Educators Push Back Against Obama's "Business Model" for School Reforms
Democracy Now: September 13, 2010
JUAN GONZALEZ: It's back to school, and as millions of children around the
country begin a new school year, the Obama administration is aggressively
moving forward on a number of its education initiatives. On Thursday,
federal education officials announced that forty-four states have joined a
new $330 million initiative to replace year-end English and math tests with
new national exams. The funds are drawn from the Obama administration's
$4.35 billion Race to the Top fund. The new testing systems are scheduled to
be rolled out in the 2014-15 school year. The tests are a part of an effort
to create a new set of national academic standards known as Common Core
Standards, which nearly forty states have already agreed to adopt. Critics
have suggested that national standards would erode state and local control
of schools.
Meanwhile, through Race to the Top, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has also
pushed states to lift caps on charter schools and link student achievement
to teacher pay. The initiative has come under fire from civil rights
organizations, community groups and teachers' unions.
Before being appointed Education Secretary, Arne Duncan was the head of
Chicago's Public Schools, the nation's third-largest school system. During
that time, he oversaw implementation of a program known as Renaissance 2010.
The program's aim was to close sixty schools and replace them with more than
a hundred charter schools. This year, the Chicago public system is facing a
$370 million deficit. Hundreds of teachers and city school workers are
facing layoffs as part of cost cutting measures and budget cuts.
Well, for more on the Obama administration's education initiatives, we're
joined by two guests. Lois Weiner is a professor of education at New Jersey
City University, and Karen Lewis is the president of the Chicago Teachers
Union.
I welcome you both to Democracy Now!
KAREN LEWIS: Thank you.
LOIS WEINER: Thank you.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I'd like to start with Karen. Arne Duncan comes from your
city.
KAREN LEWIS: Yeah, sorry.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And he is now basically heading up education policy for the
Obama administration.
KAREN LEWIS: Mm-hmm.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Your sense of his legacy in the Chicago public schools?
KAREN LEWIS: Well, Arne's legacy was-you know, let's look at the fact that
he's not an educator, never had any experience. As a matter of fact, he
would be arrested if he went into a classroom and tried to teach, because
he's
uncredentialed completely. So his legacy is: "I don't know what to do. Let
me just give it over to the privatizers. Let somebody else do"-I mean,
basically, under his aegis, the Board of Education abrogated their
responsibility towards education and gave it away, because he literally had
no idea, and still doesn't have an idea, of what to do.
The problem is the system is obviously broken. I don't think anybody will
argue with that, that the system is broken. It is-it has not basically
changed since the 1900s-1800s, for that matter. And as a result, it has
never been able to absorb real innovation. And the problem is it's just a
lot easier to test, test, test children. Our curriculum has narrowed in
Chicago. If you look at the average day for an elementary school kid, it's
reading, reading, reading, reading, reading, reading, math, math, math,
reading, reading, reading, reading, math. I mean, kids are bored to tears.
They're hating school at an early age. There's no joy. There's no passion.
And the results show that. They're very indicative of that.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But now, what's wrong? The supporters of Arne Duncan,
superintendents like Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC, Joel Klein in New York
City, and others around the country, are saying, what's wrong with having
higher accountability standards for teachers? What's wrong with encouraging
experimentation and entrepreneurship, in terms of how you deliver public
education to the millions of children who so far have not been served by the
public education system? So what's wrong with that?
KAREN LEWIS: Well, the problem is that the whole idea of the business model
doesn't work in education. In the business model, you can select how you
want to do something. You have an opportunity to innovate in a way that
discriminates. It's very easy to do. Whereas in a public school system,
where we do not select our children-we take whoever comes to the door-what
we need is actually more resources and more support for the people that are
there and the work that's being done. However, again, Arne Duncan, Michelle
Rhee, Joel Klein-I don't know about Joel Klein-none of these people are
superintendents. You have to have, again, credentials for that. These are
business folks. Look, the business model took this country to the brink of
Armageddon in 2008. And yet, we want to follow a failed business model and
imprint that on top of public education? No. And these things are not
innovative. What they are is they're terrorism. They're "my way or the
highway." And they're still not producing, quote-unquote, "results."
Nobody disagrees with accountability. That's not the issue. The issue is,
what do you use? We still know that high-stakes testing basically tell us
more about a student's socioeconomic status than it does anything else. And
until we're honest about that and want to deal with the fact that we have
neighborhoods in our cities and across the nation that have been
under-resourced, have been devalued for decades, and for some reason or
other, the schools are supposed to fix all that and change that.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Lois Weiner, you've been, in your research, conducting what I
would, I guess, call a macro analysis of the education reform-
LOIS WEINER: Right.
JUAN GONZALEZ: -comparing not only what's happening here in the United
States, but around the world, in terms of these so-called reform
initiatives. Could you talk about that?
