Supporting teachers -- or taking aim at them?
I decided to blog about the book "Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers" (Daniel Moulthrop, Ninive Clements Calegari and Dave Eggers). Then after I finished it, I thought, jeez, I really have to do a lot of side research to do this thoroughly.
But I'm a working mom with a lot of volunteer commitments (and I ain't getting paid by the hour to blog), so if I want to get this done at all, I'm going to have to do it without the research I'd prefer.
"Teachers Have It Easy" (THIE) is written by the folks who bring us the wonderful 826 Valencia writing workshop, which also offers a $1,500 award for a teacher each month. I think their commitment to improving the lives of teachers is sincere, so I just have to speculate that they've been badly misled.
The two issues here are that THIE basically supports the whole notion of tying teacher pay to performance, a plan favored by the union-busting and public-school-bashing right and often viewed as an attack on teachers. And it strongly supports charter schools, which are at bottom a weapon in the right's arsenal aimed at weakening and destroying public education. Busting teachers' unions is also a key goal of the charter movement. That's about paying them less, not more.
I believe — I hope — that the authors genuinely didn't get all this, as opposed to the more conspiratorial view. Either view is unpleasant and troubling. 826 Valencia is an admirable project (my own daughter is doing her second session of workshops there right now).
THIE focuses a lot on the SFUSD charter Leadership High School and one awesome former teacher, Jonathan Dearman, who burned himself out devoting superhuman effort to working with Leadership's largely at-risk students. Drained and broke, he gave it up to go into real estate. (See my previous commentary on how charter school successes based on demanding superhuman commitment from overworked teachers are unsustainable.) Leadership, THIE correctly notes, once had a stellar reputation and is now in meltdown, with students rushing to get out of there and into SFUSD's once-scorned Balboa High School (just down the block) faster than you can say "midsemester transfer." The reason, THIE indicates, is that — well, charter school successes based on demanding superhuman commitment from overworked teachers are unsustainable.
Yet THIE really doesn't get the nature of the charter setup. In writing about Dearman, the authors indicate that he would have been held to SFUSD's salary schedule. Well, no, he wouldn't. Charter school teachers in SFUSD (and most places) are nonunion, not held to SFUSD's salary schedule, and charters can pay them whatever they want. That's a pretty huge point to miss, and I feel like I should call up one of the authors and ask "hey, what's the deal here?" Pressed for time, I'll just post that question here instead.
I'm sure Leadership couldn't afford to pay him more, but that's not because they were forced to stick with some old hidebound union contract. They could have done anything they could afford, and the SFUSD pay scale doesn't apply.
THIE has a long section praising a charter in Pacoima, near Los Angeles, the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center. Vaughn teachers, it says, get lower base pay than teachers in L.A. Unified, but can bump their pay way up with performance bonuses. The principal devotes a lot of her time and energy to fundraising (of course via the Gates Foundation, with its eternal faith in showering money on anything as long as it's a charter).
I can't confirm or dispute THIE's claims about Vaughn's success — its API ranking is only 3 (scale of 1-10, with 10 being highest), but its Similar Schools ranking (against schools with comparable demographics) is 9. In the little research I did do, I found a right-wing (of course)commentary praising Vaughn with this dubious point:
To me, that's a warning sign that those kids were unprepared for conventional schools — indicating failure, not success, by Vaughn.
Vaughn is extremely segregated — 97% Latino — again, see my previous cmomentary. It's also huge — a K-8 of nearly 1,500 students — which I swear THIE never mentions. Charter advocates routinely portray charters as a way to create popular small schools, so I couldn't help wondering if THIE specifically chose not to mention that glaring point — unflattering in an era when large schools are widely viewed as impersonal and dehumanizing. If I missed the reference, I eat my words.
An afterword written by Dave Eggers praises Green Dot Public Schools, one of the numerous enterprises (this one a nonprofit) devoted to opening chains of charter schools. As SFUSD Board of Ed commissioner Jill Wynns points out, what these chains amount to are separate, parallel school districts — publicly funded but entirely unaccountable to the public. (Yes, I know the charter advocates will retort that they're accountable to the parents whose kids attend. That's about marketing — for example, Edison Schools win parent loyalty largely by giving inflated grades and dumping troublemaking kids out into district schools — and ignores a school district's responsibility to do what's best for all kids, not just the kids in one school.)
THIE further gives me pause by quoting right-wing education "researcher" Caroline Minter Hoxby in several places, without even hinting at her widely known identity as a vigorous public-education opponent — the charter/voucher/privatization queen.
The area I'd really like to have researched before I commented is the notion of merit pay and performance bonuses vs. "lockstep" pay scales. I know that teachers' unions view the former as a long-term way to weaken teachers by eliminating their bargaining strength. I wish I could discuss that part more knowledgeably. But this book left me baffled by advocating a position so strongly favored by the anti-public-school elements of the right, without really seeming to fathom what it was saying. I don't get it.
