The Tea Party’s assault on workers

This Washington Post article below highlights some of the nationwide assaults on working people by the Tea Party and their billionaire backers,

For all the debate on the effects of the tea party's and the Republican party's march to the far right at the federal level, it’s their impact at the state level that will probably be with us the longest.

Back in 2010, 11 states — Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Wyoming — put Republicans in control of all branches of state government. Other states saw their center of gravity move much farther to the right. And in the years since, those states have pushed an all-out conservative agenda.

Some elements of this this fight are well-covered and understood, particularly on voting rights and abortion. As Norm Ornstein observes, we are seeing “a new era of voter suppression that parallels the pre-1960s era — this time affecting not just African-Americans but also Hispanic-Americans, women, and students, among others.” And, as the Guttmacher Institute notes, “issues related to reproductive health and rights at the state level received unprecedented attention in 2011."

Less well-covered has been the assault on workers' rights as part of a coordinated, strategic, national and ideological program. There’s been excellent coverage of efforts by individual state legislatures, particularly efforts to roll back unionization for public-sector workers in Wisconsin and Michigan. But there hasn’t been a solid overview of how all these efforts hang together and how extensive and coordinated they are.

That has changed with a remarkable paper by the University of Oregon’s Gordon Lafer for the Economic Policy Institute, titled "The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011–2012." Lafer documents how extensive anti-labor efforts have been with the wave of newly conservative state governments, and he paints a picture of the forest that arises out of all these anti-labor trees.

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Be under no illusion that these assaults have ceased. In Ohio, Tea Party efforts continue to push so-called "right-to-work" laws so deceptive in a recent Plain Dealer editorial they stated that "Claiming Right to Work is about workplace freedom is like calling a slave owner a job creator.", meanwhile in the statehouse, Tea Party Republicans are pursuing yet more voter suppression laws, as detailed by Plunderbund.

working people simply cannot trust the Tea Party and their radical agenda.

America Has More Prisoners Than High School Teachers

A little off our beaten track, but this statistic stood out starkly. America Has More Prisoners Than High School Teachers

Don't be VAMBoozled!

A great top 10 research based list of the problems of using Value added modelling to sort and rank teachers, via Vamboozled .