LOIS WEINER: Absolutely. And I think it's important to understand that Race
to the Top is not unique to the United States, and what Arne Duncan did in
Chicago is not unique to Chicago. And in fact, the contours of this program
were carried out first under Pinochet in Chile. And this program was
implemented by force of military dictatorships and the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund in Latin America. And the results have been
verified by researchers there. They produced increased stratification. So I
think what we're seeing right now are the results of that increased
stratification, a stratification, inequality of results, because if you
think about it, No Child Left Behind is almost a decade old. And what are
the results? The results are a growing gap between poor minority-achievement
of poor minority kids and those kids who come from prosperous families who
are-who live in affluent suburbs and in those suburban schools.
And I think it's also very important to understand that this focus on
educational reform is replacing, is a substitute for, a jobs policy. We need
to understand that. Education can democratize the competition for the
existing jobs, but it cannot create new jobs. And when most jobs that are
being created are by companies like Wal-Mart, education cannot do anything
about that. So, we need to-we really need to look critically at Race to the
Top and understand the way that it fits into this new economic order of a
so-called jobless recovery and that what's really going on is a
vocationalization of education, a watering down of curriculum for most kids,
so that they're going to take jobs that require only a seventh or an eighth
grade education, because those are the jobs that are being created in this
economy.
And so, I think that while we-while it's important to look at the
particulars of each state and each city, each school district, it's also
important to see this large picture, because almost anything that you can
point to me that's being done in Chicago or New York or San Francisco, we
can find another place in the world that it was already done, and we can
look at those results. And the results are not good.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But those who are at the forefront of this so-called reform
movement-
LOIS WEINER: Mm-hmm.
JUAN GONZALEZ: -say that the charter schools that they're creating, the
small schools that they're creating, are doing a better job, by the testing
model of educating children, especially minority children, than has occurred
in decades past under the existing public school system. What's your
response to that?
LOIS WEINER: My response to that, first of all, is that I want to see the
evidence. And what's really incredible and disastrous is that this enormous
social engineering that's going on to transform-I would say destroy-public
education has not been accompanied by government funding for serious,
objective evaluation. We have this so-called Institute for Education
Science, but if you look at the sorts of research that they're funding, they
are not funding the kind of large-scale evaluative studies that we need to
determine whether these reforms are going to be effective. And we shouldn't
permit that. We should identify this as what it is, which is an ideological
venture that does not have a scientific basis, and it doesn't have a basis
in evidence.
JUAN GONZALEZ: You've also taken a look at the impact of No Child Left
Behind on teachers. Could you talk about that?
LOIS WEINER: Well, I think it's important to understand that there are-No
Child Left Behind is part of this global project to deprofessionalize
teaching as an occupation. And the reason that it's important in this
project to deprofessionalize teaching is that the thinking is that the
biggest expenditure in education is teacher salaries. And they want to cut
costs. They want to diminish the amount of money that's put into public
education. And that means they have to lower teacher costs. And in order to
do that, they have to deprofessionalize teaching. They have to make it a
revolving door, in which we're not going to pay teachers very much. They're
not going to stay very long. We're going to credential them really fast.
They're going to go in. We're going to burn them up. They're going to leave
in three, four, five years. And that's the model that they want.
So who is the biggest impediment to that occurring? Teachers' unions. And
that is what explains this massive propaganda effort to say that teachers'
unions are an impediment to reform. And in fact, they are an impediment to
the deprofessionalization of teaching, which I think is a disaster. It's a
disaster for public education.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you know, one of the-I've been, for several years now,
looking deeply into these charter schools, and especially their tax forms.
And one of the things that has struck me as I look at their various audited
financial statements is that, generally speaking, the pay levels of the
teachers in the charter schools are far lower than they are for normal
public school teachers, but the pay of the executives-
KAREN LEWIS: Yeah.
LOIS WEINER: Yes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: -of the charter schools is far higher-
KAREN LEWIS: Higher, yeah.
LOIS WEINER: Yes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: -than it is for superintendents. So you're, in essence,
creating a much bigger wage gap in the schools through the charters-
LOIS WEINER: Yes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: -between management and the employees who actually cover the
work.
LOIS WEINER: Yes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I'm wondering what you found.
LOIS WEINER: Well, that's part of the-you know, that's part of the thinking
here, that teaching really is not-does not have to be a skilled profession,
because we're not going to teach-we're not going to educate kids to do
anything more than work in Wal-Mart or the equivalent. They only need a
seventh or an eighth grade education, at most a ninth grade education, and
so we don't need teachers who are more than, as Grover Whitehurst, a former
Undersecretary of Education, said, "good enough." That's all we need is
teachers who are "good enough" to follow scripted curriculum and to teach to
these standardized tests. And if you only need teachers who are good enough,
you don't have to pay them very much. And that's the project. And regardless
of the rhetoric, regardless of the intentions of some of the people who are
supporting these reforms, people like the Education Trust, whose work I
respect, I think it's important that we look at something beyond the
intentions and the rhetoric, and we really look at this project as being a
project that's global in its nature.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Karen Lewis, you led basically an insurgent movement
within your own union to win the presidency of the UFT-
KAREN LEWIS: Naaah.
JUAN GONZALEZ: -of the Chicago Federation of Teachers.
KAREN LEWIS: No, Chicago Teachers Union.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Teachers Union, I'm sorry.
KAREN LEWIS: Yes, that's OK.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And could you talk about how you did that and the
relationship of the teachers with the community, in general, in terms of
dealing with these education reforms?