&mdash Caroline
But I'm a working mom with a lot of volunteer commitments (and I ain't getting paid by the hour to blog), so if I want to get this done at all, I'm going to have to do it without the research I'd prefer.
"Teachers Have It Easy" (THIE) is written by the folks who bring us the wonderful 826 Valencia writing workshop, which also offers a $1,500 award for a teacher each month. I think their commitment to improving the lives of teachers is sincere, so I just have to speculate that they've been badly misled.
The two issues here are that THIE basically supports the whole notion of tying teacher pay to performance, a plan favored by the union-busting and public-school-bashing right and often viewed as an attack on teachers. And it strongly supports charter schools, which are at bottom a weapon in the right's arsenal aimed at weakening and destroying public education. Busting teachers' unions is also a key goal of the charter movement. That's about paying them less, not more.
I believe — I hope — that the authors genuinely didn't get all this, as opposed to the more conspiratorial view. Either view is unpleasant and troubling. 826 Valencia is an admirable project (my own daughter is doing her second session of workshops there right now).
THIE focuses a lot on the SFUSD charter Leadership High School and one awesome former teacher, Jonathan Dearman, who burned himself out devoting superhuman effort to working with Leadership's largely at-risk students. Drained and broke, he gave it up to go into real estate. (See my previous commentary on how charter school successes based on demanding superhuman commitment from overworked teachers are unsustainable.) Leadership, THIE correctly notes, once had a stellar reputation and is now in meltdown, with students rushing to get out of there and into SFUSD's once-scorned Balboa High School (just down the block) faster than you can say "midsemester transfer." The reason, THIE indicates, is that — well, charter school successes based on demanding superhuman commitment from overworked teachers are unsustainable.
Yet THIE really doesn't get the nature of the charter setup. In writing about Dearman, the authors indicate that he would have been held to SFUSD's salary schedule. Well, no, he wouldn't. Charter school teachers in SFUSD (and most places) are nonunion, not held to SFUSD's salary schedule, and charters can pay them whatever they want. That's a pretty huge point to miss, and I feel like I should call up one of the authors and ask "hey, what's the deal here?" Pressed for time, I'll just post that question here instead.
I'm sure Leadership couldn't afford to pay him more, but that's not because they were forced to stick with some old hidebound union contract. They could have done anything they could afford, and the SFUSD pay scale doesn't apply.
THIE has a long section praising a charter in Pacoima, near Los Angeles, the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center. Vaughn teachers, it says, get lower base pay than teachers in L.A. Unified, but can bump their pay way up with performance bonuses. The principal devotes a lot of her time and energy to fundraising (of course via the Gates Foundation, with its eternal faith in showering money on anything as long as it's a charter).
I can't confirm or dispute THIE's claims about Vaughn's success — its API ranking is only 3 (scale of 1-10, with 10 being highest), but its Similar Schools ranking (against schools with comparable demographics) is 9. In the little research I did do, I found a right-wing (of course)commentary praising Vaughn with this dubious point:
It was decided to add grades because too many of Vaughn’s now-successful students were running into difficulties as they moved to higher grades in conventional schools within the district.
To me, that's a warning sign that those kids were unprepared for conventional schools — indicating failure, not success, by Vaughn.
Vaughn is extremely segregated — 97% Latino — again, see my previous cmomentary. It's also huge — a K-8 of nearly 1,500 students — which I swear THIE never mentions. Charter advocates routinely portray charters as a way to create popular small schools, so I couldn't help wondering if THIE specifically chose not to mention that glaring point — unflattering in an era when large schools are widely viewed as impersonal and dehumanizing. If I missed the reference, I eat my words.
An afterword written by Dave Eggers praises Green Dot Public Schools, one of the numerous enterprises (this one a nonprofit) devoted to opening chains of charter schools. As SFUSD Board of Ed commissioner Jill Wynns points out, what these chains amount to are separate, parallel school districts — publicly funded but entirely unaccountable to the public. (Yes, I know the charter advocates will retort that they're accountable to the parents whose kids attend. That's about marketing — for example, Edison Schools win parent loyalty largely by giving inflated grades and dumping troublemaking kids out into district schools — and ignores a school district's responsibility to do what's best for all kids, not just the kids in one school.)
THIE further gives me pause by quoting right-wing education "researcher" Caroline Minter Hoxby in several places, without even hinting at her widely known identity as a vigorous public-education opponent — the charter/voucher/privatization queen.
The area I'd really like to have researched before I commented is the notion of merit pay and performance bonuses vs. "lockstep" pay scales. I know that teachers' unions view the former as a long-term way to weaken teachers by eliminating their bargaining strength. I wish I could discuss that part more knowledgeably. But this book left me baffled by advocating a position so strongly favored by the anti-public-school elements of the right, without really seeming to fathom what it was saying. I don't get it.
&mdash Caroline
Labels: Charters
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