Will Obama Sell Out Teachers-- And Students-- To Corporate Interests?

Corporate America sees a big untapped profit center: dismantling free public education and replacing it with a way to enrich themselves, like they're doing with the prison system. The attack on public employee unions (mostly teachers) is part of this initiative. And where's President Obama? On the wrong side of history... again. Back from some of the best Middle East reporting anywhere, Nick Kristof wrote an OpEd for the NY Times yesterday. But before we look at that one, let's look at one front-line battleground over for-profit charter schools: Compton, California. An acrimonious bid to take over McKinley Elementary School by Celerity Group was unanimously turned down by the Compton School Board. I've been following the battle closely because a friend of mine teaches there and another friend, Micah Ali, is a School Board member. Micah and I had dinner this weekend and we talked about some of the details that weren't part of the L.A. Times report.

After two months of controversy, the Compton school board Tuesday rejected a petition by parents aiming to use a groundbreaking state law to turn over their struggling elementary school to a charter operator.

Board members with the Compton Unified School District voted unanimously, 7-0, to return the petition to parents at McKinley Elementary, saying it failed to include information required by state regulations. District officials also found that parents cited the wrong education code section and failed to provide evidence that they had selected their desired charter operator, Celerity Educational Group, after a "rigorous review process" as required by state emergency regulations.

...The closely watched case represented the first test of a new law giving parents the power to petition for major reforms of low-performing schools, including shutting them down, changing staff and programs, and turning the campus over to a charter operator. Charters are independently run, publicly financed schools.

Under the law, valid signatures representing parents of half the school's students are required to trigger the reforms. In Compton, the petition campaign was organized by Parent Revolution, a Los Angeles-based educational reform group and charter school ally. The group said it submitted parent signatures for 275 of 438 McKinley students, or 62%.

Charter school ally indeed! Behind the effort to bust the teachers unions are a sleazy bunch of self-serving fake "reformers" enriching themselves by shilling for avaricious big corporate interests, the Chamber of Commerce and even, disgracefully, a rival union.

The in-your-face organizer of Green Dot charter schools, Steve Barr, is putting together what’s basically a fake parents’ movement down in Los Angeles-- or at least it’s a top-down alleged parents’ movement, created by Barr and run by paid organizer Ben Austin. The common term for a fake grassroots organization like this is “Astroturf.”

...Needless to say, it's not hard to win plenty of converts with a convincing pitch selling parents on a “guarantee” of making sweeping improvements at their kids’ schools. It’ll be interesting to see how the promise plays out.

I took a look at the fake parent group's website and noted this line in the bio of hired-gun leader Ben Austin, parent of a preschooler:

“Ben is looking forward to sending Fiona to their wonderful neighborhood elementary school, Warner; and is currently working on a Parent Revolution at their failing middle school, Emerson.”

I object on principle to referring to schools as "failing"-- that’s a simplistic and sweeping condemnation. There are children attending the schools damned as “failing,” and to me that amounts to telling them, “You’re failures.”

But forget my opinion; we want data. So I looked up the most recent Academic Performance Index score for Emerson (Ralph Waldo Emerson Middle School, Los Angeles Unified). (The API is California’s accountability reporting system for school achievement; it ranks schools based on a compilation of standardized test scores into a score on a 200-1000 scale, with 800 and up viewed as excellent.)

The 2008 API for “failing” Emerson is 701-- neither stellar nor disgraceful. SFUSD has some very highly regarded and sought-after schools with APIs well below 701.

I thought I’d see how the schools Green Dot runs-- which are hailed far and wide as successful nationwide models-- compare. Turns out the API of the 11 Green Dot schools averages 678.64. Hmm.

Four of Green Dot’s 12 schools have APIs far below Emerson’s 701:

Animo Jackie Robinson 597
Animo Justice 569
Animo Ralph Bunche 636
Animo Watts 614

Two more of Green Dot's "successful" schools have APIs of 705 (Animo Film & Theater and Animo South Los Angeles), which hardly leaves "failing" Emerson in the dust either. (All the listed Green Dot schools are in L.A. Unified.)

