Category: Education

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Domestic Policies Education News Politics Wisconsin Union Bashing

Great Teachers Make Great Schools

happy teacher and students standing in classroom holding books

Another school year. It’s my 32nd as a teacher and I can still say that I love what I’m doing and believe that I am contributing to the betterment of society. I just wish that at some point before I go to the Great Faculty Room in the Sky, you know, the one where the microwave works, the carpet doesn’t smell and the walls aren’t made of cinder block, I could feel that society’s attitudes about my work would improve and that the United States would value education as much as it does entertainment, sports and the stock market.

The public’s attitudes on education are on display in this year’s new PDK/Gallup Poll on the Public’s Attitude Toward the Public Schools, and the results are encouraging. Most Americans do not think that standardized tests should be used to evaluate teachers and indeed say that there are too many of these high-stakes tests being administered to children. Most people surveyed also don’t like the Common Core Education Standards, both because they are tied to the tests and because most people don’t think that comparing American students’ scores with other countries is a worthy endeavor.  But more important is the finding that most Americans, including a majority of Republicans, say that it’s important that the public schools are adequately funded. 

Which brings us to how important teachers are to the success of the system. You would think that this would be a given and, for the most part, parents in local communities support efforts to bring in excellent teachers and to keep them in their schools. When schools are not fully funded, though, the system begins to break down. In most parts of the American economy, consumers understand that you get what you pay for and that sometimes you need to economize and think short term because of family limitations, emergencies, or good old American low wages.

In education, though, the argument get mangled a bit. Much of the (incorrect) literature suggests that more money doesn’t necessarily translate into better schools. Politicians and a segment of the public like to lean on the idea that teachers don’t go into teaching for the money, using that argument for keeping pay low relative to teachers’ experience and education. They also say that they want the best and brightest to go into teaching,

The insulting thing about this argument is the assumption that the best and brightest are not in teaching to begin with and that we need to attract them to the field. That’s wrong. Most of America’s teachers are smart, engaging, sharp, inquisitive, analytical and effective at what they do. Teaching is an incredibly difficult job to do well and the expectation is that you will do well with each and every one of that year’s students. You want the best and brightest? You’re getting them. It’s now time to make sure that they get the resources and financial recognition they’ve earned. Other countries do it; it’s time we did it too.

What would help is untying education money from property taxes and finding a more secure, and less intrusive, funding source. My idea is for the Congress to impose a 1% tax on all corporate earnings and a 1% income tax increase on the top earners and earmark it specifically for education. After all, who benefits the most economically from America’s great schools? American businesses, that’s who, so it makes sense for the corporate sector to pay more for their lifeblood. This would take the pressure off of middle and working class Americans who struggle with high property taxes and a system of funding that tilts towards the wealthy communities that can support higher valuations.

As we know, poverty is the main cause of educational inequality in this country. If we don’t address it, then we will never solve the problems associated with fewer educational opportunities, fewer students going on to higher education and the wage gap that accompanies it.

What we also really need is for the best and brightest to go into politics and to be part of the solution, not the problem. Most of the Republican candidates favor vouchers, which the Gallup poll shows is not enthusiastically shared by the general public. Governors Christie and Walker are proudly running on their efforts to minimize teacher input regarding educational reforms and are blaming teachers for the economic problems in their states. Neither of them have said anything remotely positive about teaching and, at least in New Jersey, morale among the teachers is abysmally low.

Not that the Obama administration is shying away from standardized tests and No Child Left Behind. Although a major Democratic constituency favors lessening the impact of tests, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, with the president’s support, is still doggedly applying the law to the public schools. And supporting Charter Schools.

So what to do? Involve the teachers. Use their expertise. Include them in decision making at the local, state and national levels. Leverage their knowledge. It seems so simple, but for the better part of 20 years, teachers have been methodically excluded from the major educational decisions of the day. This simply doesn’t happen in other industries. Exclude doctors from health care decisions? Attorneys from legal reviews? Never. But somehow the not best and less bright politicians have decided that they know best when it comes to the schools and that teachers are shills for the National Education Association and are not to be trusted. It’s a terrible situation and is threatening to get worse.