KAREN LEWIS: Well, the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, or CORE, spent two
years basically organizing with parents and community groups against school
closings, against the turnarounds, and against the Duncan policies. We did
not have an electoral strategy, to be perfectly honest with you. We just
wanted to see a change in this whole idea of privatizing schools. And what
we found was that, in general, there is this animosity between teachers and
parents and communities, because we haven't been working together. And yet,
we are still seeing the devastation of our communities based on the fact
that our institutions have been underfunded.
So, what we ended up doing was spending a lot of time talking to our members
across the city. And the more we got ready to speak-and in addition with
that, we changed the way the Board of Education does business. They would
put schools on a hit list, and they were closed down, and that was it. We
forced the board to start coming to these community meetings. They had never
shown up. They just basically rubber-stamped whenever Arne Duncan wanted.
And, of course, when Arne Duncan left, the guy that came in, equally as
unqualified, had a slightly different vision. So six schools were taken off
the hit list. That had never happened. But in addition, our union leadership
was nowhere to be found during these hearings. We went to every school
closing hearing, every charter school opening. And in addition, we had data
that showed that these charter schools not only did no better, but that in
some cases actually did worse than the neighborhood schools. And the problem
is that those studies never get publicized, and certainly not in mainstream
corporate media. So we had an uphill battle, because nobody would talk to
us, nobody paid any attention to us. But, school by school, building by
building, that's how you build consensus. That's how you build capacity for
change.
JUAN GONZALEZ: You are a veteran chemistry teacher.
KAREN LEWIS: I am, yes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Could you talk about the impact of these so-called reforms on
your own ability to teach chemistry?
KAREN LEWIS: You know, I'm going to be honest with you. Being a veteran
teacher, I have basically ignored them, to be real honest. But I've had that
ability because of the fact that I'm so passionate about teaching and that I
care about what I do and that the results I get, which are not test-driven,
as far as I'm concerned, are what speak for themselves. I mean, ultimately,
administrators want to know how well you relate to your students, how well
you relate to parents, and I've always had that ability to do that. So, as
far as I'm concerned, these so-called reforms-just get out of my way, as far
as I was concerned.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Lois Weiner, could you compare what's happened in Chicago
with the teachers there to some of the bigger unions, to the United
Federation of Teachers, to what's been happening with the NEA, in terms of
confronting some of these changes?
LOIS WEINER: Well, you know, I think that CORE's victory is really a
watershed. and I'm just delighted. And I have to say that I spoke at a rally
of CORE earlier this year, and I heard Karen speak to teachers in the
audience. And what struck me in the way that Karen talked about the reforms
and what's going on in public education was her passion about teaching. And
I think it's-the fact that CORE contains teachers who are committed to
social justice, they're committed to a new form of teacher unionism, and
they're committed to facing racism, it really makes it a model for what we
want to do in unions elsewhere, I have to say especially the UFT here in New
York.
But we're beginning to see in other large city locals a renaissance of
activism among young teachers, because, unlike Karen, they're not protected.
And these reforms, they're losing their jobs. They're being terrorized by
principals. Their schools are being shut down, because very often they teach
in the most vulnerable schools, because they're new and that's where the
jobs are. And they want a union. They want a union that's going to fight for
them. And the message that we have to bring them is, I think, that CORE
does, is "You are the union. Nobody can do it for you."
And I think in New York City we're beginning to see that. I've been working
with this group called Teachers Unite, and I think it's a ginger group for a
new-the kind of reform that we need in New York City. Los Angeles already
has a reform leadership. Detroit has a reform leadership in the AFT. And I
think that that's going to pull-those changes are going to be-pull, I'm
hopeful, the national unions to more progressive, more militant, and more
pro-parent and pro-education stances.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Let me ask you also about the intervention of other elite
forces on this education reform debate-
LOIS WEINER: Right.
JUAN GONZALEZ: -the right-wing foundations, the Walton Foundation, the Eli
Broad Foundation, as well as all of the hedge fund and Wall Street people
that have gotten involved in funding schools and creating charter networks.
What do you analyze is behind this?
LOIS WEINER: Well, I mean, their effect has been, really, all-encompassing
and quite pernicious. And we have a great deal of research about what's
going on with this, if we want to take a look at it. It's never-it's never
mentioned in the popular media, in the corporate mass media. And they are
controlling the education agenda. They are controlling these new core
curriculum standards. And if people really looked at these core curriculum
standards, I think they would be aghast. You know, vocationalization of the
curriculum is beginning in first grade. They're doing career education in
first grade, if you look at these standards. What is that about? That we're
preparing kids for the workforce when they're in first grade? And the
foundations, the right-wing foundations, including the Gates Foundation,
they are absolutely driving this. They're funding it. They're funding the
media campaign to persuade people that this is necessary. And they are
funding the-
KAREN LEWIS: Research.
LOIS WEINER: They're funding the research.
KAREN LEWIS: They're funding the research, mm-hmm.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Karen Lewis
is president of the Chicago Teachers Union. Lois Weiner, professor of
education at New Jersey City University. And we will continue to follow this
story.
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