Students first?

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Yesterday’s email brought a message that featured the smiling face of Bill Cosby asking me to join Michelle Rhee’s Students First organization. I deleted the email without responding, but today I’m having second thoughts.

As the Chicago teacher strike continued and the scapegoating of teachers was ramped up in the mainstream media, I decided I should say a bit more about why I do not support Rhee’s effort and others like it. Now that the strike has been suspended, I think it is even more important that those of us who still believe in American public education speak out.

First of all, Rhee, herself. Her tenure as chancellor of the DC schools was a colossal failure. Now she has reinvented herself as a consultant and media darling who earns big bucks for speaking to various echo chambers around the country. Michelle Rhee is to the politics of education what Sarah Palin is to politics generally. She has repeatedly falsified her record in promoting herself, recently in Great Britain.

Rhee’s organization is one of a network of well-funded efforts to undermine public schools. Some of these organizations make no secret of their ties to moneyed interests intent on replacing public schools with for-profit charters. With PR that is long on slogans, these interests have nothing of value to offer in the way of real help to struggling schools, historically abandoned by successive waves of flight from the nation’s cities.

What they do have to offer is a program of privatization. A test of their ideas is now underway in Michigan. Behind it is the educational equivalent of corporate predation with its ethic of “creative destruction.” The Obama administration has based its “Race to the Top” program on this dubious program, and this in spite of a strong protest from the National Academy of Sciences. Race to the Top appears to be failing in Tennessee, the program’s signature client.

I take Students First as the most recently organized and perhaps most visible effort to privatize public schools. It identifies teachers’ unions as the cause of blight in urban school systems because teachers’ unions are its most serious opponents in the public sphere. Moreover, it should not escape notice that the school privatization cabal shares a strategic methodology with the American Legislative Exchange Council. Just as ALEC has “written” the legislation for many states who have enacted voter suppression laws, so the Teacher Advancement Project and the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (and now Students First) have “written” programs to suppress and marginalize teachers.

None of this is to say that there are not good charter schools, though for-profit charter schools have a sorry history. Nor is this to say that there are not fine private schools among us. One of the strengths of American education has always been its mix of public and private efforts. What is new in our time is flight from public education that began with attempts to escape integration, continued with the establishment of Christian and country day schools and has now eventuated in the home schooling and charter school movements. And what is most distressing about this recent experience is the normalization of antipathy to public education.

Higher education is implicated in this trend. Correct me if I’m wrong. It has been fashionable, and continues to be so, among college and university educators, to denigrate public education at least since the 1950s. It is an article of faith amongst university educators outside colleges of education that professional programs in education are substandard and inferior. It is this complex of prejudices that has created the hegemony of English departments in colleges and universities, and it is a canard. I told a story about an education prof in my last post that was prejudicial. That prof, who believed that administrators made teachers good, did not represent the norm. More representative was another prof, with whom I was privileged to work for many years, whose curiosity, intellect, and spiritual insight endeared him to a generation of graduate students at the University of North Texas, and to me.

I also mentioned Roosevelt High School in St. Louis in my last post. Any liberal who supports Michelle Rhee’s program should spend some time at Roosevelt or at Vashon High School in North St. Louis. The idea that the problems these schools face can be solved by firing a few high-priced veteran teachers and replacing them with cheap substitutes is hogwash. Liberals might wish, as well, to examine the history of Imagine for profit charters in St. Louis, currently being closed amid reports of poor performance and financial impropriety. And nobody, liberal or otherwise, should be surprised by the corruption of Imagine schools or of schools like them in other cities. The for profit charter system is yet another corporate scheme to transfer public monies into private-sector coffers. It’s a scam like the publishing scams that have bloated the cost of textbooks and scholarly journals and are now coopting online education.

Meanwhile, there are partnership programs cooperating quietly with public schools that actually do put students first. One of them is the network of urban debate leagues. I have a good deal of experience with the St. Louis Urban Debate league and have seen its results. I recently wrote about a St. Louis high school student who is a debater. Debate enhances the likelihood that students who participate will graduate from high school. Among key findings of a new study that will soon be reported in the Journal of Adolescence are these:

  • Among the highest risk students, 72% of debaters graduated as compared with 43% of non-debaters.
  • The level of participation in debate (number of rounds debated) is a strong predictor of high school completion. Students who debate more, are more likely to graduate.
  • All students who debated, including those at-risk, scored higher on the ACT and were more likely to achieve college readiness benchmarks in English, Reading and Science.