Meanwhile, the nation’s teachers will continue to do their level best to educate all children across the country.

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Domestic Policies Education News Politics

Education Roars Back

It’s August and the Back to School sales are ramping up in earnest, at least here in the nor’east. The sales started in July for the more southerly US climes, but that’s because they’re already back in the classrooms. In any event, it’s time once again to be thinking about education, and the issue is now near the top in this presidential election.

One of the more popular articles making its way around electronica is this one  that essentially summarizes the findings of John Hattie, an educational researcher who’s written a slew of books on best practices. He suggests that achievement standards, focusing on smaller class sizes, and pouring more money into the educational system are not the answers and have little effect on student performance. He also questions school choice as a viable public policy.  Of course, politicians on the right and left will pick and choose what they want from his message, with Democrats wanting more money and Republicans wanting more accountability, as if the two were completely opposite.

Educational access, attainment and benefits have been tied to the relative wealth of families and communities for the better part of United States’ history, so it should be no surprise to anyone that we are presently confronted with a system that’s as fractured as our income gap. Schools in wealthy communities tend to perform better than those in less wealthy and poor communities and the willingness of politicians to spend money where it should be spent (key concept) lends itself to schools where teachers can teach and students have every opportunity to learn.

Most of the Republican candidates for president support the free-market, pro-corporate model for schools, and the results have been disappointing at best to demoralizing at worst. Governors Scott Walker (falling in the polls) and Chris Christie (can you fall below zero in you polls?), have done more to demonize public school teachers than the other candidates and promise to do the same to the rest of the country if they are elected. Jeb Bush supports the Common Core standards, which really isn’t going to endear him to any particularly large constituency, but he’s also against public unions. The other candidates want local and state standards, which have not worked in the past and will not help student performance in the future.

The Democrats want more money for universal pre-school and aid to schools in poor and depressed areas of the country. Hillary Clinton has also recently unveiled a higher education policy that focuses on student debt.  She would probably never get $350 billion over ten years from a Republican Congress, but her plan would put pressure on the right to relieve millions of students from crushing loans that are sapping their economic prospects. The Republican candidates have joined her in trying to address the debt issue, but right now the best we can say about them is that they’re market-oriented, including Marco Rubio’s plan to have wealthy investors essentially buy an interest in your future earnings in return for their investment in your education. I wonder if he’s also going to provide students with a free saddle so that your investor can sit on your back.

Given the years of blame and economic hardship that teachers have had to endure, it’s no wonder that there’s a shortage. And given the attitude that many national and state leaders have about teachers, it’s no wonder that qualified students are looking at other fields of endeavor.  The truth is that we pay a great deal of lip service to wanting a highly qualified, well-trained teaching staff at every school, but the best and brightest are not stupid; they see what’s going on in education and are increasingly turned off to it. And since we don’t have the best and brightest going into government, the solutions will be doubly difficult to come by.

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Domestic Policies Education Express Yourself News Politics Wisconsin Union Bashing

Education By Dummies

Politicians can talk all they want about how changes to the American education system such as the Common Core, new testing rubrics and teacher evaluation systems will vault us into the top tiers of learned nations over the next few years, but, really, that’s not going to happen if what’s happening in Arizona and other states doesn’t get fixed.

Consider:

At least 30 states spent less per student this school year than in the year before the economic downturn began, and 14 states, including Arizona, have cut per-pupil funding by more than 10 percent over that period.
The drop is not simply a reflection of state economies still struggling to recover. Experts say politics and policy have also played a role.
Of the seven states with the deepest cuts in education from kindergarten to 12th grade, six — Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Wisconsin — also cut income tax rates, leading to a series of vigorous protests and public disputes between lawmakers and educators that are still playing out.

The Great Recession was terrible, but that part about cutting taxes and school funding is reprehensible. There is simply no excuse to give money back to taxpayers when the schools have a library that nobody can use or that run out of supplies before the end of the school year.

