The defenders of traditional public education participating in
Saturday’s Save Our Schools rally in D.C. want
everyone to believe in a little narrative: that they’re saving
America’s public schools from heedless reformers and cost-cutting
Republican governors.
The march’s organizers also want
people to believe that the rally is a grassroots effort sustained
by teachers and parents working together to preserve education.
They proclaim that the No Child Left Behind Act and other school
reform efforts, which have emphasized the use of student
performance data culled from “high stakes” standardized tests, is
leading to the shutdown of schools and to teachers losing their
jobs. And, as they stand, chant and wave placards across the street
from the White House at the Ellipse and demand that President
Barack Obama put an end to his school reform efforts, they will
also play upon the images of the civil rights movement of the
1960s, whose leaders rightfully and effectively used such protest
rallies to end Jim Crow discrimination.
That organizers and headliners
of the Save Our Schools rally include such big names as Oakland,
Calif., teacher and Education Week blogger Anthony Cody
and author and activist Jonathan Kozol weakens the claims that the
rally is a grassroots affair. It gets even weaker when the biggest
star for the event is Diane
Ravitch, the once-respectable New York University historian and
Bush Administration appointee who has become the darling of
teachers’ union bosses and the talk show circuit for her screeds
against charter schools. When you consider that half of the rally’s
$100,000 budget comes from NEA and AFT — who have also endorsed
the event — it becomes clear that this march isn’t just some
organic affair.
Granted, No Child has
exposed the woeful quality of America’s public schools, helped the
school reform movement gain political and grassroots support, and
helped weaken NEA and AFT influence. But, until now, the supposedly
“high-stakes tests” emphasized under the law have been anything
but. Just 11 percent of the nation’s dropout factories and failure
mills were shut down between the 2003-2004 and 2008-2009 school
years, according to a
report released earlier this year by the Thomas B. Fordham
Institute. If anything, the Obama administration has focused on
turning around the nation’s laggard schools — including devoting
$3.5 billion to the federal School Improvement Program — even
though such turnarounds work out just one percent of the
time.
The Obama administration’s Race
to the Top initiative, along with efforts by states such as Florida
and Ohio to require the use of student test data in evaluating
teachers, are certainly beginning to subject teachers to the kind
of performance management typically found in the performance
sector. Moves by reform-minded mayors and school districts to
restrict laggard teachers from gaining near-lifetime employment
obtained through tenure is also starting to work; just 58 percent
of recently-hired New York City teachers gained tenure this past
school year, versus nearly all teachers five years earlier. Still,
only 2.1 percent of teachers are ever dismissed for poor
performance, according to the U.S. Department of
Education.
Certainly education spending is
being cut, with 20 out of 37 states reducing education expenditures
this year. This comes after five decades of constant increases in
school spending (including a 16 percent increase between 2000
and 2007). Most states have avoided cutting school budgets and have
gotten help from the Obama administration, which has provided $95
billion in federal stimulus spending and another $10 billion ladled
to states and school districts as part of last year’s Edujobs
deal.
When you look closely, the Save
Our Schools rally is really the March to Save Teachers’ Unions.
This is because four decades of dissatisfaction with American
education — along with the high cost of lackluster schools — is
finally coming home to roost.
States must wrangle with $137
billion in budget shortfalls in the coming two fiscal years, and
deal with $1.4 trillion in long-term teachers’ pension deficits and
retired teacher healthcare benefits. The average state spent 34
cents on benefits for every dollar of teacher salary in 2008-2009
versus 28 cents six years ago. These burdens have led
budget-cutting Republican and Democrat governors to take aim at the
array of generous defined-benefit pensions, nearly-free healthcare
plans, near-lifetime employment privileges and degree-and
seniority-based pay scales that have long made teaching the
most-lucrative profession (and most-insulated from hiring and
firing) in the public sector — and have long been the source of
NEA and AFT influence. It has led them to team up with the nation’s
school reform movement, which has proven that traditional teacher
compensation is both overly costly and ineffective at rewarding
high-quality teachers and spurring student achievement, to move
towards alternatives such as performance-based
pay and make it tougher for laggard teachers to
keep their jobs.
NEA and AFT affiliates have
fought hard against the efforts — and devoting even more of their
$622 million in annual dues — towards rallies and
flexing their influence at the ballot box. But as proven by
governors such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Chris Christie in
New Jersey, who successfully backed efforts to abolish collective
bargaining and require teachers to contribute more to their fringe
benefits, the unions are getting little sympathy either from
politicians or from voters. The fact that the NEA moved earlier
this month to
endorse President Obama’s re-election bid in spite of their
enmity towards his reform efforts proves that neither it nor the
AFT call the shots in Democratic Party politics.
Meanwhile the NEA, the AFT and
Save Our Schools organizers are also losing sway over the very
families they claim to represent. Just 18 percent of parents
surveyed last year by the Gallup Organization and education group
Phi Delta Kappa gave the nation’s schools a rating of A or B, a
nine-point decline over the past 25 years. Middle-class families —
including those black,
Asian and Latino households who moved from failing urban
districts to the suburbs in the hopes that their children would get
a high-quality education — are finding out the hard way that
low-quality teaching, especially in reading
and math, can
be as pervasive in those schools as in the urban dropout factories
they worked hard to avoid. For urban parents, along with big-city
mayors and young Democrats, the continuing failure of traditional
public schools secured their support for charters, vouchers and
takeovers of faltering districts.
This isn’t to say that school
reformers have fully won the hearts
and minds of the public. They still haven’t done much to help
parents get the data they need to choose better schools and haven’t
addressed the lifestyle concerns that are as much a part of
education discussions as school quality. But the Save Our Schools
gang has long ago lost support from most families and taxpayers for
the costly
failed vision of education they continue to
offer.
