4 reasons educators must get in the game and fight ALEC

We mentioned some of the radical education policies ALEC was seeking to push in up coming legislative sessions, here are 4 reasons educators must get in the game and fight ALEC

1. ALEC puts the profits of corporations before the welfare of students. Virtual schools and for-profit charters do NOT do all that a neighborhood school can do—so why does its Virtual Public Schools Act insist those corporate ventures should receive the same public funding?
2. ALEC thinks its corporate members know better than your community how to run your schools. A common theme throughout ALEC education bills is to reduce local control of parents and democratically elected school boards.
3. ALEC would have you giving more standardized tests. When they say they want to” apply marketplace standards” to education, they mean they want to increase the reliance on standardized testing to judge student and teacher performance.
4. ALEC thinks corporations deserve “a voice and a vote” (their words) more than U.S. citizens do! Although it has disbanded its highly controversial Public Safety and Elections Task Force, the damage has been done: an estimated 5 million eligible voters will have a more difficult time exercising their right to vote in the 2012 election.

For more on how you can get invovled, you can go here.

Gross miscalculation

On his Sociological Eye on Education blog for the Hechinger Report, Aaron Pallas writes that in April 2011, Carolyn Abbott, who teaches mathematics to seventh- and eighth-graders at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted-and-talented school in Manhattan, received startling news. Her score on the NYC Department of Education's value-added measurement indicated only 32 percent of seventh-grade math teachers and 0 percent of eighth-grade math teachers scored worse than she. According to calculations, she was the worst eighth-grade math teacher in the city, where she has taught since 2007.

Here's the math: After a year in her classroom, her seventh-grade students scored at the 98th percentile of city students on the 2009 state test. As eighth-graders, they were predicted to score at the 97th percentile. Yet their actual performance was at the 89th percentile of students across the city, a shortfall -- 97th percentile to 89th percentile -- that placed Abbott near the rock bottom of 1,300 eighth-grade mathematics teachers. Anderson is an unusual school; the material on the state eighth-grade math exam is taught in the fifth or sixth grade. "I don't teach the curriculum they're being tested on," Abbott explained. "It feels like I'm being graded on somebody else's work." The math she teaches is more advanced, culminating in high-school level work and the New York State's Regents exam in Integrated Algebra. Of her students taking the Regents in January, all passed with flying colors, more than a third achieving a perfect score of 100.

This summer, the state will release a new iteration of the Teacher Data Reports. For Abbott, these will be a mere curiosity. She has decided to leave the classroom, and is entering the Ph.D. program in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall.

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To Sir: Where are you?

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2011 Population Survey indicates that men make up 18.3 percent of elementary and middle school teachers and 2.3 percent of preschool and kindergarten instructors, down from 2007 pre-recession proportions of 19.1 percent for grades 1 to 8, and 2.7 percent for preschool and kindergarten, reports Sarah Sparks in Education Week.

High school educators are more evenly divided: 42 percent in 2011 were men, down from 43.1 percent in 2007. The diminishing status of teachers generally, coupled with continuing sexism against men working with children, may be discouraging men from entering the field. Chanté Chambers, who recruits at historically black colleges and universities for Teach For America, sees the trend play out among high-achieving college students. Education's low status is "a major barrier" to bringing more men, particularly black men, into the field. "They're coming from communities that are not necessarily affluent, so it adds to pressure to be that breadwinner, to have financial stability," she explains.

According to Shaun Johnson, a former D.C. teacher and now a professor at Towson University, "Teacher-bashing is a new national pastime ... and [one] which you could argue is highly gendered. [Teaching's] status as a profession isn't going to improve in this climate; it's only going to get worse."

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High Stakes Testing Backlash

The backlash against high-stakes testing is growing. JTF recently signed the National Resolution on High-Stakes Testing, which simply states

WHEREAS, our nation's future well-being relies on a high-quality public education system that prepares all students for college, careers, citizenship and lifelong learning, and strengthens the nation's social and economic well-being; and

WHEREAS, our nation's school systems have been spending growing amounts of time, money and energy on high-stakes standardized testing, in which student performance on standardized tests is used to make major decisions affecting individual students, educators and schools; and

WHEREAS, the over-reliance on high-stakes standardized testing in state and federal accountability systems is undermining educational quality and equity in U.S. public schools by hampering educators' efforts to focus on the broad range of learning experiences that promote the innovation, creativity, problem solving, collaboration, communication, critical thinking and deep subject-matter knowledge that will allow students to thrive in a democracy and an increasingly global society and economy; and

