All things considered, I don't regret sending out John Deasy's speech so enthusiastically. Though slightly chagrined by my own lack of knowledge about the system and Deasey himself, that it elicited responses from others equally so affected, it also brought forth several responses such as this, from friends with experience and histories I know and respect. I'm glad it all happened. Read on.
Ed
From: Kathleen Hernandez [mailto:hernandezkathleen@hotmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 9:14 AM
To: Ed Pearl Ashgrove
Subject: RE: [Ed-LA] Schools Matter: John Deasy's Queen Antoinette moment: "let them eat ebooks"
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 9:14 AM
To: Ed Pearl Ashgrove
Subject: RE: [Ed-LA] Schools Matter: John Deasy's Queen Antoinette moment: "let them eat ebooks"
I appreciate being heard Ed. Thank You. As far as being better than Perry I think he runs in the same crowd. He refuses to release the $55 million to hire back needed 1,400 teachers and health and human workers (nurses, speech therapists, and psychologists) and just laid off 800 office staff. Here is a piece that a teacher wrote that went to his event with teachers on Friday. He seems to be on a rampage to rid LAUSD of teachers with high seniority and cares nothing for critical thinking and creativity in our children. He also thinks history is a non-critical subject.
Kathleen Hernandez
From: epearlag@earthlink.net
To: hernandezkathleen@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: [Ed-LA] Schools Matter: John Deasy's Queen Antoinette moment: "let them eat ebooks"
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 08:02:39 -0700
From: Kathleen Hernandez [mailto:hernandezkathleen@hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2011 8:04 PM
To: Ed Pearl Ashgrove
Subject: FW: [Ed-LA] Schools Matter: John Deasy's Queen Antoinette moment: "let them eat ebooks"
Kathleen Hernandez
On Set 22. 2011 a half a dozen UTLA members plus a few NewTLA members attended the "Dr" Deasy evening at the Flix Theater Center on Beaudry. The event was hosted by Teach Plus and facilitated by it's founder Celine Coggins. I would guess that at least 90% of the audience was under or hovering around 30 years old. With an interactive screen we were asked a number of questions such as "Are you a public school teacher or a charter teacher?" But charter schools always claim to be public. It didn't matter. The feedback mechanism malfunctioned. The second question asked how many years of teaching experience we had with the highest option being 16+. Another malfunction. The rest were questions that made me uncomfortable like, "Do you agree that the present teacher evaluation system is not good?" Well yes, but where is this leading? Here are a few comments from the good "doctor."
-- It's silly to think of teaching as a career. This is the 21st century and 3-5 years is a good amount of time to dedicate to the profession.
-- Regarding pensions and health benefits - Compensation should come early, not years down the road. A young teacher needs the money now when he or she has a family to suppot.
-- Teachers should view teaching a year at a time, not the long view.
-- Exceptional teaching should be rewarded.
On evaluations of teachers, Deasy believes that the Stull process is useless. Evaluations should do three things: identify top performance, develop known effective behavior, and provide quality control. (Weed out the bad, I guess) He did not elaborate on what this last category meant. There were questions from the audience, some good, some troubling. An 8 year history teacher said that he had entered the profession with a plan to stay in permantently. Now he is burned out because he doesn't want to just teach what years wars began, but to examine the reasons for war. Test prep doesnt give him the time to do this and he's frustrated. Deasy commented that it was lucky that he taught a "non-critical" subject that's not on the CST. A young woman stated that creativity is important and the ability to develop new ways of looking at things. The Deasy retort: Well, do you want kids to graduate from high school or not? Choose. But the best was last. Another young woman said that before we decide how to evaluate teachers, we should ask what the purpose of education is. Is it to train people to do low level jobs or professional jobs or broadly, to think critically and creativly? She said that when we determine our goals for kids, we will determine how to evaluate the people that teach them. To which Deasy replied, (please note the quotation marks) " I disagree with you. The California State Standards tell us and tell kids what they need to know. That's what we teach. That's it.
-- It's silly to think of teaching as a career. This is the 21st century and 3-5 years is a good amount of time to dedicate to the profession.
-- Regarding pensions and health benefits - Compensation should come early, not years down the road. A young teacher needs the money now when he or she has a family to suppot.
-- Teachers should view teaching a year at a time, not the long view.
-- Exceptional teaching should be rewarded.