1. VAM estimates should not be used to assess teacher effectiveness. The standardized achievement tests on which VAM estimates are based, have always been, and continue to be, developed to assess levels of student achievement and not levels growth in student achievement nor growth in achievement that can be attributed to teacher effectiveness. The tests on which VAM estimates are based (among other issues) were never designed to estimate teachers’ causal effects.
2. VAM estimates are often unreliable. Teachers who should be (more or less) consistently effective are being classified in sometimes highly inconsistent ways over time. A teacher classified as “adding value” has a 25 to 50% chance of being classified as “subtracting value” the following year(s), and vice versa. This sometimes makes the probability of a teacher being identified as effective no different than the flip of a coin.
3. VAM estimates are often invalid. Without adequate reliability, as reliability is a qualifying condition for validity, valid VAM-based interpretations are even more difficult to defend. Likewise, very limited evidence exists to support that teachers who post high- or low-value added scores are effective using at least one other correlated criterion (e.g., teacher observational scores, teacher satisfaction surveys). The correlations being demonstrated across studies are not nearly high enough to support valid interpretation or use.
4. VAM estimates can be biased. Teachers of certain students who are almost never randomly assigned to classrooms have more difficulties demonstrating value-added than their comparably effective peers. Estimates for teachers who teach inordinate proportions of English Language Learners (ELLs), special education students, students who receive free or reduced lunches, and students retained in grade, are more adversely impacted by bias. While bias can present itself in terms of reliability (e.g., when teachers post consistently high or low levels of value-added over time), the illusion of consistency can sometimes be due, rather, to teachers being consistently assigned more homogenous sets of students.
5. Related, VAM estimates are fraught with measurement errors that negate their levels of reliability and validity, and contribute to issues of bias. These errors are caused by inordinate amounts of inaccurate or missing data that cannot be easily replaced or disregarded; variables that cannot be statistically “controlled for;” differential summer learning gains and losses and prior teachers’ residual effects that also cannot be “controlled for;” the effects of teaching in non-traditional, non-isolated, and non-insular classrooms; and the like.
6. VAM estimates are unfair. Issues of fairness arise when test-based indicators and their inference-based uses impact some more than others in consequential ways. With VAMs, only teachers of mathematics and reading/language arts with pre and post-test data in certain grade levels (e.g., grades 3-8) are typically being held accountable. Across the nation, this is leaving approximately 60-70% of teachers, including entire campuses of teachers (e.g., early elementary and high school teachers), as VAM-ineligible.
7. VAM estimates are non-transparent. Estimates must be made transparent in order to be understood, so that they can ultimately be used to “inform” change and progress in “[in]formative” ways. However, the teachers and administrators who are to use VAM estimates accordingly do not typically understand the VAMs or VAM estimates being used to evaluate them, particularly enough so to promote such change.
8. Related, VAM estimates are typically of no informative, formative, or instructional value. No research to date suggests that VAM-use has improved teachers’ instruction or student learning and achievement.
9. VAM estimates are being used inappropriately to make consequential decisions. VAM estimates do not have enough consistency, accuracy, or depth to satisfy that which VAMs are increasingly being tasked, for example, to help make high-stakes decisions about whether teachers receive merit pay, are rewarded/denied tenure, or are retained or inversely terminated. While proponents argue that because of VAMs’ imperfections, VAM estimates should not be used in isolation of other indicators, the fact of the matter is that VAMs are so imperfect they should not be used for much of anything unless largely imperfect decisions are desired.
10. The unintended consequences of VAM use are continuously going unrecognized, although research suggests they continue to exits. For example, teachers are choosing not to teach certain students, including those who teachers deem as the most likely to hinder their potentials to demonstrate value-added. Principals are stacking classes to make sure certain teachers are more likely to demonstrate “value-added,” or vice versa, to protect or penalize certain teachers, respectively. Teachers are leaving/refusing assignments to grades in which VAM-based estimates matter most, and some teachers are leaving teaching altogether out of discontent or in protest. About the seriousness of these and other unintended consequences, weighed against VAMs’ intended consequences or the lack thereof, proponents and others simply do not seem to give a VAM.

What is Wrong with Vouchers?

Via Nicholas Meier

The rhetoric behind vouchers is that if everyone had vouchers parents could select the best school for their child instead of being forced to go to “government” schools*.

Where does such logic fall apart? There are two main logistical reasons it is really a false promise. One is economic and the other is question of who gets to choose.

The private schools that the elite send their children to cost tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend. I looked up a few progressive private schools and tuition ranged from $20,000 to well over $30,000, more than many private colleges. And the actual amount they spend per pupil is well over the tuition since they raise lots of extra money from alumni. (They also tend to pay their non-unionized teachers significantly less than public schools.)

Since at best the voucher proposals I have seen only pay a small fraction of that, these vouchers will leave the recipients with few real choices without putting out a lot more money. I do not think the public is going to go for vouchers of $20,000+ and have never even heard such figures discussed. If they did, the public education bugets would soar. (And those already in private schools would and should claim they should get the subsidies too). What it would do in effect, at the rates being proposed, is subsidize the middle class and rich to abandon public schools and send their children to private school, and while leaving such choices out of reach financially for the poor.

The other issue is who chooses. Most private schools have selective admission, and limited space. Since unlike public schools they get to choose their students, even if the voucher fully paid for them (which of course it will not), they would still most likely cream the easiest students to teach, leaving the more difficult to teach children in the public schools.

These two factors in combination would end up subsidizing private schools and middle and upper class families at the expense of public schools and the poor that are left in them. This would further segregate our schooling system into the haves and the have-nots.

Since I have never heard voucher proponents either suggest that vouchers should be at the levels necessary to have them cover the full cost of most private schools, nor to force private schools to take those children, I find their arguments disingenuous.

Charter schools, in theory at least, get around both of the above limitations. There is no tuition; schools receive the same funding as the other public schools, and (at least in California) schools cannot select the students. (In reality, though, they often find ways of using other means to “encourage” and “discourage” certain types of students.) So, is this not a solution?