Public education needs more programs like the UDL to restore valuable and life-enhancing activities such as music, dance, and art, that have been axed from many school programs in favor of teaching the test. Public education doesn’t need lessons in neoliberal economics or more demagoguery from political hacks like Rahm Emanuel, who is only the most recent politician to promote himself by attacking schools. And public education especially doesn’t need Michelle Rhee and her organization.

Shame on Bill Cosby.

Another school year . . .

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At seventy-five I am still teaching school. My mind still works. I’ve not lost the ability to talk to young people, and I enjoy their company. The enterprise helps to keep me alive; and so I’ve begun another year in the classroom. I could recall a host of good memories, but today I’m thinking about another, one that’s not so good.

I recall hearing an education prof (who should have known better) make the following claim in a lunchtime conversation years ago: ‘There’s no such thing as a good teacher. If a teacher does a good job, it’s because an administrator made her a good teacher.’ Even bracketing the sexism, it’s hard to take such a claim seriously.

But the Chicago public school system, with the tacit support of the Obama administration, has already put into effect a clumsy—some would say mindless—system of teacher evaluation designed to deprofessionalize Chicago teachers and subject them to a Taylorist efficiency scheme in which their performance in their jobs is to be disproportionateloy evaluated on the basis of “student performance” (i.e. according to their students’ scores on standardized tests).

The problems with these tests are many, even with regard to college admissions, and the present use to which they are being put as more and more school systems are being subjected to neoliberal programs of “reform,” is unconscionable. Now the Chicago teachers have struck in the attempt to preserve what professional dignity they have left, as Mayor Rahm Emanuel attempts to use the standardized testing canard to deprofessionalize them still further.

I have been a school teacher for fifty years. Though most of my experience has been as a teacher in colleges and universities, I have also taught in elementary and secondary schools and community colleges. In my time I have seen much good teaching, and I have also seen bad. After fifty years I remain convinced that the only civilized way to establish and maintain standards in the teaching profession is through peer review. Peer review has its problems; it is sometimes self-interested and idiosyncratic, but it is a damn sight better than the sort of administrative dictatorship we are seeing in Chicago. And the irony is that many liberals, who ought to know better, support mindless, top-down management schemes in the public schools

We live in a time when workers of all sorts are being subjected to deprofessionalizing, indeed to dehumanizing “oversight and dumb operant-conditioning gimmickry sold to organizations by snake-oil consultancies,” as my friend Tim Burke has put it, as well as to demands for more and more economic concessions from workers. One consequence of this trend is that the wages and benefits of teachers and other public workers are now sometimes better than those in the private sector; and this has given rise to another canard. No less a pundit than David Brooks claimed just days ago that paying teachers’ salaries and benefits “is becoming a burden that [the private economy] can no longer carry,” having conveniently forgotten that teachers pay taxes like everyone else. Unscrupulous politicians like Scott Walker and careless pundits like Brooks are urging us to believe that support for public workers amounts to support for unearned privilege and excess.

It simply isn’t so. Teachers work hard, often against unspeakable odds and in terrible working conditions. More often than not they buy needed school supplies out of their own pockets. Many are denied Social Security and forced into substandard health care programs. It is true that some teachers still work only nine months of the year, but that is no longer the norm; moreover, a substantial part of the complex of reasons that teachers are on the defensive in today’s anti-union, anti-worker environment is that people dislike teachers. This point has been made forcefully by Corey Robin in a recent blog.

I remember being bullied on the school grounds, and teachers who encouraged the bullying. I remember teachers who were martinets or, worse yet, were bullies themselves; and I remember corporal punishment. I was a kid who loved school from the first grade (I missed kindergarten because of a series of accidents), but I hated junior high school because a crowd of thugs who were being kept in junior high until they were sixteen were allowed to terrorize bookish boys. If I had not been sent to high school in the ninth grade where I found myself back in the midst of civilization, the entire course of my life might have been different.

Still, much antipathy towards teachers would be better directed at schools themselves, towards the role schools play in the socialization of children. There’s an old teacher joke about a kid who flunked “standing in line.” School is where we learn to conform, sometimes to vicious regimes of bahavior. But Robin’s argument is that teachers are disliked because they are public servants and as such do not participate in the suburban “meritocracy.”