But that’s not the only problem. Here in New Jersey, Governor Christie recently did an about-face and said that he no longer supports the Common Core Curriculum Standards but does support the PARCC tests that are based on…the Common Core. This neat bit of contradiction, endemic to Republican politicians, not only makes no sense; it invites testing students on skills and content that they will not learn in their classrooms. Couple this with the Governor’s previous bashing of teachers and their association, and his severe education budget cuts and you have the scary proposition of someone sitting in the Oval Office who supports testing, but not the people who will be delivering a curriculum that is yet to be determined.

Christie has good company in another soon-to-be Republican presidential candidate, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Not only did he and the GOP-led legislature end collective bargaining for public employees, now he’s proposing a bill that would significantly affect tenure in public colleges and universities. That law would repeal the idea of shared governance when it comes to tenure and is best explained this way:

Shared governance gives powers to faculty, staff and students over such matters as instruction, personnel matters and student services. The shared power is not the adversarial relationship many think of, Fair said. “It’s a conversation across the different bodies to reach consensus on what is best for the institution,” she said.

And while the employment protections conveyed by tenure can seem self-serving, Compas said, that is not what it is about.

“Tenure doesn’t protect anyone who breaks university rules or doesn’t do their job. Instead, it is a cornerstone of academic freedom,” he said. “It provides protection for faculty to challenge conventional notions and present ideas that often are unpopular,” said Compas, who has tenure.

What Walker wants to do is to take tenure decisions away from the shared model and transfer authority to a state body that is–surprise!–appointed by the governor. I’m guessing that the makeup of the body will be sharply different than the people making tenure decisions now. And I can see great mischief in how it will be applied should this bill pass. Which it most likely will.

These are but three examples of how terribly education policy is made and implemented in the United States. After 2016, it could get even worse.

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Domestic Policies Education News Politics

Christie: It’s Not My Fault. Elect Me President

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie looks on while giving his State of the State address in the assembly chamber in Trenton, New Jersey, January 8, 2013. Christie renewed his calls to the U.S. Congress on Tuesday to quickly pass the full $60.4 billion Superstorm Sandy relief package, saying victims in New Jersey had been short-changed. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS) - RTR3C83X
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie  REUTERS/Carlo Allegri (UNITED STATES – Tags: POLITICS) – RTR3C83X

It’s one thing when you have something to run on. It’s quite another when you have to run away from your record. That’s the position Governor Christie finds himself in on the eve of his long-awaited announcement that he will run for president. Most candidates have a signature issue or can point to improving conditions in their state. What can Christie run on?

  • There’s no New Jersey economic miracle.
  • His attorneys argued in court that the one significant legislative achievement of his term, a state workers pension and benefits reform bill, was, in fact, unconstitutional, which will require another round of pension cuts and significantly higher health care premiums for state workers.
  • Property taxes continue to rise.
  • Funding for education has been cut.
  • Businesses and the very wealthy continue to enjoy the governor’s protection from tax hikes while middle class workers have seen their wages stagnate to erode further.
  • He created an atmosphere of fear and contempt in his administration and hired aides who shared his vengeful attitude, which resulted in the Bridgegate scandal that is still rocking the Statehouse.

But you know what? None of this Governor Christie’s fault. How do I know? Because he said so.

On the economy, Christie is taking credit for slowly improving conditions in the state, where  unemployment still lags behind the national rate. What he isn’t saying is that job growth during his tenure is 48th nationally, ahead of only Mississippi and New Mexico. His reaction?

“We inherited a wrecked ship,” he said, “and we’ve now made it sea-worthy.”

Arguable, but the bigger issue is where the Governor is steering that ship. Right now it’s going in circles and is perilously close to the rocks. The truth is that after more than 5 years, Christie’s economic plan is dead in the water. The state budget chief said as much in 2013 and Christie mocked him as a fiscal Dr. Kevorkian. And thankfully, the Democratic Legislature killed his proposed tax cut. That really would have sunk the ship. Christie now wants to take his fiscal genius to a national level. For anybody making under $100,000, that would be real suicide.

