"If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability. And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school." - President Obama, March 2010
A very poor, half-Latino community in Rhode Island called Central Falls has a very bad education record. In this "No Child Left Behind (NCLB)" era of standardized testing being the final word and punishment for poor performance being the bureaucrats' go-to play, the district administration decided to fire 93% of the teachers and staff in accordance with the generic "restructuring" strategy of NCLB. We on this email list don't even have education degrees, and we probably already realize that this is problematic, if not completely moronic and traumatic for the students.
Yet Obama and his education secretary and Chicago hanger-on, Arne Duncan, praised it. Obama claimed that he likes to know what he's talking about before he speaks. Yeah, I guess that showed when he called the cop's actions "stupid" in the arrest of his Harvard professor and hothead pal Henry Louis Gates, without knowing a single detail about the case. And now with the Rhode Island issue, he is also being a dumbass douchebag, for lack of a better description.
"[The Central Falls administrators are] showing courage and doing the right thing for kids." - Arne Duncan, March 2010
Yep, it sure shows courage when the captain of the ship sacrifices the seamen to the pirates and keeps the one lifeboat for himself. If anything, the Central Falls administrators should fire THEMSELVES, and Obama/Duncan should have called for that. Do the angry Toyota customers blame the assembly line workers who were instructed to put shitty parts into the vehicles, or do they blame the careless designers who cut corners and the arrogant execs who were tone-deaf to early complaints? Central Falls was a tragedy for years, and the admins (the ones with the fancy degrees, higher pay, and less stress than those lazy unionized teachers) failed to show leadership and execute reforms. The buck stops where? Teachers can only do so much, even the most heroic of them. Education solutions should be top-down for best effect. But I guess our president can't wrap his brain around that.
Second, how the hell can you produce great education results overnight in such a community? If a basketball coach gets a bunch of guys like me, and his boss expects a winning season, what do you think will happen? He won't deliver and he'll be fired. I don't care if it's Phil Jackson, but he won't turn me into LeBron, or even an above-average player, because of my limitations (physical and economic - I have a job so I can't practice hoops and work out 5 hours a day to get better). But maybe Phil taught me a lot of good stuff and did make me a vastly improved player, but I'm still not up to the standards imposed by outsiders. Phil did a great job, but still gets fired. How does that make sense?
Central Falls is a tough place to grow up. The ratio of single-parent to traditional family households is 2:3. 25% of families live below the poverty line, with a median income of $26k. 40% of kids live in poverty, and 40% of the population are Latinos who don't speak English at home. If you sent the Eton faculty to Central Falls, do you think they could dramatically improve graduation rates in a couple years? We all know that kids can't learn if their bellies are aching and they are fatigued/troubled by issues at home. We know that it's harder for kids to learn if their parents are uneducated, poor, and working long hours. We can't expect miracles. If Obama, Duncan, et al. really cared about those kids, they would increase social welfare programs for them and their families, and invest in better teaching materials. Swap the students at Harvard and Kabul University for a decade, and we'll see which performs better. America has gutted its public school systems to balance budgets and pay corporate tax breaks, and now we're outraged that our schools suck and our kids are struggling? We (or should I say the Boomers) made our bed, and now we must lay in it. Yes of course bloated teacher/union concessions have contributed in some cases, but "charter schools" competition isn't the answer either. According to former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch, a national study showed that only 17% of charter schools outperformed comparable local public schools, and quite a few were worse. Education is supposed to be collaborative and supportive. It's lunacy to pit schools and teachers against each other, hoarding trade secrets to compete for students, tenure, and funding. Yes it's important to improve efficiency and accountability, but education doesn't lend itself to traditional business performance metrics. Main Street isn't Wall Street, and I don't want to live here if the two become indistinguishable. "Marketizing" our education system is not the answer. Some government services shouldn't be privatized, like social security and the military (oops, I forgot about Blackwater and Boeing). Wake up, Obama.
Even though Central Fall's graduation rate is 48% and only 7% of 11th graders could pass the state math exam, some teachers are doing a good job. This is obvious because students wept and protested when they heard the news. Kids aren't dumb, even if they can't do long division. They know that it won't help to fire the whole lot and replace them with ambitious newcomers. Even if the new crop is excellent, they will be hampered by job pressure because they know they could be fired too if scores don't go up. By firing those teachers, they destroyed decades of cumulative community and education wisdom. And those teachers may be jaded and unwilling to return, even if the admin changes its mind. Like a nasty lockout or strike in pro sports, it could take a decade (or never) to repair the damage and loss of community trust. What are those standardized test scores worth anyway? Maybe the Central Falls math teachers instructed their students with techniques that are not represented on the exam. Other schools and teachers, fearful for their jobs/funding, just help their students "master the test" (or just make the tests easier!), without really becoming skilled in the subject. Their goal is high scores, not pure understanding and thinking. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) investigated a subset of students who had 90% passing rates on their state reading exams. But by NAEP's metrics, only 20-30% of those same students read proficiently. There have been many cases of teachers caught cheating to help their students get higher scores. That should be evidence enough to show that NCLB is failing in its purpose.
The admins were not total tyrants. They gave them a chance: they requested that the Central Falls faculty increase instruction time, training, and tutoring without much additional compensation. The teachers' union refused, so the admin decided to fire them. That is not good management, and Obama/Duncan shouldn't have endorsed it. Maybe the teachers were being unreasonable, but a skilled leader can still work with them and achieve something positive. What if Nixon walked out on Mao at the first sign of resistance? Then he would have been like Congress. Restructuring the faculty won't work either. All of us working people know that reorganizations are terribly disruptive. Even a bunch of weak employees are preferable in the short term to a total purge. Weak employees still know stuff and can maintain the vital operations. When you get rid of them, who is doing the work in the meantime? Substitute teachers? Yes we should wean out poor performers, but gradually and sensitively, or the admin might create tensions and resentment among the new and remaining staff. All of this is management 101, which is why the management are the ones who need the pink slips.
And Obama's guy Duncan is one to talk about education reform. His record in Chicago is decent but far from stellar. Yes he inherited a Chicago system that was among the nation's worst, but Chicago's math improvement rate (as evaluated by the NAEP) lagged behind many other cities of comparable size and demographics (in some cases, even behind DC and dysfunctional LAUSD that needed to be taken over by the mayor for a time). Duncan played around with performance pay, charter schools, closing bad schools, and mass firings, with inconsistent results. But it's not like he turned poop into gold over there. Plus, many of the test score gains that Duncan brags about were actually due to relaxed test standards, not improved knowledge. Half of Chicago kids still don't graduate in normal time (even though passing criteria was relaxed).
"There's been this rhetoric about dramatic gains, dramatic success, that we have to replicate this model because of its dramatic success," said Julie Woestehoff of the advocacy group Parents United for Responsible Education. "And here in Chicago, we're looking at these schools and going, 'Uh . . . ' "
What does that say about Obama for picking an inner-circle Chicago boy for a crucial job when better alternatives were available? I've had about all I can take of this "change stuff", and he still has three years to go.
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