“Those who can’t do, teach” goes the old saw. But where that traditionally bespoke a suspicion of fancy ideas that didn’t produce anything concrete, in my fancy suburb, it meant something else. Teachers had opted out of the capitalist game; they weren’t in this world for money. There could be only one reason for that: they were losers. They were dimwitted, unambitious, complacent, unimaginative,
and risk-averse. . . . No one, we were sure, became a teacher because she loved history or literature and wanted to pass that on to the next generation. All of them simply had no other choice. How did we know that? Because they weren’t lawyers or doctors or “businessmen”—one of those words, even in the post-Madmen era, still spoken with veneration and awe.

There’s a good deal to be said for Robin’s argument, though I think it’s too simple. But there are a couple of other arguments, each also too simple in itself, that I believe have strong explanatory power with respect to where we are as a nation with regard to public education. First, when we abolished segregated schools we retained a system of funding based on local property taxes that has continued the disproportionate allocation of resources to affluent, suburban schools and left inner city schools impoverished.

Even within city school systems, resources flow disproportionately to schools that serve affluent, mostly white students and their parents. I live a couple of blocks from Roosevelt High School in St. Louis, once one of the finest public high schools in the nation, now a dump. Roosevelt is being starved for resources. But worse still, Roosevelt is the one school in the city which is not a magnet school, and the consequence is that its student population is disproportionately made up of young people who will never graduate.

Second, the end of segregated public schools ushered in an era which has seen a massive incursion of political demagoguery into public school affairs at almost every level. Ten years ago the St. Louis city school board was so polarized that city schools were in disarray. The system was full of serious corruption and fiduciary malfeasance. The schools ultimately lost accreditation and remain unaccredited. They were taken over by the state some years ago and are slowly improving.

But in the interim Mayor Francis Slay devised a scheme to rig a school board election and install a group of his cronies as members. This cabal hired a turnaround firm to run the St. Louis schools, an action that led directly to their loss of accreditation. People got wise and threw the mayor’s cronies off the school board. But tremendous damage had been done. It is an open secret that the St. Louis Mayor’s office promotes the creation of for-profit charter schools, despite the abysmal record of corruption and miseducation those schools have in this city.

Power hungry mayors like Rahm Emanuel, Francis Slay, and yes Michael Bloomberg, have no business running public school systems.

More about at-will

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In the aftermath of Labor Day I’m also thinking of my former staff colleagues at the University of North Texas who are now subject to an employment-at-will policy instituted last summer after a sham consultation period in which staff concerns were largely ignored. UNT President Lane Rawlins has claimed that the new policy contains “checks and balances” that “will protect employees from arbitrary and unwarranted actions,” but his own description of the policy belies his claim.

I wrote about this last year, before the policy went into effect. UNT (which I still think of with some affection as North Texas) is operating under a new corporate structure headed by a chancellor, Lee Jackson, who is a political appointee, a structure very like that at the University of Virginia which recently led to abuses of authority widely aired in the national press. (I wrote several blog posts about events at UVA. You can find them listed under “Recent Posts” in the sidebar.) Here is what Chancellor Jackson said about at-will employment at UNT when he first announced that the new policy was in the works.

I am revising our employment policies because I believe improvement is needed. With enhanced training and by working together, I believe we can place a higher priority on the quality of our workforce and support for employees.

This is bureaucratic doublespeak. UNT officials never explained to staff why the change was needed or what “improvement” was being sought. Indeed, if reports are true, the meetings that were held to allow for staff “input” were exercises in administrative stonewalling and more doublespeak.

Of course the real meaning of the change is that UNT is simply following suit. At-will policies are now in effect throughout the Texas system of higher education as that system bends to the determination of Republican governor Rick Perry “to re-engineer Texas’s leading public universities to become more like businesses, driven by efficiency and profitability,” as reported in The Washington Post. The Post also reports that

Texas A&M University, ha[s] compiled a spreadsheet ranking faculty members according to whether they were earning their keep or costing the school money. The university already had rankled professors with a program that paid bonuses based on anonymous student evaluations.