His proposed national economic plan, just released, calls for the highest tax rate to be cut from 39.6% to 28%. That’s an enormous tax break for the wealthy that will redistribute more income to the upper class and require cuts to the programs that most Americans want and that many desperately need.

As for hiring the best and brightest for his administration, the governor is now saying that he can’t be held responsible for what his aides did on his behalf. Says he:

“I obviously spent time thinking about that, because it’s an obvious question,” the governor said. “But no, I really don’t think so. I think, unfortunately, there are going to be times when people that work for me do things that are completely out of character.”

“I’m accountable for what happened because I’m the governor,” he added. “But you can’t be responsible for the bad acts of some people who wind up in your employ.”

The buck, obviously, stops…there, but never here.

My Ouija Board just spelled out, “I am not a crook.”

Governor Christie has spent a good deal of time during his term in office criticizing people who don’t recognize that he’s telling us the truth on taxes, on pensions, on the role of government and, mostly, on being responsible for our future. His hypocrisy knows no bounds.

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Domestic Policies Education News Politics Wisconsin Union Bashing

Pensions in the Age of GOP Math

Things are getting a bit complicated in New Jersey for Governor Christie, and that’s having a major effect on when (and it will be when) he announces his bid for the presidency. Yes, he is waiting for the economy to improve and the George Washington Bridge scandal to go away, but now he’s added what could be a signature accomplishment for him to run on: another public employee pension reform bill. This time, however, he won’t have as many Democrats to help him.

Christie has been traveling the state telling some marvelous half-truths and outright lies about the history of governmental pension neglect since the 1990s. He’s even saying that the legislature is blocking pension funding when it’s actually the good governor who took out the full funding from the 2015 budget with a line-item veto. When the legislature then passed a bill to have the state pay quarterly payments, he vetoed it and the Republicans who supported it the first time around would not vote to override. At a legislative dinner in March, State Senator Joe Pennacchio (District 26) was asked why that happened. His answer: “Christie is going to run for president. We didn’t want to embarrass him.”

So much for fiscal responsibility.

Now comes word that State Senate President Stephen Sweeney is saying the the legislature will include a full pension payment in the 2016 budget, which starts on July 1. That battle will define the struggle for the next two months, but Christie will veto anything that even smells of a tax increase or else he’s going to be burnt toast in Iowa and South Carolina. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousand of public employees will have to sweat it out and worry that the pensions they were promised will not be paid in full, although they have made their payments reliably their whole careers.

But even if Christie doesn’t win the nomination, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who is now attracting gobs of Koch Brother money for his campaign, would be an even worse choice. He’s been able to do what Christie has not when it comes to public employees, and that is to strip them of their collective bargaining rights. Imagine the nightmare scenario of a President Walker with a Republican Congress slashing taxes for the wealthy and slashing public programs and benefits for the middle class. Never mind that the number of working people who qualify for public assistance has increased in the last 10 years. The GOP loves to blame those lazy burger-flipping door-greeters (because many have two jobs) for their own problems while catering to the upper crust.

Blaming public workers and the working poor for America’s fiscal problems has worked well for the GOP. It’s time to fight back.

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CCRAP! More Testing Ahead

If you’re a regular American, you know, like the kind of person Hillary Clinton is trying to appeal to, you probably think that the PARCC tests are over and that the education system has moved on.

Not so.

This week marks the return of the standardized tests that no one likes, and are based on the Common Core standards that are unpopular across the political spectrum. And since the federal government has given schools until early May to give the tests, schools across the country will be testing for the next four weeks. Never mind that there are precious few weeks of instruction left in the academic year, especially in the South, or that Advanced Placement tests are administered during the first two weeks of May. PARCC tests must be given and school districts must stop everything in order to meet the testing mandate.