WHEREAS, it is widely recognized that standardized testing is an inadequate and often unreliable measure of both student learning and educator effectiveness; and

WHEREAS, the over-emphasis on standardized testing has caused considerable collateral damage in too many schools, including narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, reducing love of learning, pushing students out of school, driving excellent teachers out of the profession, and undermining school climate; and

WHEREAS, high-stakes standardized testing has negative effects for students from all backgrounds, and especially for low-income students, English language learners, children of color, and those with disabilities; and WHEREAS, the culture and structure of the systems in which students learn must change in order to foster engaging school experiences that promote joy in learning, depth of thought and breadth of knowledge for students; therefore be it RESOLVED, that [your organization name] calls on the governor, state legislature and state education boards and administrators to reexamine public school accountability systems in this state, and to develop a system based on multiple forms of assessment which does not require extensive standardized testing, more accurately reflects the broad range of student learning, and is used to support students and improve schools; and RESOLVED, that join the Future calls on the U.S. Congress and Administration to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, currently known as the "No Child Left Behind Act," reduce the testing mandates, promote multiple forms of evidence of student learning and school quality in accountability, and not mandate any fixed role for the use of student test scores in evaluating educators.

We joined 290 other organizations and almost 8,000 individuals in doing so. This growing movement is starting to have an effect. CNN

Welcome to the world of high-stakes standardized testing.

“I find it the most absurd thing in the world. I don’t know anyone who thinks they’re valid,” said Principal Anna Allanbrook at Public School 146 in Brooklyn, New York. “So the morale is down because teachers are worried that people who don’t really know their work will make decisions about their jobs.”
[...]
Across the country, teachers, principals and parents are pushing back against the test results carrying so much weight. More than 1,400 New York principals signed onto a letter to the state education commissioner that said the tests are deeply flawed. The outgoing Education Commissioner in Texas called standardized testing “the heart of the vampire.” Jenny LaCoste-Caputo of the Texas Association of School Administrators said, “This one test has become the single measure for a student’s success, for a school’s success, and that’s what is absolutely wrong.”

The Wall Street Journal reports

The increasing role of standardized testing in U.S. classrooms is triggering pockets of rebellion across the country from school officials, teachers and parents who say the system is stifling teaching and learning.

The increasing role of standardized testing in classrooms is triggering pockets of rebellion across the U.S. from school officials, teachers and parents. Stephanie Banchero has details on The News Hub. Photo: Brandon Kruse for The Wall Street Journal.

In Texas, some 400 local school boards—more than one-third of the state's total—have adopted a resolution this year asking lawmakers to scale back testing. In Everett, Wash., more than 500 children skipped state exams in protest earlier this month. A national coalition of parents and civil-rights groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, signed a petition in April asking Congress to reduce federal testing mandates.

In recent weeks, the protest spread to Florida, where two school boards, including Palm Beach County, signed on to a petition similar to the one in Texas. A parent in a third, Broward County, on Tuesday formally requested that school officials support the movement.

The efforts are a response to the spread of mandatory testing in the past decade. Proponents say the exams are needed to ensure students are learning and teachers' effectiveness is measured. Critics say schools are spending disproportionate time and resources on the tests at the expense of more-creative learning. They also contend the results weigh too heavily in decisions on student advancement, teacher pay and the fate of schools judged to have failed.

"They've turned a generation of kids into test-taking machines who are lacking creative-thinking ability," said Debbie Shaw, whose two children attend Palm Beach schools. She said she intends to enroll her younger child in a private school next year because she is so angered by Florida's "insane" testing regime.

the reason this backlas is growing is in part because stories and experiences like this are becoming mainstream

Other than the pep rally, teachers spent the week prior to the testing in meetings being lectured on the importance of test security, the protocols that would be our bible for the next two weeks, and on just exactly what would happen to us if these rules were not followed. The plans outlined what would happen from the moment the students entered the classroom until the last test was signed back into our testing coordinator. We were instructed to go over the plans, ask any questions we had and be prepared in the weeks to come. Due to the fact that our school was under scrutiny for previous allegations of cheating, we were warned that any negligence in conforming our classrooms and ourselves to these guidelines would result in an investigation and strict consequences.

