opportunity to observe the schools closely and I saw that each appeared to be an excellent blend of secular and faith-based instruction.

Still I wouldn’t send my children there, no matter how good they were. I am of the belief that secular education and religious instruction should be kept totally separate. I made it a point to strenuously avoid this controversy in my classroom by always referring my students to their parents in any question that even remotely alluded to religious beliefs. While it wasn’t always easy  I felt it was an important distinction to maintain.

So how do we solve the problem of faith-based curriculum? That one is simple: We don’t.

This perceived problem, like voter fraud, is entirely a construct of those with political agendas. There has never been a time in the United States when a church based school could not exist. Most educational professionals have no problem with them existing. Nor do they take issue with academy style schools that seek to focus on achievement and specific foci such as math or science. The problem lies in the support they receive and the proliferation of less carefully wrought iterations of private schools that are masquerading as public school under the aegis provided by a legislature eager to get out of the business of educating the public.

Currently in Arizona a charter school need only have one certified teacher overseeing curriculum and does not have to follow the federal guidelines laid down by NCLB and ESEA. What’s more they are funded at a different rate with fewer restrictions as to how that money is used. 1) The use of the term, “charter school” in Arizona is so meaningless as to almost be humorous. The construct would be laughable were it not charged with such a critical issue as the education of our children.

Charter schools as supported by Arne Duncan, are schools first and businesses second, but that is not how they are manifesting themselves here in Arizona. As a point of fact in Chicago where Duncan hails from, all charter schools are part of the public school districts and subject to the same restrictions and guidelines. Were this situation true of Arizona I would immediately will withdraw any objections.

With the recent loss of revenue from the defeat of Proposition 204 finances will be further crippled in our state’s public schools and we can only hope that legislature of Arizona will recognize their inherent fiscal short-sightedness and restore funding for education before the effects become irreversible.

1) http://www.arizonaeducationnetwork.com/2011/06/az-achievement-profiles-show-top-schools-suffering-from-budget-cuts/

“Vulture capitalists?”

“The private equity guys and the hedge fund guys are circling public education.” Diane Ravitch 1).

I am not by nature, an alarmist. One reason I lasted so long as an educator is that I rarely react precipitously. I can, but I tend to wait, see what happens and reflect on what must be done before doing it. Usually I would offer my kudos to any other individual acting similarly. But in this instance the individuals I am looking at somewhat askance at are newly identified as such: corporations as people.

Private industry is watching public education right now, to see if there is an opportunity materializing right in front of their eyes. Stephanie Simon writing for Reuters and published in The Huffington Post discusses the reaction of many US companies to what they see as a financial frontier, freely open for further exploration and exploitation.

“Privatizing Public Schools: Big Firms Eyeing Profits From U.S. K-12 Market” 2) is a discussion of a potential burgeoning industry that could result in another source of record profits for someone. Simon points out correctly this is not a new phenomenon, the growth of for profit companies involved in public education has been steady over the last decade or more.

Simon states: “Big publishers such as Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have made hundreds of millions of dollars selling public school districts textbooks and standardized tests.” 2)

Those of us involved in the field can attest to the increasing number of offers for teachers to buy supplemental materials designed to improve instruction. Having reviewed many of the new and improved educational materials in my career I am of the opinion that most are representative of rediscovering the wheel, that is to say, they represent old techniques, repackaged and with a fresh coat of glossy paint.

By this I do not mean to imply they are of no worth, rather from what I can see they represent tried and true learning vehicles, useful but not unknown to the experienced educator. The problems arise as the expenses involved in order to purchase something that may already be available, or that can be replicated rather simply.

Conversely, I feel that much of the appropriate focus of education has been lost by looking in the wrong direction. We should not be examining the materials to see if they support our instruction until we know what skills we have to teach; we should focus on the student to understand what it is they need to learn. You don’t buy children clothes and shoes that are “one size fits all”.

The longer I taught the more I looked to old adoptions, materials that had been used and discarded, to find the tools that I needed to reach some of my students. My aim was not to fit the child to the curriculum but make the curriculum fit the child. We have lost the sense of this through our dependence upon time-lines and benchmarks. A benchmark is a goal, not a deadline. By focusing our efforts solely on product and ignoring process we lose the art and humanity of education.