The effects on schools have been profound. Students have missed, and will miss more academic classes, extra-help sessions, Advanced Placement test reviews, band practices and basic skills instruction. In most schools, the tests are taken in the library, which makes that resource unavailable for part or all of the school day. In other schools, the entire academic day stops for the tests and some districts have prohibited homework for the duration of the administration. This is not efficient education.

Meanwhile, in New Hampshire where the GOP had its first substantive discussions about presidential policy, Ted Cruz is promising to obliterate the Common Core, Chris Christie is blaming his predecessor for the standards, Bobby Jindal is running away from the standards despite  promoting them two years ago, and Jeb Bush, who supports the Common Core, is not mentioning that fact because the GOP base hates them. Hillary hasn’t said much, but she can bide her time and let the Republicans fight amongst themselves.

My sense is that the Common Core standards will survive because most educational publishers and programs, such as the AP, have modified their curricula to mirror the standards. In and of themselves, the standards are beneficial and having national benchmarks will allow us to compare our students across the United States and with students from other countries. State standards might reflect local priorities, but we live in a global world and economy. Students need to be proficient in specific content and academic skills and, quite honestly, not all states are proficient at delivering them.

In addition, not all states and localities can afford to implement programs that students need. Federal involvement in education is a point of contention in many areas, but without equality of resources we can’t have equality of outcomes. And that’s what we desperately need.

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Domestic Policies Education New Jersey

Pearson Jumps the Shark on PARCC

We are truly in deep PARCC mode now. Perhaps the April/May test administration should include readings from the Pentagon Papers.

Pearson Education, the company that produces the PARCC tests, and is reportedly being paid over $22 million dollars in New Jersey alone, is monitoring social media to check for security breaches and other untoward activity.  The latest example is in the Watchung Hills Regional school district, where evidently a student tweeted a test question and Pearson was able to flag it. The company then contacted the New Jersey Department of Education, which then contacted the school district. A fuller discussion is here. I can certainly understand test security because every teacher in New Jersey is warned annually that any data breach can result in the loss of their teaching license.

In the new testing world, though, the students may control the balance of power. Think about it: The new tests are being given exclusively on computers to an audience that, shall we say, is less than enthusiastic about sitting for hours to complete them. Students also have access to the Internet on their own devices. Mix in the politics of test refusal and the widely acknowledged fact that these tests count for zilch to the people who are taking them, and you have a messy brew that was just waiting to foam over. And think again if you think this is only happening in New Jersey.

Testing has always been a part of education and the PARCC is just another in a long line that stretches back decades. What’s upset many more people about these particular tests is that they are tied to the Common Core Curriculum Standards, which are unpopular on both the right and the left, and which most school districts just implemented formally this past September. That means that students in grades 3-11 have only had six months with which to work with some new, sophisticated concepts. How are these tests going to do anything except tell us that we have more work to do? What’s worse, many parents and teachers with college educations and advanced degrees have taken the practice tests and have been flummoxed by what PARCC says are the correct answers.

The tests are also unpopular because they are being administered over a couple of weeks in two separate time frames; one now and one during late April or early May. This is taking an extraordinary amount of time away from classroom teaching and learning that is, presumably, the point of having children go to school and hiring teachers to instruct and mentor them. As someone who teaches Advanced Placement courses, I can tell you that this schedule has put enormous pressure on me to find time to properly prepare students for the early May AP tests while they are also taking the PARCC.

Then there is Pearson Education (remember Pearson Education? This is a column on Pearson Education). They will be paid about $22 million dollars for the tests in NJ, which is below the original estimate, but it’s still a great deal of money. Now the company is trolling through social media, monitoring student behavior and expecting that nobody will ever talk about the tests in a world where we are all connected.

This will not help schools and states that are trying to limit the number of students who are refusing to take the tests, and could possibly lead to more students not taking them in April/May. In the high school where I teach, approximately 35% of eligible students are not taking the tests. When I was proctoring the tests last week I did notice that a number of students were logging on to the test program on their computers, cycling through the pages in about 30 seconds, then taking out a book to read. Civil disobedience is alive and well.