Universities pay faculty members? What a novel idea! Nevertheless, at-will employment was once the norm in American law. A contemporary defense of the practice represents a nineteenth-century court’s view of the matter as follows:

May I not refuse to trade with any one? May I not forbid my family to trade with any one? May I not dismiss my domestic servant for dealing, or even visiting, when I forbid? And if my domestic, why not my farm-hand, or my mechanic, or teamster?

There is a gathering effort in our national life to reverse protections for workers and reintroduce older practices affirming master-slave relationships between those who labor and those who own or supervise. In the background of this one should recall how much of this country’s wealth was created by slave labor conscripted from Africa and Asia, as well as the history of repression of (and violence against) workers that accompanied the rise of the labor movement. To indicate how far we have gone towards reinstituting the practices of the bad old days, it is now claimed that worker’s rights enslave owners and managers.

Scarcity is the natural state of mankind. Abundance, on the other hand, only comes about after people have applied their labor to their natural surroundings. In other words, scarcity is held at bay only by productivity or “work.” Therefore to assert that a man’s sustenance—his freedom from scarcity—is a basic right necessarily implies that another man must be forced to provide it whether he wishes to or not. If he does not wish to, then the “individual freedom” of the first man can only be bought at the cost of some degree of freedom from the second, who must be coerced, by threat of force, to provide for the first. Indeed, this is tantamount to slavery.1

The incoherence of this argument is so clear as to need no comment, but it reflects the way in which the politics, say, of Paul Ryan appeals to some popular sentiment. On Labor Day, Eric Cantor tweeted: “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Perhaps Cantor would defend his callous disregard for the history of Labor Day by reference to an ideological position such as this one:

Government efforts to hamper an employer’s freedom owe much of their intellectual foundation to the old Marxist assumption that employer and employee interests in a free market are opposed. But this is not true. Employers seek profits; when they find them, they bid laborers and other resources away from other employers. This promotes new opportunities, higher real wages, higher productivity, and improved living standards. Hampering labor markets may have emotional or voter appeal, but it is counterproductive and corrosive to genuine human freedom and prosperity.2

Free-market ideology is falsified by so much empirical evidence that its durability is surprising. Its grassroots appeal ro rugged individualism is not only incoherent but cruel as well. Ask public workers in Wisconsin who have recently lost collective bargaining rights as well as jobs, benefits, and wages. So far Scott Walker’s cynical appeals to greed and selfishness have succeeded in turning many private-sector union workers against public-sector workers and their unions.

That Walker’s scorched earth policies have not produced significant job growth should surprise nobody. Those policies were designed to produce short-term political gains for the Republican party—they were never designed to create jobs. And the at-will policies that have been forced on Texas universities have nothing to do with improving efficiency or productivity. I expect to see large-scale staff cuts in Texas higher education, which will be justified by economic exigency. Faculty rights will be next on the chopping block.

There’s a new Pew Research report entitled “The Future of Higher Education.” It’s a flawed report in some ways. But the guts of it, particularly the contributed statements of academic professionals, are often pretty striking. One of my colleagues at Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms community, Bryan Alexander, describes a future for Higher Education that I think is likely as well. Bryan is a senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. Here is what he says:

By 2020 we will see: 1) A split between teaching and research faculty. Teaching faculty will largely be part-time, ill-paid, and expected to do no research. Research professors will teach little (perhaps the occasional grad student) and focus on grant-funded research. 2) Distance learning will be normative. A majority of students have taken at least one online class by age 16. The default for learning is online at this point. 3) Number of college campuses will dwindle. Those that survive will emphasize: face-to-face experiences; campus grounds (beauty, history, charm); charismatic teachers; a sense of tradition (meaning mid-20th century, but aiming for an older time).

I don’t think this future will be achieved by 2020, but I think it’s a reasonable expectation, given present trends. The expansion of higher education that took place as the baby boomers went to college isn’t sustainable. On the other hand, the idea that universities should hasten towards this brave new world has the potential to create great economic dislocation and suffering, as well as a lot of silly and shallow academic programs. If Institutions like UNT and others that are following Rick Perry’s lead, continue on their present course of attempting to impose “reform” from the top down instead of following the more prudent example of Teresa Sullivan at The University of Virginia, they could wind up looking a lot like the State of Wisconsin, and like Wisconsin have nothing to show for it.

Notes

1Arthur Foulkes, “In Defense of Employment-at-Will,” Ludwig von Mises Institute.
2Ibid.