And it is in this milieu my fears become emboldened and stalk boldly into the light to challenge me.

A tenant of the new Charter school movement is that teaching is facile and available to nearly everyone. Certified teachers are not necessary in this new profession because anyone can deliver the curriculum with a modicum of training and effort. This, as any good teacher knows is fallacious and dangerous on many levels but two of them intrude upon my professional sense of inner well-being most forcibly.

First, teaching is facile, and available to almost anyone but good teaching is not. A good teacher is an artist working in a human medium. It is not just hubris that empowers me to say this but rather observation and self awareness. It is because I see my own failings as a educator that I can recognize the concomitant instructional strengths of others. Are all teachers effective with all children? Of course not and that engenders my proposed corollary: our children as students have become more diverse in the skills and experiential characteristics over the last generation, just as our knowledge and technologies have broadened and deepened in their complexity.

The second fallacious and possibly injurious belief that arises out of the growth of Charter schools and their reliance on less well-trained professionals is that of a monetary focus. Many decry the supposed avarice of teachers, jealously guarding their tenured positions and generous salaries. Yet another danger implied in Simon’s article is clear. If teachers need not be trained, they do not need to be compensated for having acquired that training, therefore increased profits incurred by private schools serving as public education facilities will become available. Who will earn that wealth? Will it be passed on to schools as lowered costs for materials? I am not a “trickle down” proponent — to me that trickle has always appeared more as a wet spot on the ceiling indicating that the roof needs fixing. And believe me when I tell you I know how much a new roof will cost.

The pursuit of ‘for profit education’ is analogous to other formerly exclusively public service industries i.e. cable television, special deliveries, and the rapid growth of private prison facilities. Has the service improved? Expanded yes, but not necessarily improved, not unless you have the funding to afford those improvements. Follow the money, it still comes back to cost and profit.

Perhaps most insidious in my eyes is the lusting after the Special Education field:

SPECIAL ED AS A GROWTH MARKET
Another niche spotlighted at the private equity conference: special education. Mark Claypool, president of Educational Services of America, told the crowd his company has enjoyed three straight years of 15 percent to 20 percent growth as more and more school districts have hired him to run their special-needs programs. Autism in particular, he said, is a growth market, with school districts seeking better, cheaper ways to serve the growing number of students struggling with that disorder. 2)

Is this what our country has come to in its children’s education? Chortling over the wealth to be realized through the misfortune of others? Public education was established as a non-profit service industry for a reason. It needs to be one of the few sources of equitable treatment for all Americans and a consistent opportunity offered regardless of race, creed, culture or mental or physical limitations. Oh, and yes, regardless of wealth.

1) http://schoolingintheownershipsociety.blogspot.com/2012/08/hedg-fund-vultures-circling-public-ed.html

2) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/02/private-firms-eyeing-prof_n_1732856.html

United we bargain, divided we beg.

I have been a supporter of professional teacher associations my entire career as an educator: I was a member of the union the moment I walked into a classroom as a student teacher. Besides reading articles about education and educational practices I am also always interested in what is happening in the workplace.

Sean Cavanagh writing in EdWeek reports that Charter schools are seeing a significantly higher turnover than traditional public schools 1). Turnover in public schools is at 14% whereas the rate for charter schools is 25%.

There may be many factors which impact this disparity but a report by Teach Plus suggests several factors as being most often cited:

• Build a culture of “mutual feedback,” in which administrators not only allow offer guidance and instruction to teachers, but also accept it from the educators on staff. Doing so is likely to improve student achievement, the authors argue, and strengthen teachers’ belief in the school.
• Protect teachers’ time for teaching. Charters should be “vigilant” in protecting teachers’ planning time so they can improve their craft, and find creative ways to ease up on the other work they’re asked to do—like lunch duty and study hall. Reducing those non-academic burdens will help reduce burnout, the paper says.
• Create career pathways for teachers. Too few charter schools today offer any room for advancement, the paper says. And when they do give teachers leadership duties, it doesn’t come with relief from teaching duties, on their other end. Charter schools need to work harder to develop career ladders, based on what teachers say are the kinds of leadership roles they would want, the paper argues.
• Become more attuned to the personal needs of teachers. Charter schools’ schedules and expectations “can wear down even the most idealistic and energetic hires,” the paper says. Not only should teachers be adequately compensated, they should be allowed to have relatively flexible schedules, to help them keep up with responsibilities in their personal lives as they fulfill their on-the-job duties. The idea is to “create a culture of sustainability for teachers while maintaining high student achievement.” 2)

Looking at this list I notice that support and availability of all of these factors can be found one place that I know of — in my teacher association. Over the years I have participated in many forums and in-services sponsored by my association that seek to offer connections with other teachers in order to facilitate peer support and professional growth.