Every social movement has its tipping point. This could be the one for Pearson and PARCC.

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Domestic Policies Education George Bush News Politics

On Education: Can’t See the Forest for the Bushes

AFP PHOTO/Saul LOEB

Remember the education president? That would be George H.W. Bush, who promised that he would focus on improving schools so that the United States would be number one in educating its children for the new millennium. His Goals 2000: Educate America Act had terrific political nuggets such as:

All children in America will start school ready to learn. 

The high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent.

United States students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.

Every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

Every school in the United States will be free of drugs, violence, and the unauthorized presence of firearms and alcohol and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning. 

Of course, these goals were not met because they aren’t realistic. Public institutions that suffer from inadequate funding and political interference can’t guarantee that all students or every adult will do anything except be disappointed that as a nation, we couldn’t do better.

The along came his son, George W. Bush, who promised that the No Child Left Behind Act would do for America what its smaller implementation had done to Texas in the 1990s. This meant that all students would pass state tests by 2014 and schools that didn’t perform, either overall or because any subset of racial, ethnic or gender categories did not score well enough on said tests, would be closed. Bush even made Houston Superintendent of Schools Rod Paige the Secretary of Education.

That’s when the real story of how the Texas Education Miracle became one more Bush myth. It turns out that Paige and Bush cooked the graduation rate books, inflating the number of students who met school standards and essentially erased the records of students who dropped out or had discipline problems.

The NCLB was based on faulty numbers, but that didn’t stop it from infecting every aspect of school reform for the next decade. Testing became rampant and disruptive. Private testing companies like Pearson Education got very wealthy creating tests and changing the curriculum. President Obama’s embrace of this model was disturbing, and has led us to where we are today, wasting huge chunks of time modifying what students need to know and testing them not once (March), but twice (late April or early May).

Now word comes that the third Bush who wants to be president, former Florida Governor Jeb, promoted a charter school in Miami that is now closed, but he’s running as if the school is a shining successful example of his education agenda. The basic problem seemed to be that as a private citizen, Bush was able to raise money and be the face of the school, but as governor, he could not have his name on the school’s letterhead nor could he raise funds privately. Other issues also intervened, namely that Bush had to balance the state budget and unfortunately there wasn’t enough to pay for public schools and charters. Simply, the toy lost its luster.

But at least he has a policy that applies to the classroom. Compare that to Governor Chris Christie’s approach to education. He’s focused solely on economics and making sure that teachers, and indeed all public unions, pay more and more for their benefits while he skirts his own law and refuses to make full payments to the pension system.

In fact, you would think that Christie and the New Jersey Education Association made a major agreement on teacher benefits, according to a speech Christie made in Florida last week. There is no agreement, and there won’t be one on his terms. But I guess that when you’re running for president, you can say anything you want, and in the end, most people won’t know or care to know the difference.

That’s what happened with the two previous Bushes. Let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again.

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Education Featured

Teacher Hangs Herself In Classroom

No,  reports say her students were not in the classroom at the time, but they found her body hanging in the classroom when they reported for class.

Jillian Jacobson, 31, was pronounced dead at the scene at El Dorado High School in Placentia, some 30 miles (50 km) southeast of Los Angeles, said a spokesman.

Students and another teacher got her down to the floor before calling 911, said Placentia police spokesman Eric Point.

“It’s still an ongoing investigation but everything points to suicide… There’s no indication of foul play,” he said.

“From what I gather, she was very popular, well liked by the students and faculty,” he said. “It was definitely a shock to everybody.”

No note was found at the scene, but investigators were continuing to search for clues as to why she would have taken her life, said Point.

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Benjamin Netanyahu Domestic Policies Education Foreign Policies Healthcare Immigration Reform Israel Mitch McConnell News Nuclear Security Politics

Elected, Perchance to Govern?

