I have been totally flummoxed on what in today’s world constitutes a progressive agenda for public education. I believe I am a progressive on many debatable public policy issues. When I attempt to outline a progressive agenda for K-12 education I am personally conflicted now more than ever.
Conflict #1
The Rhodda Act, named for its author, State Sen. Al Rhodda, was the vehicle to give collective bargaining rights to California teachers in the 1970s. I viewed collective bargaining as a progressive policy, one to lead education to new horizons with renewed teacher authority and vision. I was elected as president of 400 county teachers as their elected union leader in 1980-82.
Yet, as an elementary and middle school principal, I began to view teacher contracts negotiated at the collective bargaining table as an impediment to change. Now as a school board member I see the collective bargaining instrument as a tool to seek necessary change in an ever-changing world. I do believe the salary portion of a typical collectively bargained contract is regressive. A progressive agenda should include pay-for-performance…more on this conflict later.
Conflict #2
I thought the progressive agenda, which I championed, called for non-segregated high-quality public schools with smart and caring teachers for all children. Except for achieving integration, I believed neighborhood schools were sacrosanct. Yet this agenda did not help lead to elimination of the achievement gap while increasing graduation rates.
The supply of highly effective, smart and caring teachers was not as abundant as needed, and most of them were in suburban affluent schools and districts. I still believe a progressive agenda would identify the most highly effective teachers, especially in reading, and place these teachers with the students in elementary school primary grades that have the least advantaged students. Therefore, a progressive agenda would create incentives for teachers to move to inner city, low performing schools.
Conflict #3
As a teacher in the 1970’s and 1980’s I was not a proponent of choice or vouchers. Now vouchers have morphed into a Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama Charter School movement. President Obama in his Race To The Top funding is asking for states to lift their caps on the number of Charter schools allowed. Is this part of a progressive agenda? Now both Republicans and Democrats alike are praising the Charter movement and choice from the highest mountaintop.
I was resistant and hesitant to jump on the Charter bandwagon as a panacea for public school ills and I am still cautious about it. I have observed some Charter schools like Downtown Collge Preparatory and Rocketship Mateo Sheedy, authorized by San Jose Unified and Santa Clara County Office of Education respectively, as schools on the vanguard of meeting the educational needs of the least advantaged, low-income youth.
However, there are many other Charters that have failed, like MACSA Charters in San Jose and Gilroy. Now in Diane Ravitch’s number one downloaded book on the new IPad, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System”, she questions whether there is an adequate supply of teachers willing to work fifty-hour weeks to sustain the Charter movement. A 2009 EdSource Study on Charters concludes the movement is limited and not scaleable since there is a finite supply of the types of teachers and leaders that make a difference for all children whether in a Charter school or traditional public school.
A progressive agenda should level the playing field for all policies both traditional public and Charter schools must adhere. Currently, most Charter schools and Charter Management Organizations do want collective bargaining, although Green Dot CMO in Los Angeles has a collectively bargained agreement with teachers and management, but all teachers serve “at will”. There is no tenure.
Conflict #4
School accountability is neither a progressive or conservative issue. Rather it is right for schools to be accountable by using data to inform taxpayers, students, parents, and community of its overall effectiveness with its primary mission, student achievement. Yet, the testing movement created by No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan supported Elementary and Secondary Education Act Bill, has destructively narrowed the schools curricular offerings to math and English due to state testing.
Testing skills are the coin of the realm. In my progressive view history and science are equally vital to our success as a citizen, visual and performing arts, too. This narrowing of our national curriculum is at the expense of a rich, diverse education that helps perpetuate a democratic system of government.
Conflict #5
I view the tenure of teachers as controversial. I can no longer support California’s model of tenure as progressive. One can achieve tenure in two years with satisfactory evaluations based on two to three pro forma observations. This is wrong. In fact the CA education code uses permanent status as the language that equates with tenure. Bill and Melinda Gates are funding 5 school districts in 5 states to study pay-for-performance, teacher quality and tenure over the next 7 years. In 2015 we might have enough information from this study’s findings to begin to craft a new progressive model for tenure in the 21st century.
As Governor Charles Crist from Florida has learned it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine what constitutes a progressive agenda in public education. Gov. Crist by vetoing the controversial teacher pay and tenure bill, SB 6, might run as an Independent rather than as a Republican. Most Republicans favored the legislation. Serious debating of issues from conservative to progressive views must continue to be cornerstone of our democracy.
Newsweek covered the tenure and accountability problems well:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/234590
Thank you, teachers union. You are ruining education and blaming it on others.