The rest of the Green Dot schools range from 715 to 749. (This tally excludes Locke, the highly publicized Watts high school newly taken over by Green Dot, which doesn’t yet have test scores from the Green Dot era.)

And by the way, even the L.A. Times, which has generally been starry-eyed about Green Dot, cops to the big advantage its schools have in terms of creaming more-motivated students (prior to the Locke takeover, which includes a commitment to accepting the students from the neighborhood).

"Green Dot charters, opened as alternatives to failing public schools, attracted motivated families that came from far-flung communities to place their children on waiting lists. As a result, enrollment was predictable and stable. ... The charter operator normally requires a certain amount of parent involvement."

Yet it appears that non-charter Emerson achieves its 701 API without the creaming advantage that the lower-performing Green Dot schools enjoy.

So I’m curious how Mr. Austin sees Emerson as “failing” and views Green Dot as its path to success.

I already know the answer will be some variation on “test scores are only part of the picture,” a view I agree with. Yet to the charter folks, test scores are THE picture when they’re blasting public schools as “failing.” They allow lots  more  nuance and margin for flexibility when it comes to their own schools.

Charter schools are not a magic bullet for education, although they may work very nicely for corporate bottom line and spineless, easily bought off politicians. Interestingly the very first charter school in Compton is the Barack Obama Charter School which, as you can see from the chart below, underperforms (in science) not just public schools across California but even public schools in Compton!


Compare the Academic Performance Index (API) Report for Barack Obama Charter School and next door Lincoln Elementary Public School and you'll see the public school actually outperforming the charter school. Instances where charter schools have done better than public schools are often accompanied by reports of blatant cheating on exams by staff.

Now some relevant points I want to share in Kristof's OpEd from yesterday's Times about how badly teachers are paid in our society. He starts by pointing out the pernicious fallacy that corporate shills like Wisconsin and Florida governors Scott Walker and Rick Scott make when they claim teachers are too highly compensated:

A basic educational challenge is not that teachers are raking it in, but that they are underpaid. If we want to compete with other countries, and chip away at poverty across America, then we need to pay teachers more so as to attract better people into the profession.

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.

These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers-- and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

We all understand intuitively the difference a great teacher makes. I think of Juanita Trantina, who left my fifth-grade class intoxicated with excitement for learning and fascinated by the current events she spoke about. You probably have a Miss Trantina in your own past.

One Los Angeles study found that having a teacher from the 25 percent most effective group of teachers for four years in a row would be enough to eliminate the black-white achievement gap.

Recent scholarship suggests that good teachers, even kindergarten teachers, increase their students’ earnings many years later. Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University found that an excellent teacher (one a standard deviation better than average, or better than 84 percent of teachers) raises each student’s lifetime earnings by $20,000. If there are 20 students in the class, that is an extra $400,000 generated, compared with a teacher who is merely average.

...[P]art of compensation is public esteem. When governors mock teachers as lazy, avaricious incompetents, they demean the profession and make it harder to attract the best and brightest. We should be elevating teachers, not throwing darts at them.

Consider three other countries renowned for their educational performance: Singapore, South Korea and Finland. In each country, teachers are drawn from the top third of their cohort, are hugely respected and are paid well (although that’s less true in Finland). In South Korea and Singapore, teachers on average earn more than lawyers and engineers, the McKinsey study found.

“We’re not going to get better teachers unless we pay them more,” notes Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, an education reform organization. Likewise, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform says, “We’re the first people to say, throw them $100,000, throw them whatever it takes.”

Both Ms. Wilkins and Ms. Allen add in the next breath that pay should be for performance, with more rigorous evaluation. That makes sense to me.

Starting teacher pay, which now averages $39,000, would have to rise to $65,000 to fill most new teaching positions in high-needs schools with graduates from the top third of their classes, the McKinsey study found. That would be a bargain.