Mitch McConnell, moderate. I thought I’d never see that characterization, but after last week’s embarrassing, incompetent, dangerous gambit the House Republicans played, he’s looking like the only GOP adult in the room. John Boehner seems to have lost his caucus and is now dependent on the far right to dictate what gets done in the House, and what’s getting done is virtually nothing. Kicking the Homeland Security funding argument to this week will do nothing except make Friday night another frantic opportunity for brinkmanship and Obama-bashing. In the end, Homeland Security will get funding and the president’s immigration changes will stand. The real losers will be the people who work for the agency as they bite their nails and wait to see if they’ll be getting paid for another week. If terrorists read American news sources, they are surely laughing at us.

Not content to make itself look bad on the domestic front, the Republicans doubled down and asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to come and speak to a joint session of Congress, an honor he will deliver this week. Never mind that his visit, essentially a jab at the Obama administrations efforts to negotiate a nuclear treaty with Iran, will only put more on strain US-Israel relations, although there are reports that things might be getting less strained. Mr. Netanyahu, I’m sure, will have important things to say. The problem is that he might want to think twice before attaching himself to the clown car Congress that can’t seem to find money to pay for homeland security, much less debate a serious issue like a possible Iranian nuclear weapon.

This is also the week that the Supreme Court will hear arguments in King v. Burwell, the case that challenges whether the federal government can give subsidies to people who buy health insurance on the federal exchange. The plaintiffs believe that only those who buy policies on state exchanges should get subsidies. Which of course begs the question, if the court rules for the plaintiffs, will they work feverishly to make sure that the states without exchanges set them up quickly so the law can work and millions of people can keep their health care?

Of course not.  This is most likely the final attempt to destroy a law that is working wonderfully and is fundamentally changing the health care landscape for the better. Also, the states that would suffer the most if the subsidies are struck down will be the poorest, reddest states in the country. You know, the ones whose citizens vote against their interests by electing governments that seek to limit the programs their people desperately need.

And the state that would suffer the most? Florida. Does Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio have a fall back plan if millions of Floridians lose their health insurance? No. Do both of them want to be president? Of course, but what a catastrophe either of them would be.

And finally, this week will see the rollout of the PARCC tests across the nation. School districts are hoping that their technology holds up and that students can navigate the many screen they’ll need to use in order to answer the questions. Some families have decided that they don’t want their students to participate, so they’ve opted out, or “refused” to take the tests as the officials like to characterize it, The testing will take almost three weeks and then return in late April or early May, taking more valuable time and resources from classrooms and actual learning. The tests will mean almost nothing to students, but for teachers, they will count for 10% of their yearly evaluation (in New Jersey, at least). I give these tests five years, and then the education establishment will move on to something newer.

March is certainly roaring in.

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Domestic Policies Education Express Yourself News Politics

Christie Tells It Like It’s Not

It’s getting a bit too easy finding contradictions and hypocritical statements in what Governor Chris Christie is saying these days. That must mean he’s running for president.

On his signature issue, pension and benefit reform, the governor went back on his promise to make a full payment for 2014, and his administration even argued in court that the 2011 reform bill is unconstitutional. These are both odd turns, but they are simply a matter of doing business under a man who shamelessly switches policy positions, excoriates those who disagree with him, and simply does what is politically expedient with no central philosophy or plan to guide him.

And through all of this hypocrisy, Christie has the nerve to say that he “tells it like it is.” As a keen observer of national and state politics, I can say with 100% confidence that people who rely on that phrase do not tell it anything near what it is and are, in fact, blowhards who like to hear themselves talk.

The latest example of Christie’s flip-flop road show occurred this week on the issue of the Common Core educational standards. Two years ago, the governor was all for the national standards and agreed with President Obama that the country would be better off with benchmarks on which all states could be evaluated. He even said that this issue should not be politicized.

Clearly, things have changed. Last week in Iowa, he said,

“I have grave concerns about the way this has been done, especially the way the Obama administration has tried to implement it through tying federal funding to these things. And that changes the entire nature of it, from what was initially supposed to be voluntary type system and states could decide on their own to now having federal money tied to it in ways that really, really give me grave concerns.
 