Why I still do not favor even this is that it fundamentally changes the purpose of public schools. Traditionally we have considered the education of the next generation to be a concern of society as a whole. In fact, virtually every society has considered this to be true throughout history. For this reason, locally elected school boards have governed our public schools.

Charter schools and voucher systems make schooling a private consumer choice. In the charter and voucher systems consumers choose among the choices offered them, but have no guaranteed right to have a say about the schooling other than making that choice. Those who do not have children in the schools have no say at all. Private schools are run privately, and do not have to answer to the public. Charter schools usually have to answer for test scores and financial responsibility, but even there it is to the state and not in any direct way to the local public. While charter schools have governing boards, they select their own members of those boards. This gives control of the content of schooling to those who run the schools, often for-profit concerns, but even if not, private concerns of some sort. While our government is not perfect, should I really trust those who have private agendas and do not have to answer to the public to decide the how and what of our next generation’s schooling? Public school boards are elected, and have open meetings; private schools do not have to. Even if the charters do have open meetings, they are often run by national organizations and so are inaccessible and would probably just say, “Don’t send you child here if you don’t like it our agenda.”

Vouchers and charters are about redefining the public as consumers rather than citizens, which is part of a larger corporate agenda to destroy public institutions and the limit the power of the public.

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Market-based education gambles with our children

Via Salon

In Ohio, at least 15 charter schools have abruptly closed this year – most don’t even bother to list a reason.

In Detroit, a city wracked by debt and bankruptcy, officials scrambled to close a failed charter school by Oct. 31 this year, due to the school’s debts, which exceeded $400,000.

According to The Washington Post, Washington, D.C., spent over $1 million on closing failed charter schools from 2008-2012.

More cities are following the lead of districts like Chicago, where the largest shutdown of public schools in the nation’s history occurred at the very same time that new private charter schools were being expanded by the district.

Abruptly opening and closing schools – leaving school children, parents and communities in the lurch and taxpayers holding the bag – is not a matter of happenstance. It’s by design.

The design in mind, of course, is being called a “market.” Parents and taxpayers who used to rely on having public schools as anchor institutions in their communities – much like they rely on fire and police stations, parks and rec centers, and the town hall – are being told that the education of children is now subject to the whims of “the market.”

The supposed benefit to all this is that parents get a “choice” about where they send their children to school. But while parents are pushed to pick their schools on the increasingly turbulent bazaar of “choice,” the game resembles much less a level playing field and much more a game of chance in which the house rules determine the odds. And too many of the nation’s families – and their communities – are getting caught up in a crapshoot with our children’s education at stake.

Whether from charters or voucher-funded private schools, the explosive growth of crapshoot schools is fast becoming the norm. And too few are asking, “At what risks?”

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NAEP Reveals Ohio Charter Disaster

The US Department of Education released the latest NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) results a short while ago. Despite all the corporate education reforms that have been pushed in Ohio, Ohio’s students continued to score marginally highher than the national average, but haven’t shown any significant improvement over previous results. In other words, for all the additional workload, stress and controversy, corporate reforms are not producing increased performance results.

What we are seeing though is the utter perfoermance disaster of Charter schools in the state. The Fordham Foundation crunched the numbers to compare traditonal pblic schools with tier low performing charter school counterparts

The figures below display the charter versus non-charter comparison of students who are eligible for the Free and Reduced Price Lunch (FRPL) program, the most-utilized poverty metric available. This provides a fair comparison of similar students, since Ohio’s charters enroll a relatively high number of impoverished students.
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The results from this snapshot in time are not favorable to charter schools. In all four grade-subject combinations, charter school NAEP scores fall short of the non-charter school scores. And in all cases, I would consider the margin fairly wide—more so in 4th than 8th grade. In 4th grade reading, for example, non-charter students’ average score was 211, while charter students’ average score was 191, a 20 point difference.

Here's Fordhams findings in graphiocal format

The only question that remains is, what is to be done about this performance disaster?