Our association recognizes that teachers put in a lot of their own time to be successful at their jobs. So one of the key features of our district consensus agreement has long been to ensure that all teachers have at least some time set aside every day for planning and collaboration.

While plans for advancement have been problematic in some areas, our association has also been very supportive in lobbying for recognition and compensation for teachers who seek to become better at their profession. Such things as national board certification and pursuit of advanced degrees have been key focal points in negotiations and discussions for the recruiting and retention of superior teachers.

Finally, here comes that old bugaboo raising its head. Paying teachers more money in order to have them stay. What then is “adequate compensation”? The study has shown that Charter schools may not be offering enough in the way of a sufficient salaries calculated to make their teachers want to remain in the education field. That means that one quarter of the teachers that have become part of their system and philosophy leave teaching forcing them to find and integrate new staff continually.

Teacher associations help ameliorate the negative factors in the current educational environment.

Having been on numerous bargaining teams in two different school districts I have seen the process first hand. I am very familiar with what our associations do to benefit not only our members but non-members and subsequently our schools.

What does the teacher association bargain for? Number one is salary, number two are benefits. Why do they bargain for these things first? Because as any teacher will tell you our working conditions are our student’s learning environments. It is intuitively obvious that constant turnover in the field of education is not a good thing. For the most part teachers, like any other professional, perform better at teaching as they continue to do it and amass experience. Also they are more likely to work to become better in their field of endeavor when they feel valued as professionals.

In my opinion, all the points cited in the Teach Plus report point to unionization as the right thing for Charter school teachers. The more they are recognized as professionals the better off they will be and concomitantly the likelihood of their remaining in the profession also increases proportionally.

Yes, I am a union shill, I readily admit it. But I have a good reason. In supporting Charter school teachers becoming recognized as teacher association members I am also supporting the profession I have devoted 33 years of my life to. It is in the best interest of education for all public school teachers to be the best trained, most committed and fully compensated individuals that they can be. And retaining trained, experienced teachers is in the best interests of our children.

1) http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/charterschoice/2012/06/tacking_teacher_turnover_at_charter_schools.html

2) http://www.teachplus.org/uploads/Documents/1340224253_WhyAreMyTeachersLeaving062012.pdf

As you probably know by now, if you have been following my OpEds (again, fawningly, I say “Thank you!”), I read a lot. I make it a habit to survey as many articles and blogs in re educational issues each week as possible. In scanning the updates a report by the Huffington Post caught my eye today.

“Charter Schools Fall Short On Students With Disabilities” was the headline. 1) The author Joy Resmovits was reporting on a meeting in Minneapolis that brought together many diverse people who were celebrating the charter school movement’s 20 year anniversary. She cites some interesting data.

A recent study by the Government Accountability Office (GAC) has found that charter schools do not enroll special needs students at the same rate as public schools. 2) This is not news to teachers in the public sector, the report only serves to quantify the discrepancy. Overall the report says, charter schools enroll exceptional education students at 8% while exceptional educational students in public schools represent 11% of their populations.

Exceptional education as defined in our district includes both what has been known as Special Education and Gifted Education. If you google (when exactly did that become a verb? How does one conjugate ‘to google’?) ‘exceptional education’ you will get citations for both. I am of the opinion that Ms. Resmovits’ article refers mostly to those students with developmental delays or disabilities. I digress, there is a much bigger problem here.

The government report does not fully address the issue. In the last school year there were several students attending charter schools who accessed services from my own school. Our psychologist was responsible, upon request, for evaluations of charter school students if they lived in our school’s enrollment area. Other services were also provided by our public school district to charter school students as needed.