I planned lessons throughout the meetings and graded papers in the background, only contributing my thoughts in areas which I found to be egregiously unreasonable or unjust. For example, lined paper for scrap paper, smiling at students (this is what they say is “coaching”), and allowing students to stand and stretch during testing would absolutely not be tolerated. As I listened to these rules, I pictured my bubbly bunch of eight year olds' faces. Then, the real bomb was dropped: Absolutely no bathroom breaks during testing unless the child was showing physical signs of distress. In addition, we also needed to prevent multiple bathroom trips by determining how badly each child had to use the restroom. Well, any teacher knows that once one student has “an emergency,” they all have emergencies. How am I to be the judge of the content of each child's bladder? To this I was told it would be easier to deal with angry parents of a child who had wet themselves, than to have to explain the situation to the monitors from central offices.

I decided that I'd be escorted out by authorities before I let nervous eight year old test-takers wet themselves on my watch. Are we that afraid of losing our jobs that we relinquish our humanity? Are we that desperate to prove that we are not cheating on these McTests that we deny children their basic needs? This is the “pinnacle” of insanity. This is the “pinnacle” of what an era of high-stakes testing is doing to our children and to our educators.

As testing was underway I became more and more irritated with not only the rules, but the fact that teachers’ discretion was being undermined by outsiders claiming to be experts on data, but not on children. Who are these people moving chairs from place to place around my room to see my test administration from multiple angles? Why are these strangers writing pages of notes on the condition of my classroom and my position in the room? The thought crossed my mind of just throwing the pile of test booklets in the air and screaming of its insanity, but what good would that do? I wouldn’t be allowed to finish the year with my students who had to put their science projects on the back burner for the two-week testing period. I would never get to see how they turned out if I was punished for breaching test security. I had already been scolded for allowing children to read books after they finished the test, as well as for allowing them to go to the bathroom. I decided to not push any further.

After being stalked throughout the building for two weeks in order to ensure that I would not change any test answers and spied on from just beyond my classroom door, my anxiety and disgust became overwhelming. After being witness to little children crying with anxiety and acting out in resistance and being forced to sit for hours completing endless assessments that they would most likely never see the results of, my faith in public education was diminishing. Why are teachers subject to this level of disrespect and distrust? Why are students subject to this much of a loss of real learning time?

Every day, more and more evidence comes out that challenges the reliability and validity of test results and demonstrates the unfairness of using these results to evaluate teachers. But I will comply with the rules and regulations--if for nothing else than to see my students' science projects and to see how much more they will accomplish this year; I am committed to my students and their learning even as I am opposed to the insane high-stakes testing regime that has been imposed on them. I will not, however, allow my students or myself to be de-humanized in the process.

How much longer can we allow our schools to feed the high-stakes testing machine rather than feed students’ imperative to learn? How much longer can we let testing replace teaching and learning? And how much longer can we remain silent throughout it all?

Studies show unionized charters are desperately needed

Bill Sims, president and CEO of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools said, in defense of charter school teachers poor pay and conditions, "Charter school teachers often are making less than district teachers but because they tend to be smaller schools, with smaller classrooms, less bureaucracy, they officer[sic] a pay in 'psychic salary' that more often than not makes up the difference". If this is true, why do so many charter school teachers quit? Indeed, study after study has found that charter school teachers leave at alarming rates, with pay and poor conditions often cited as the main reason.

The Ohio Collaborative, an educational research group initiated by the Ohio Board of Regents and housed at Ohio State, produce a study in 2005 which found

Nearly half of the teachers in Ohio's charter schools quit their jobs each year, with the majority leaving teaching altogether, according to a new study.

From 2000 to 2003, between 44 and 52 percent of charter school teachers quit their positions each year. Few took other jobs in teaching.

In comparison, between 6 and 11 percent of teachers in traditional public schools left their positions during each of those years. Even in major urban, high poverty public schools, the teacher attrition rate was only between 9 and 19 percent.
[...]
The results showed many areas of concern, Opfer said.

For example, charter schools had an average of 30 pupils for each teacher in 2004, compared to 19 pupils per teacher in traditional public schools. The pupil-teacher ratio in charter schools increased significantly from 2003, when there were 24 pupils per teacher.

Class sizes that are almost twice the size of traditional schools puts lie to the claim by Bill Simms that charter teachers enjoy smaller class sizes. His entire defense of poor pay and conditions in charter schools is falling apart or looks absurd ('Psychic pay').

Other studies have found the same problems, time and time again in Charter schools. Poor pay and working conditions causing high rates of attrition - that is, high rates of charter school teachers quitting to find jobs more rewarding, both professionally and economically.

