Eugene weekly., October 20, 2011, Page 14, Image 14

Reforming
Education Reform
Teachers fight Wall Street/politicians’ war on schools
A
fter a decade-long war
on public education
by
Democratic
and
Republican
presidents
and Wall Street that has
wracked schools with
high-stakes bubble tests
and crowded classes
beyond fi re codes, but
has left kids no better
educated, teachers are
fi nally starting to fi ght
back.
“Last year students at my school spent
four to fi ve weeks taking standardized tests,
that doesn’t even include the time they
spent preparing for those tests,” said teacher
April LaCombe last week. LaCombe
spoke through a bullhorn to a group of
teachers protesting outside while U.S.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave
a speech to Oregon Business Association
(OBA) executives in Portland. Duncan
joined Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates last
year in calling for larger class sizes and
privatization of public schools.
“When Barack Obama was elected,
we teachers rejoiced,” said LaCombe,
an east Portland teacher with 20 years of
experience. “But with a heavy heart, we
teachers watched those hopes disappear
into thin air.”
“This year I gave three standardized
tests to my students within the fi rst month
of school,” veteran teacher Joyce Rosenau
told Obama’s education chief in a Portland
middle school packed with teachers
who had come to educate Duncan about
classroom reality before he met with the
corporate group. “Those students had to
do test prep work instead of their reading
groups,” Rosenau said. After the test
cramming, “those students said they now
hated reading,” she said.
Schools “are no longer rich nurturing
places where children became problem
solvers and active participants in their own
learning,” Rosenau said. “I would ask you,
Mr. Duncan, to remove the business model
of education,” she said to wild applause
from the teachers.
The Gates and Walmart foundations,
Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg
and other foundations headed by Wall
Street hedge fund billionaires, technology
executives and developers have worked
closely with the Obama and Bush
administrations and school districts to
transform education into a corporate model
14 OCTOBER 20, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
with a bottom line focused on privatization
and testing. Although they face the
concentrated power of the most powerful
politicians and wealthiest tycoons in the
world, a grassroots uprising of teachers is
fi ghting back.
As Occupy Wall Street protests spread
across the nation, a groundswell of teachers
across the country are now fi ghting to end
the bipartisan Wall Street occupation of
public education. In July, thousands of
teachers converged on Washington, D.C.,
for a Save Our Schools march on the White
House. Local teachers plan to rally for
better schools at noon this Saturday, Oct.
22, at the old Federal Building at 7th and
Pearl.
If schools spend about 20 percent of
their time on standardized testing, as some
teachers claim, then the nation has spent
more than a trillion dollars forcing kids to
fi ll in bubbles over the last decade alone.
There’s little to show for it. The National
Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP), the nation’s most respected
standardized test, shows scores that are
essentially fl at over the past three decades
for 17 year olds. In international tests, the
U.S. now trails far behind Finland, which
has no standardized tests.
In Oregon, where Democratic Gov.
John Kitzhaber has joined Republicans
in pushing for using high-stakes tests to
fi re teachers and privatize schools, $6
billion has been spent on testing over the
last decade using the same formula with
similar fl at results on the NAEP.
Meanwhile, Colleen Works, the 2011
Oregon Teacher of the Year from Corvallis,
said she struggles to educate the crowds of
students crammed into her classes. “The
Obama administration keeps talking about
needing accountability for the teachers in
the classroom, and yet I see no measure
of accountability for those who are setting
up the conditions that are set up to hold
me accountable for my students when I
have 199 students a day and less than 30
seconds for each one of them.”
Obama hired Duncan to head the nation’s
schools even after the Chicago school
system he ran failed to show signifi cant
progress on the NAEP. Duncan, who has
no principal or teaching experience but did
play professional basketball in Australia,
went to a private high school with ample
funding and small classes.
That private school pedigree is also
shared by many of the other powerful
politicians and billionaires pushing big
by Alan Pittman
changes in public schools. Obama went to
a private school in Honolulu and sends his
kids to an expensive private school. Bill
Gates went to a private high school that,
like Duncan’s private alma mater, is exempt
from government testing requirements and
markets itself for small class sizes.
In Oregon, Kitzhaber sent his son to a
private school and just appointed a private
school teacher to head his education
efforts.
Duncan, Kitzhaber and Wall Street
school reformers have pushed converting
public schools into privately managed
charter schools as part of their reforms.
But multiple studies have shown little
evidence that charter schools are any
better than public schools. While some are
excellent, some are horrible and many are
mediocre.
“The research is clear, 80 percent of
charter schools perform no better and often
worse than traditional public schools,”
Suzanne Cohen, a Portland seventh grade
degrees and “targeted increases in class
size.”
But Forest Grove teacher Suzanne
Cordes
questioned
the
Obama
administration’s
spending
priorities.
“Those of us in the classrooms and working
with Oregon students are extremely
frustrated that our nation continues to
spend hundreds of billions of dollars on
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we
can’t fund our programs and teachers in the
classroom and even textbooks,” she told
Duncan to loud applause.
Other teachers questioned a high-stakes
testing focus that penalizes teachers and
schools for trying to help the hardest-to-
teach students.
“Instead of punishing teachers for
working with the students in the most
impoverished neighborhoods, let’s gain
stable funding, secure housing and a child
poverty rate that is far below the 22 percent
that we have now,” said LaCombe.
Kevin Mechling, the dean of students
at Portland’s Roosevelt High School, the
poorest in the state, told Duncan, “We are
held accountable for our students’ success
in a society that is unable to provide
them with their basic needs, needs that
include a roof over their heads and food
on their plates. When the students come
into our classrooms, they are already at a
disadvantage.”
Researchers have long known that
family poverty is one of the greatest
predictors of test performance. But testing
advocates have dismissed consideration
of poverty, calling it an excuse for bad
teachers.
But raising test scores has often had
little to do with education. The most
effective way to boost scores is to get
different students.
That happens when privately run charter
schools skim off the most motivated
families. Only the most stable families
‘Last year students at my school spent four to five weeks taking
standardized tests, that doesn’t even include the time they spent
preparing for those tests.’ — April LaCombe, teacher
math and science teacher, told Duncan.
This year Kitzhaber cut a deal with
Republicans to get more power for himself
over schools in exchange for allowing for-
profi t online charter school companies to
make big profi ts by diverting more money
from state education funding.
The virtual schools have “limited
accountability, oversight and transparency,
and the largest one in Oregon failed to
graduate 70 percent of its students,” Cohen
said.
This year private organizers of a hip-
hop charter school in Portland spent
$500,000 in federal school money without
ever opening for a day of class.
Last year Duncan argued to conservative
executives at the American Enterprise
Institute that funding cuts for education
were the “new normal.” The low funding
“can, and should be, embraced to make
dramatic improvements,” he said. Duncan
called for increasing emphasis on testing
by linking bubble scores to teacher pay,
reducing pay for teachers with master’s
with the most educated and motivated
parents are likely to enter or even know
about charter admission lotteries months
before school starts. Those parents’ kids
are already the most likely to succeed in
school. Meanwhile, public schools are left
with the least motivated families, special
education kids and children learning
English.
Another way to raise scores is to
cram to the test. Studies have shown that
cramming may raise scores on the target
test, but does little to increase education
and scores on other tests like the NAEP.
Another way is to simply cheat. Testing
advocates hailed Atlanta’s rising scores,
but this year the district was wracked by
the largest cheating scandal in the nation’s
history involving administrators and
teachers at 44 schools.
Another way is to simply change the
test. Many states have dumbed down tests
to show increased scores.
Test-driven reformers have called on
modeling school reform on corporate
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