I am not against this. Also I see nothing wrong with the fact that charter schools are less likely to take special needs students than public schools even though by law they are supposed to take everyone.

Simply stated, charter schools do not have the base of resources that public schools have. Certain children require specific classrooms, ongoing therapy and consistent evaluation beyond the normal curriculum in order to be successful. Only our public schools have all these resources available, as they must by law. Charter schools are able to access those resources but maintenance of all the necessary specialists, resources and materials adequate to accommodate each student would be a daunting task for any charter school system, no matter how competent they are as an educational institution.

Think of that the next time you want to rail against the waste of resources in public schools. Public schools are maintained so that no matter who walks through the door they can be educated to the best of their abilities. Public schools do not cull out students who are unable to maintain normal progress, they do not refuse to serve the specific needs of any student and they do not call upon some other agency to provide the educational services that any single child might require.

Public schools take everyone, and they educate them. If I was a parent of a child with special needs for their educational growth, I would want my child to be in the best possible learning environment.

I am not an apologist. Is there waste in the public schools system? Of course there is! Way too much of it, I might add. But is there waste in our federal government, our state legislature, Tucson City Parks and Recreation, Mr. Kim’s JerryBob restaurant or my grandson’s breakfast plate this morning? Unfortunately, yes, there is. But that inherent waste does not imply that any of these institutions should cease to be supported. I will give my grandson breakfast again tomorrow no matter how much he leaves behind today.

There is waste all around us and we should be trying to limit waste of valuable resources. But our children are our MOST valuable resource and they should not be short-changed because we are concerned we might waste money. It is money. I will balance the future of my children and grandchildren against the monetary cost incurred by providing the best education possible, any day of the week.

In fact, let’s do that.

1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/19/charter-schools-disabilities-_n_1610744.html
2) http://www.scribd.com/doc/97619872/Charter-School-SWD-Highlights-June-2012

I tell stories. I have been known as a professional storyteller for nearly thirty years now. It is not a big money maker, I do it because I like to do it. It works well with my other two professional endeavors: education and archaeology. Now, with my aspirations to write . . .

Let me tell you a story.

Long ago, or maybe not so long ago, there was a land where the leaders decided they wanted to ensure their continued success and ability to lord over their state. They conceived a magnificent (in their minds) plan.

It began by cutting funding to education.

Then they greatly assisted the development of a private alternative to public education. They offered incentives for people to leave the public schools which due to the cuts were laboring under severe financial and programmatic restrictions. These same restrictions were not extended into the private sector.

They made available new rules that allowed people to efficiently leave the struggling public schools. You would have to admire the chutzpah of a group of individuals that significantly underfund education in their state and then offer an ‘out’ to people who are not satisfied with the numbers in the classes to go to a private provider for the service. It was almost as if they had a vested interest in the private schools and felt that the public schools existed for the poor and special needs students alone.

In such a land there could develop a view of public school; one that says it is adequate for those who can’t do any better but they (you know who ‘they’ are) wouldn’t want to be seen there. Besides if education can be remade as a money making venture for those individuals who support their agenda; you talk about a win-win opportunity!

In the meantime they launched diversionary attacks. Attacks on the professional educational associations and others on the public school curriculum.

Attacking teacher associations served the two-fold purpose of weakening the structure of such organizations, damaging their ability to bargain for their members, thereby decreasing the amount of money paid out and the attack significantly lessened the possibility that there would be outrage over their actions as that same association was one of their strongest political opponents.

Attacking curriculum made the public schools appear inadequate and mismanaged; if not dangerous and it decreased the public confidence in that organization which also resulted in attention being focused away from the leaders’ true plan.

What was that plan? Free public education had long been a hallmark of this land, indeed it was one of the things that strengthened the populace as a whole by offering an equal opportunity to all regardless of race, creed or financial status.

Destroying such an institution would not be easy. But in doing so, a small group could better control who had the real knowledge, power and wealth. Class could more clearly defined and mobility carefully orchestrated and rigidly stratified. It would shift the focus of the society from a large prosperous middle class to a smaller, more powerful upper class and a large mass of less educated poor.

This was their plan.

I’m glad this is just a story.