On evaluations of teachers, Deasy believes that the Stull process is useless. Evaluations should do three things: identify top performance, develop known effective behavior, and provide quality control. (Weed out the bad, I guess) He did not elaborate on what this last category meant. There were questions from the audience, some good, some troubling. An 8 year history teacher said that he had entered the profession with a plan to stay in permantently. Now he is burned out because he doesn't want to just teach what years wars began, but to examine the reasons for war. Test prep doesnt give him the time to do this and he's frustrated. Deasy commented that it was lucky that he taught a "non-critical" subject that's not on the CST. A young woman stated that creativity is important and the ability to develop new ways of looking at things. The Deasy retort: Well, do you want kids to graduate from high school or not? Choose. But the best was last. Another young woman said that before we decide how to evaluate teachers, we should ask what the purpose of education is. Is it to train people to do low level jobs or professional jobs or broadly, to think critically and creativly? She said that when we determine our goals for kids, we will determine how to evaluate the people that teach them. To which Deasy replied, (please note the quotation marks) " I disagree with you. The California State Standards tell us and tell kids what they need to know. That's what we teach. That's it.
The standards tell us what we need to know. That says it all.
I would invite others who were are the event to add their own commentary.
Written by a LAUSD Teacher Attendee at the Dr. Deasy Evening Event
From: epearlag@earthlink.net
To: hernandezkathleen@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: [Ed-LA] Schools Matter: John Deasy's Queen Antoinette moment: "let them eat ebooks"
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 08:02:39 -0700
Thanks for this Kathleen. You're right, I probably was duped, along with at least the several others who wrote their own approval of the article. You make the fourth, thoughtfel critique. I'll send this out, though I wish there were more straightforward facts, like those in the graph at the end. Anyway, he's a great talker; not the first time I, and others, are so taken in.
To his credit, he's better than Rick Perry, dontcha think? (joke)
Ed
From: Kathleen Hernandez [mailto:hernandezkathleen@hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2011 8:04 PM
To: Ed Pearl Ashgrove
Subject: FW: [Ed-LA] Schools Matter: John Deasy's Queen Antoinette moment: "let them eat ebooks"
Ed I had to send you this regarding Deasy after seeing you were impressed by him. See both articles to see another POV. Thanks. PS. My AC hasn't worked either. Deasy has given away more schools to private charters then his predecessor.
Kathleen Hernandez
A LAUSD Elementary School Teacher
On Sep 24, 2011, at 5:55 PM, "Robert D. Skeels" wrote:
Kathleen Hernandez
I recently came across a state dept of ed report from a few years back that said every elementary classroom should have 1,500 books. We're talking about picture books, chapter books and other grade-level appropriate fiction and non-fiction. No doubt students do need easy access to a rich variety of reading matter, but LAUSD does not provide anything near the recommended number. I'd be surprised if there are even a third of that in many classrooms. I guess they needed to spend the book money on Deasy's chauffer. (No matter, teachers can be counted on to pay for books out of their own pockets. Chumps. They think education should be a calling and a career, not a profit center!) By the way, the air conditioning is still broken in the classroom next to mine at my elementary school, three weeks into a school year that has included quite a few excruciatingly hot days. That LAUSD makes the teacher and students swelter in such an unhealthy and enervating environment is clearly inhumane, and not conducive to learning. Somehow I doubt it would take weeks to fix the air conditioning in Dr. Doublespeak's office, if it broke down.
A LAUSD Elementary School Teacher
On Sep 24, 2011, at 5:55 PM, "Robert D. Skeels" wrote:
Let the counter-narrative to John Deasy begin. The press is working overtime to make Deasy look progressive and concernedabout education. We all know that both those things are entirely false. We need to get the social justiceside of the story out.Robert D. SkeelsSaturday, September 24, 2011
John Deasy's Queen Antoinette moment: "let them eat ebooks"
"Right now, only higher-income readers can afford ebook readers and ebooks." — Dr. Stephen Krashen
On September 14, 2011 former Gates Foundation executive and Broad Superintendents Academy graduate John Deasy gave a much ballyhooed speech at Occidental College. While I may have time in the future to critique his mendacious stream of business-speak, which amounted to a clever corporate couching of school privatization in the language of "civil rights," it was his aloof response to an attendee's pertinent question on school libraries that deserves an immediate response. Here's a quote from an attendee who endured Deasy's verbal assault on public education:
"[O]ne of Rosemary's questions about his shutting school libraries got through. He said libraries would be irrelevant soon as books will move to electronic format. This was after he lamented about the plight of a homeless student living in a tent. I kid you not. I guess the kid in the tent will have to access books on the $800 I-Pad he can't afford."