“So we’re in the midst of re-examination of it in New Jersey….It is something I’m very concerned about, because in the end education needs to be a local issue.”

Yes, he even used the word “grave” twice. This is a man who is definitely running for president.

The problem is that he is mistrusted among the conservatives who will decide two of the first three Republican popularity tests, Iowa and South Carolina, and is mistrusted in New Hampshire, the third test, because he has no record to run on. In fact, he’s running fourth among the early names being bandied about for the GOP nod, which wouldn’t be terrible, except that two of the four ahead of him, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, are competing for the same voters as Christie is. He’s going to have to muscle past those two, and they don’t have the scandals and YouTube rantings that he does. I would never count Christie out, but pandering to the right is not the road that “tell it like it is” Chris wants to navigate.

This also comes on the heels of a poll in New Jersey that shows the governor’s popularity and approval ratings at their four year lows. That’s not the political environment in which you’d like to start a national run, but that’s what the man has done since being reelected rather emphatically in November 2013. For a politician who says he knows how to safeguard public money, he sure has spent and wasted a great deal of political capital.

If Christie really wanted to reverse himself, I’d rather it be that he decides next week to build the third rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Or by fully funding public education. Those would definitely show that he knows how to tell it like it is. I’m not holding my breath, though.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

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Domestic Policies Education News Politics teachers

The Best and Brightest Have Let Us Down

I get very tired very quickly when I hear that we need the best and brightest to become classroom teachers in the United States. For one, it’s incredibly insulting because it assumes that the teachers we have now in public schools are somehow subpar, which is not true. Further, it also assumes that the elite students at elite colleges need to swoop down and save education because the best students make the best teachers, right?

Wrong. Oh, so wrong.

Don’t misunderstand me: I support all effective teachers across the country who want to make a difference in any type of school, public or private, and who want to educate students. This includes those from Teach for America, the program that began in 1990 at Princeton University and places the best and brightest into urban schools for specified periods of time, usually three years. The program has been criticized for providing a short-term conscience break for smarties who then leave the classroom and make billions as hedge fund managers and tech company start-up junkies. It has also been lauded for enabling the most difficult school districts to staff their classes with committed teachers who knew what they were getting into they signed up for TFA.

For 15 years, the program grew. For the past two, growth has stopped. That’s bad news for the districts that rely on TFA graduates, but it might be the beginning of good news for the rest of public education. Why? Although TFA was founded on a laudable goal, the program was also responsible for pushing some of the worst reforms education has seen in decades. From the article:

Teach for America has sent hundreds of graduates to Capitol Hill, school superintendents’ offices and education reform groups, seeding a movement that has supported testing and standards, teacher evaluations tethered to student test scores, and a weakening of teacher tenure.

It seems that the best and brightest are neither when it comes to new ideas on how to improve education. They, along with the conservative know-nothings who inhabit statehouse governments and education commissionerships, relied on untested data purporting to show a connection between student test scores and teacher effectiveness, and supported ever more Charter schools that take public money away from public schools that have legal mandates to deliver a quality education to all students. Weakening teacher tenure and injecting market competition in the schools round out the final failures on their list as both destroy the culture and ethos that have protected the public schools from unwanted political interference, commercialization and data-mongers of all political stripes.

Ten years from now, those still left in education will look back on this era as not only misguided, but destructive; an era from which it will take a few years to recover and reclaim the ideas that actually work in the classroom. By then, the best and brightest will be back on Wall Street or law school or boardrooms touting their latest ventures and perhaps reflecting on the years they spent in the program. I applaud their efforts as teachers. For many, it will inform the rest of their lives. For others, it allowed them to realize a community service dream in a neglected corner of the country.

But for their support of ideas that have wreaked havoc in the classroom and resulted in a culture of testing that undermines effective teaching, I will forever rue the day that they joined the reform conversation. I have met far better and far brighter minds who didn’t attend elite schools and who have enriched teaching and learning across the United States.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

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