Thanks Joseph for your thoughtful post on the dichotomy facing schools. Many of the rules under which school districts in California operate have positive motivations, but lead to some of the problems you outline.
I commend you for posting such an essay on this forum. I imagine you will be attacked mightily from both sides for your comments.
The education system is stuck in the 50’s and 60’s. Very little has changed in the way that our children are educated. The primary difference between today’s classrooms and the ones of my youth are that chalk boards have been replaced by white boards, and some overhead projectors have been replace by computer projectors. Oh, yeah, and videotape/DVD has replaced slideshows and 16mm projectors.
Worse, the education system has not learned a fundamental lesson that business learned in the 1980’s: you cannot inspect quality into the product. This is especially true for state testing. The results of the state tests do not affect students’ grades, so why should the students care…other than because teachers and administrators constantly harp on the importance of the test results?
And worse, still, “teaching to the test” has virtually eliminated the multi-modal learning choices of the past. Gone are the vocational high school classes of my youth. Yet the very people who would benefit most from vocational training are the ones falling out of our system.
I’m no educator, so maybe I’m totally off base. Or maybe educators are the problem…
DiSalvo in Conflict #2: “Yet this agenda did not help lead to elimination of the achievement gap while increasing graduation rates.”
Most of DiSalvo’s conflicts would disappear if he re-thought his favorite rubric, “the achievement gap.” The term explicitly blames the victim of our public schools. It is implicitly racist, and it is negative, divisive, and regressive.
A better tool to re-orient our thinking toward the problems in every segment of the educational system is “the opportunity gap” which is positive, unifying, and progressive.
For more on this point, go to:
http://missioncitylantern.blogspot.com/2010/04/closing-opportunity-gap-interview-with.html
Good insight!
DiSalvo blames the consumer rather than the supplier.
From the educrat perspective, the education system provides wonderful educational services by dedicated, professional, “credentialed” and unionized teachers, lead by astutely intellectual, effective, and compassionate administrators.
The failure is on the part of the dull-witted, lazy slugs slouching at the desks with their iPods plugged into their ears. They failed to “achieve”. It’s their fault!!
This reminds me of a news item I saw twenty or so years ago. The Cuban Communist Party newspaper reported that Cuba had failed to achieve its annual production goal of fifteen million tons of sugar that was set by the Great Leader Fidel. In bureaucratese, there was a sugar production “achievement gap”.
The newspaper lauded the work of the government bureacrats and functionaries for their enthusiastic support and promotion of the plan. Reading between the lines, it seemed that the failure was due to the workers not working hard enough.
Since the leader was a genius, and the government did its part, only the people were at fault. The solution, obviously, was for the government to stay but for the people to be replaced.
I crappy blog promoting a crappy point of view.
http://www.savesantaclara.org/James_Rowen.php
Joe mentioned Governor Charles Crist. Here’s an interview with Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, where he talks about how he’s taking on the teachers union:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303348504575184120546772244.html
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“I’m a product of public schools in New Jersey,” Mr. Christie explains, “and I have great admiration for people who commit their lives to teaching, but this isn’t about them. This is about a union president who makes $265,000 a year, and her executive director who makes $550,000 a year. This is about a union that has been used to getting its way every time. And they have intimidated governors for the last 30 years.”
While the state lost 121,000 jobs last year, education jobs in local school districts soared by more than 11,000. Over the past eight years, according to Mr. Christie, K-12 student enrollment has increased 3% while education jobs have risen by more than 16%. The governor believes cuts in aid to local schools in his budget could be entirely offset if existing teachers would forgo scheduled raises and agree to pay 1.5% of their medical insurance bill for one year, just as new state employees will be required to do every year.
A new Rasmussen poll found that 65% of New Jersey voters agree with him about a one-year pay freeze for teachers. But the teachers union wants to close the budget gap by raising the income tax rate on individuals and small businesses making over $400,000 per year to 10.75% from its current 8.97%.
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Would any California politicians be brave enough to do the same?
Even the regulars on this forum who rant about anything government-run seem strangely quiet. Where are all the big, bad, gun-totin’ Republicans now? Are all their kids in private schools?
> Even the regulars on this forum who rant about anything government-run seem strangely quiet. Where are all the big, bad, gun-totin’ Republicans now? Are all their kids in private schools?
Let me lay down my Glock for a moment and grab my iPad.
I AGREE WITH GOVERNOR CHRISTIE!!
And by the way, private schools are pretty neat.
You get to meet a lot of snooty elitist rich liberal parents like Mr. and Mrs. Clinton and Mr. and Mrs. Obama who also put their kids in private schools.