A 2007 study, titled "Teacher Attrition in Charter Schools", by The Great Lakes Center for Education Research & Practice, found

• The single background characteristic that strongly predicted teacher attrition was age: younger teachers in charter schools are more likely to leave than older teachers. No significant attrition differences appeared between males and females or for African-American teachers.
• Among teacher qualification variables, the best predictors were “years of experience” and “years at current school.” Teachers with limited experience were significantly more likely to leave their charter schools. (It is presumed that many of these inexperienced teachers moved to teaching jobs in other schools.).
• Certification was also significant. Attrition was higher for noncertified teachers and for teachers who were teaching outside their certification areas; this situation may be related to the No Child Left Behind act’s pressure for ensuring teaching staff meet its definition of “highly qualified.”
• Other strong and significant factors included teachers’ relative satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the school’s: 1) mission, 2) perceived ability to attain the mission, and 3) administration and governance. Generally, teachers who left were also routinely less satisfied with: curriculum and instruction; resources and facilities; and salary and benefits. It appeared that teachers who were not satisfied were leaving or were being asked to leave.

These findings prove that experience does matter, and so does education and certification - contrary to many claims made by corporate education reformers. This study made the following recommendations for improving this serious rate of attrition

• Efforts should be made to strengthen teachers’ sense of security as much as possible.
• Efforts should be made to increase teachers’ satisfaction with working conditions, salaries, benefits, administration, and governance.

Efforts that could easily be achieved by organizing charter school teachers and the subsequent use of collective bargaining.

The National Center of School Choice, at Vanderbilt University produced a study in 2010, again finding the same results, with the same set of problems

The rate that teachers leave the profession and move between schools is significantly higher in charter schools than in traditional public schools.

• Charter schools that are started from the ground up experience significantly more attrition and mobility than those converted from traditional public schools.
• Differences in teacher characteristics explain a large portion of the turnover gap among charter and traditional public school teachers.
• Dissatisfaction with working conditions is an important reason why charter school teachers are significantly more likely to switch schools or leave the profession.
• Involuntary attrition is significantly higher in charter schools.

Taken one by one - conversion schools, those that might have had some collective bargaining history, or in a handful of cases, still do, are less affected than start up schools where teachers can be treated as temporary help. Experience and certifications matter, so too does poor pay and working conditions offered by most charter schools, and employees have little or no job security and work at will.

These are all serious problem which can be resolved easily through collective bargaining. The studies results prove it

The odds that a teacher in a charter school will leave the profession are 230 percent greater than the odds that a teacher in a traditional public school in their state will do so.

In the charter schools, nearly a quarter of the teachers ended up leaving by the end of the school year, 14 percent of them leaving the field altogether and 11 percent transferring to another school.

By comparison, the average turnover rate in the regular public schools in the same states was around 14 percent. Half the departing teachers were leavers and half were switchers.

So when corporate education reformers, and charter school boosters like Terry Ryan at the Fordham Institute claim "unionized charters would be a setback for Ohio’s school improvement efforts", they need to go deeper than simple rhetoric and address these serious problems of massive teacher attrition at the schools they are promoting. Bill Simms, CEO of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, need to stop pretending charter schools are some great place for predominantly young, inexperienced, underpaid teachers to be working, and instead begin to formulate ways in which working conditions can be improved in order to attract and retain great teachers for charter students to benefit from.

OEA has it right, it's time to organize some charter schools and see what impact improved conditions has upon charter quality - this kind of experimentation after all is what charter schools were designed to test. They certainly weren't designed to maximize profits as some proponents, operators and authorizers have come to believe.

Charter teachers receive "psychic salary"

Ohio's largest professional teachers organization, OEA, at their recent spring representative assembly, overwhelmingly voted to allow for the organization of charter school teachers in Ohio. Unthinkable mere years ago, but after a long hard battle over collective bargaining rights, the teachers and education support professionals enshrined rhetoric into core belief and action. A belief that all employees have the right to representation and bargaining, even those who work in charter schools that OEA has long opposed.

The reaction from the charter school apologists has been predictable, but Bill Sims, president and CEO of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools had the best response

"Of course this is something that has always been possible, but I would say that it's easier said than done," he said in an interview. "Charter schools are smaller entities, they're more personalized, and teachers tend to feel more positively connected to management with defined grievance procedures and participation in the mission and strategic plan of the school.

"There tends to be more resistance or less interest in charter schools for this sort of thing. Charter school teachers often are making less than district teachers but because they tend to be smaller schools, with smaller classrooms, less bureaucracy, they officer[sic] a pay in 'psychic salary' that more often than not makes up the difference."