A pointed and poignant question indeed to Los Angeles Unified School District's (LAUSD) Superintendent John Deasy, a man who deliberately gutted LAUSD's libraries in defiance of California's Assembly Bill 114, which was supposed to mandate the district spend its copious surplus funds on retaining the very personnel Deasy and company gleefully laid off. Laid off in a most ignominious fashion by the way, as Hector Tobar's The disgraceful interrogation of L.A. school librarians chronicled. Deasy's vapid and vacuous response to the library question sums up everything about corporate education reforms and shows why Deasy was hand selected to implement the neoliberal agenda in Los Angeles.
As disgusting as Deasy's quote about libraries being irrelevant was, it wasn't surprising considering his astonishing wealth and privilege. For wealthy white males like Deasy, poverty is something you see on television and it's easily solved by applying forms of the meritocracy myth via vile "no excuses" rhetoric and corporate privatization policies cloaked as promoting "high expectations." Deasy's own phrasing of the threadbare right-wing no excuses rhetoric reads as follows: "I actually believe that no other issue—circumstances of poverty, one parent, no parent, race, language proficiency, special need—none of that has a greater affect on the achievement gap than our belief about the ability of youth."
More to the point, Deasy's flippant remark that electronic format books would soon replace libraries has no grounding in reality. Such thinking and policies exacerbate the inequality of access to books in a way that is both classist and racist. A brief, but fact packed essay by Schools Matter's own Dr. Stephen Krashen entitled Kindelizaton: Are Books Obsolete? patently disproves everything Superintendent Deasy claims. Let's look at some of the important facts the essay presents.
Data shows that "ebooks appear to be capturing some of the paperback book market, but certainly not all of it, and not the hard cover or tradebook market. Thus far ebooks make up only a tiny percentage of total school library collections." [1] In other words, while ebooks are making inroads in the profitable popular paperbook sector, there hasn't been a great deal of investment in the more costly and lower volume textbook and hardcover sectors. As a consequence "ebooks only account for one-half of one percent of school library collections, and this is predicted to increase to only 7.8% in five years." [2]
It isn't just that ebooks aren't widespread enough to be considered a suitable replacement for school libraries. It's that access to ebooks is strictly class based:
The problem is the expense. Right now, only higher-income readers can afford ebook readers and ebooks. Kindles, for example, cost at least $100 each, and ebooks cost about $10, beyond the budget for those living in poverty. [3]
A table in Krashen's paper shows only four percent of people with household incomes under $30,000 owned ebook-readers, and that percentage remained constant for the nineteen months prior to publication of the paper. Krashen's conclusion is equally revealing:
The cost of ebook readers and ebooks makes them much less available to students from high-poverty families and under-funded school libraries. (Note that it is usually not possible to share ebooks.) Ebooks are allowing the print-rich to get even print-richer. [4]
It isn't surprising that people who get doctoral degrees from Cracker Jack boxes, or worse, purchase them from convicted criminals like Robert Felner in exchange for six figure grants, might be unaware of such research. More cynical readers might be tempted to suspect Deasy's deep ties to monopolistic software moguls like Bill Gates and technobabble charlatans like Tom Vander Ark as possible explanations for his intentional razing of school libraries in favor of profitable, but income exclusive, ebooks. Those things said, one would like to think the head of one of the largest school districts in the country would have a grasp of the basic fundamentals surrounding pedagogical issues and would be immune from pandering to his deep pocketed associates. Given the frightening lack of capacity of California's schools, outlined in UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access "The Train that is about to Hit," Deasy's notion of "let them eat ebooks" borders on criminal.
Research emphatically puts to lie Deasy's assertion that "libraries would be irrelevant soon as books will move to electronic format." In a state where the ratio of students to librarians is nearly 5,500 to 1 [5], Deasy's outright dismissal of the importance of libraries and books, combined with policies that exacerbate the problem, strongly convict him in his role in neoliberal dismantling of public education. Of course that's Deasy's capacity, he wasn't brought in by the Broad/Gates/Walton Triumvirate to fix LAUSD, he was brought in to destroy it. Collectively we need to reject Deasy's false narrative and demand he spend our funds on libraries and classrooms, not he and his fellow administrators' lavish lifestyles! Collectively we need to fight the privatization of public education!
_____
NOTES
[1] Krashen, Stephen. 2011. Kindelizaton: Are Books Obsolete?. Books and Articles by Stephen D. Krashen. Accessed September 20, 2011. http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles/kindelization.pdf
[2-4] Ibid.
[5] This wonderful infographic from the UCLA IDEA article mentioned above illustrates what the plutocrat class has done to California's education system.
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