Their limo drives are always ready to dish some dirt if you cross their palms with the right presidential image. The tabloids pay big bucks for dirt an hypocritical snooty rich liberals.
> I viewed collective bargaining as a progressive policy, one to lead education to new horizons with renewed teacher authority and vision. I was elected as president of 400 county teachers as their elected union leader in 1980-82.
> Yet, as an elementary and middle school principal, I began to view teacher contracts negotiated at the collective bargaining table as an impediment to change.
It’s a mystery to me why anyone would want to make such an embarrassing and public confession of misfeasance, naivete and folly.
But don’t let us interrupt.
By all means, continue.
I agree with a recent post by the Anonymous Liberal (A.L.).
“This is the first post I’ve written since last November. Part of what drove me to take a break from writing about politics was a growing realization that the Great Conversation in this country had completely ceased, that the various sides were no longer speaking the same language, like dialects that have—over time—drifted so far apart that they are no longer mutually intelligible. Watching Fox News and Tea Party rallies, it became apparent to me that the right wing in this country had severed the few remaining ties it had to the world I live in, the empirical world.
In its place, the Right has constructed its own Bubble World, a sort of political Truman Show complete with its own facts and rules (albeit facts and rules that are constantly changing based on political expediency). The writers, directors, and actors in this conservative version of Seahaven are the legions of GOP politicians, operatives, and conservative media outlets that relentlessly push this politically expedient alternative reality, and the Trumans are the millions of regular Americans who don’t realize the joke is on them.”
I hope we can get back to an empirical world where debate is based on facts presented intelligently, whether on educational issues, political or social issues, and becomes once again the coin of the realm. Until then we destructively pursue an agenda of name calling and bottom feeding.
Joseph Di Salvo
> Watching Fox News and Tea Party rallies, it became apparent to me that the right wing in this country had severed the few remaining ties it had to the world I live in, the empirical world.
> In its place, the Right has constructed its own Bubble World, a sort of political Truman Show complete with its own facts and rules (albeit facts and rules that are constantly changing based on political expediency).
A perfect statement of the reality paradigm of the modern liberal uttered by a perfectly named poster (“Anonymous Liberal”.)
In essence, it states the liberal conceit that the Liberal is at the center of reality and that anyone and everyone with a differing perspective has “severed the few remaining ties … to … the empirical world.”
Liberalism is narcissism:
“the right wing in this country had severed the few remaining ties it had to the world I live in….”
In case you missed the point, for a liberal, it’s all about ME! ME! ME! and the “world I live in”.
One of the eternally amusing aspects about liberal narcissism is that it is so completely invisible to the liberal himself. To the narcissist, narcissism is a COMPLETELY NORMAL reality.
One of the most defining utterances of the modern liberal narcissist is creditable to Bill Clinton:
“I feel your pain.”
In the reality of the modern liberal narcissist, this is, on the face if it, an entirely laudable sentiment of Bill Clinton’s wonderful magnanimity to other human beings.
But, for those who understand the narcissistic psyche and how to decode their self-referential perspective, Clinton’s statement is really about himself.
“While it may be noteworthy that you are experiencing some pain, it is of remarkable cosmic significance that someone as wonderful as Bill Clinton is actually empathizing with your experience.”
From the amount of posts and pseudonyms you sling around this forum, it is apparent that YOU are the narcissist.
You two are so cute… just like children, with your overuse of capitalization and name-calling. Is somebody cranky because they missed their nap? Maybe some milk and cookies would make everyone feel better?
A jealous Doofinator impostor writes:
> From the amount of posts and pseudonyms you sling around this forum, it is apparent that YOU are the narcissist.
Pretty darn weak, if you ask me.
I’m sure you can do better.
I’m even sure that YOU think YOU can do better. After all, you ARE a narcissist.
> From the amount of posts and pseudonyms you sling around this forum, it is apparent that YOU are the narcissist.
The Doofinator feels your pain.
> You two are so cute… just like children, with your overuse of capitalization and name-calling. Is somebody cranky because they missed their nap? Maybe some milk and cookies would make everyone feel better?
I agree. We’re better than they are.
As a matter of fact, we’re better than just about everyone, aren’t we.
I started home schooling my son and it is the best experience.
I wish I had home schooled my two older kids.
There are so many co-ops and resources here for home schooling parents.
Your homeschool child can attend junior college when he or she is in high school and can have an AA by thte time he/she is 18 years old.
Plus you pay NO tuition if you are home schooling.
My son is so happy to be away from the teasing, fighting, foul language, etc of school!