Psychic pay! Why would charter school teachers want to give up their low salaries and psychic pay for better working conditions, smaller class sizes, better benefits and equitable pay? Let's take a look at this so called "more personalized environment, where teachers tend to feel more positively connected to management", with this first person recount of working for White Hat management

With buildings being shut down and teachers being canned in droves across the state, White Hat seemed to be the only place hiring. I was brought on board as an academic adviser. It seemed like a pretty cool gig at the time; I would be helping students graduate, via phone and e-mail, from a cubicle farm in downtown Akron.

On my first day at OHDELA, I was shown to my cube, given a large gray binder, and ordered to copy my own training manual. One week later, promptly at 8 a.m., a huge pile of messy files and the educational fates of 150 students were handed down to me by four overworked and mentally scattered advisers. It was the beginning of the school year. Enrollment was picking up rapidly. The little online high school was approaching an enrollment of 1,500 kids -- with a staff of only 30 to 40 teachers and advisers to steer their education.
[…]
My job at Mr. Brennan's gerbil cage was contacting students and parents every two weeks, telemarketer-style, and attempting to hold kids accountable for their progress. More often than not, there was no progress at all for a variety of excuses -- valid and not -- concocted by students who seemed less interested in their educational well-being than I was. Faced with choosing between the importance of their education and the irresistible allure of the Xbox, the odds weren't good.

So every day at 8 a.m., I strapped into my headset and launched into my 30-plus Cheerleader/Bad Guy phone calls, for 11 bucks an hour with zero benefits.

Nothing says "personalized environment" like a 6 by 6 cubicle. But what of having "less bureaucracy" to make the day go faster and the work more rewarding? Back to our story

White Hat, meanwhile, seemed more preoccupied with charting spreadsheets, calculating endless employee performance measures, appeasing streams of irate mothers, and raking in cold, hard state cash.

Organizationally speaking, it was a nightmare on steroids. The place was built on a lopsided pyramid of spreadsheets, spreadsheets, and more spreadsheets. I was given the daily task of updating huge Excel workbooks with student data and test scores. Copies would circulate throughout the office, so that no two staff members had the same information about one student.

Every morning I arrived to stare eight more hours of drudgery in the face. It was one of those jobs that are traumatic to any creative, intelligent mind. I had to admit to myself that it really was nothing but a poorly run credit factory with killer marketing.

I've never witnessed lower morale at a workplace. Rumors circulated, cliques gossiped, managers took sides, and everyone had a cynical attitude toward the company. Many of the young, inexperienced teachers were hired straight out of college or after long bouts of trying to find "real teaching jobs." They became resigned to their roles as cubicle slaves, with no control over the material they "taught."

It does make you wonder if Bill Sims, president and CEO of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, has ever stepped foot in a charter school, or talked to someone who has worked there. But Mr. Simms wasn't the only apologist painting charter schools with the rosy brush. Fordham had an opinion piece titled "Why unionized charters would be a setback for Ohio’s school improvement efforts" that set up their argument against organizing charter schools by first erecting a straw-man

But, would unionized charter schools be good for students?

Successful charters work because they are flexible and constantly seek improvements to how they do things. They deploy funds, teachers, time, materials, and technology in different ways to impact student achievement. High-performing charter schools almost always display strong cultures, astute and driven leaders, dedicated teachers, coherent curricula, shared responsibility, and a sense of common purpose. Successful schools know their students and address their needs. In fact, one of the strongest arguments for charter schools is that they are expected to be different. Collective bargaining agreements put constraints on all these factors that lead to success and impede not only innovation but seek conformity across schools.

Successful charters are a rare breed in Ohio. The bottom 113 ranked schools in Ohio are all charters. Fordham themselves, in a preceding post titled "Accountability and perspective needed for drop-out recovery charters" acknowledge that charter quality is often very low and in desperate need of improvement and accountability.

No one is arguing that a charter school contract has to be identical, or as comprehensive as a traditional school's - in fact they are often quite different and more limited in nature. Opponents and proponents alike ought to read the entire Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) study on this matter.

Price examined nine charter schools unionized either by management design or by teacher vote. For comparison, he examined traditional district contracts and analyzed data from non-unionized charter schools as well. He found that the new contracts can be crafted in ways that respect the unique missions and priorities of charter schools, provide teachers with basic protections, and maintain organizational flexibility. However, while these new contracts innovate in many ways, they could go much further given the opportunity to create contracts from scratch.

That sure sounds a lot better than mystical "psychic pay", doesn't it?