Labor Day

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Today I am thinking about my grandfather. Here’s a picture of him as I remember him. He tended to dress this way even to work in his yard, keeping two hats, one old and one new, for each season, and two pairs of Edwin Clapp shoes, one old and one new. He seemed an old-fashioned gentleman to me as a child. I thought it quaint that he called my grandmother love and that he always paid his bills in person. I adored him.

I don’t know how often grandaddy replaced the items of clothing I’ve described (the shoes probably lasted a long time as they were made of kangaroo leather); but when the old items got to a serious point of wear he would replace them and the formerly new items would become old. The old items served him for work around the place after he retired, and I expect before as well, though I didn’t observe him as closely before retirement as I did after. He retired a bit early, after a heart attack, when I was four or five years old.

He was a printer by trade. When I was a small child he was the night foreman and ultimately the plant superintendent at the Abilene Reporter News in Abilene, Texas. I remember that he would take me to the composing room with him once in a while, set me on a bench by the window and let me watch him work. I still have a mental picture of him standing bent over the big stone-topped tables where the page frames were made with a type stick in his hand.

Grandaddy belonged to the International Typographical Union, then the oldest trade union in the country. He retired before lynotype machines changed newspaper production much, and he didn’t like lynotype operators. He claimed they were ignorant, and of course they weren’t craftsmen. He didn’t live to see the ultimate dissolution of his union as photo offset printing made redundant both his craft and the skills of the lynotype operators he disliked.

As the eleventh or twelfth child in a family whose wealth had been dissipated by his father’s impecuniousness, Grandaddy had been unable to attend college as some of his older brothers had done. I don’t know how much formal schooling he had, but his real education had been a progress through the ranks of apprentice and journeyman in the printer’s trade at a small newspaper in Terrell, Texas. He set himself up in a job shop in the big city of Dallas for a while after, then returned to Terrell for some years after his partner absconded with the assets of the business (or that’s family story) and ultimately took his family to West Texas in 1926.

I think he must have been pretty good at his trade, and he must have known at least a bit about the gigantic presses newspapers used in his day as well, because one of the things he did towards the end of his career was technical troubleshooting for the Harte_Hanks newpaper chain that owned the Reporter News. He regarded Bernard Hanks as a friend and mourned his death in 1948.

The union was one of the things that grounded Grandaddy’s life. He was no friend of strikes because they created hardship; though he believed steadfastly in collective bargaining. But the great value of the union for him, as I think back on it, must have been that it was a band of brothers, if I can be forgiven that old-fashioned expression. Inded, in Grandaddy’s day men who worked for newspapers, whether they worked in the plant or in the newsroom, felt a sense of connection with one another. When one of my uncles, who had followed Grandaddy into printing, found hmself out of work because of a strike at his plant in San Antonio, he found work in San Angelo and Abilene through the union. Grandaddy was retired by that time, about 1950 I think.

Some newspaper people were restless in the old days, and moved around a lot. My friend Patrick Bennett documents the career of an itinerant writer named Edward Anderson, who tended to move from paper to paper because he drank a lot and sometimes got fired for being drunk on the job. Anderson eventually found his way to Hollywood where he wrote some movies and a couple of novels, then back to Texas where he became involved with right-wing politics and died in obscurity.† But for every marginal character like Anderson, whose vagrancy was enabled by the newspaper network, there were countless others who led solid middle-class lives. The union enabled my grandfather to do so, to retire with dignity, and to purchase property in his old age which helped to provide retirement income.

Of course Grandaddy had Social Security as well, and that’s another story. As I remember him today, and the life his working milieu enabled for the extended family of which I am a part, I find that I still adore him. As a child I would follow him around and “help” him do things. When I have tools in my hands I think of him to this day puttering around, fixing things, digging in his flower beds. This afternoon I will do some puttering of my own, and I will think of him. I’m also thinking the modes of social organization that enabled his life were good things: not all of them, certainly not the racial part. But I think of my grandfather’s life as an illustration, not of the naked individual initiative we have mythicized in today’s political culture, but of the nurturing and enabling force of human solidarity.

†Pat’s book is entitled Rough and Rowdy Ways: The Life and Hard Times of Edward Anderson, College Station, Texas A&M University Press: 1988.