The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers published this infographic on its Facebook page this morning:

At least I no longer have to wonder why it seems the central office is intent on making teachers’ jobs as difficult as possible. It makes a lot more sense when you realize the Minneapolis Board of Education is employing people at the highest levels who have dedicated substantial portions of their careers to disrupting, dismantling, and destroying the community public school system that is the bedrock of our democratic society.

You elected Don Samuels.

You sent a clear message to the plutocrats that their spending on our election was a good investment, money well spent. You’ve got them doing back-of-the-envelope calculations; they could drop a cool $50 million on a House or Senate race, but for a fraction of that–a mere tens of thousands of dollars–they can advance their privatization agenda in a major city. You’ve got them putting on the green eyeshades and calculating how many school board majorities they can buy for the cost of one Senate seat. You’ve ensured a continuation of the trend in higher spending in every school board race in this city; no one will ever be able to run without the backing of ideologically polarizing out-of-state “reform” groups, or at the very least, of a major political party.

Teaching is, at its best, an incredibly intrinsically rewarding career. Nothing’s better than that moment when a frustrated and discouraged student finally grasps a difficult concept, or when parents come to conferences and say their kid comes home and talks about my class over dinner, or when I perform a chemistry demonstration and everyone whips out their phones to record it.

If you asked me what’s the most stressful part of being a teacher, there are lots of candidates; the long hours during the school year, the pressure-cooker evaluation process, large class sizes, behavior problems, meetings that suck up time better spent elsewhere. The worst of these is the constant drumbeat of attacks against us from the news media, Silicon Valley billionaires, the Obama administration, Republicans and Democrats, and other “education reformers” of all stripes. The barrage has led to a siege mentality that makes it difficult for teachers to trust elected officials and an inherent reluctance to “buy in” to new policies or initiatives. Time Magazine’s latest cover photo captures the spirit of these attacks nicely:

You don’t see this attitude towards nurses, firefighters, soldiers, lawyers, psychologists, accountants, engineers, or even toward less trusted professions like CEOs, Catholic priests, bankers, or Congressmen. It’s great working with young people, but it sure is hard to put up with this level of contempt. Maybe this would help explain why 50% of teachers leave the field within five years of starting.

Elimination of teacher “tenure” is an article of faith in the corporate reform movement, and it’s an easy sell for the general public (“I don’t get a lifetime job guarantee, why should they?”) I think the underlying assumption by the corporate reformers can be summed up thus:

“We could fire our way to great outcomes for kids, if only those horrible unions would go away.”

This line of thinking is misguided in many ways:

• “Tenure” is an inappropriate name for the system anyway. “Tenure” is granted to faculty members at colleges and universities after many years, and is intended to protect academic freedom. Few dispute the importance of insulating professors from political pressure; academic tenure is necessary to protect the integrity of independent research and scholarship. Public school teachers, on the other hand, do not conduct academic research and do not have academic freedom. The material we teach is circumscribed by state standards and district curriculum. What teachers have is not “tenure”; it’s more accurately described as “civil service protections” or “due process”. In other words, we can only be fired for reasons, and the reasons have to be related to conduct or job performance. This rather common-sense principle has its origins in the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which was enacted growing public outrage over the “spoils system”, by which victorious Presidential candidates would “clean house” and give all the government jobs to their supporters and cronies. Barring the arbitrary firing of public employees makes it more difficult for politicians to play games with our jobs–as important today as it was 130 years ago. Maybe instead of asking why teachers and other hardworking public servants have these job protections, we should ask why the rest of the country doesn’t–as they do in most of the rest of the developed world.
• Civil service protections shield teachers from real threats, freeing up time and mental energy to focus on effective instruction. Dana Goldstein, in her book “The Teacher Wars“, argues that “the history of American public education shows that teachers are uniquely vulnerable to political pressures and moral panics that have nothing to do with the quality of their work.” There’s a long list of such pressures that could get a teacher fired in a world without due process, and all of these are based on actual historical events, real conversations with other teachers, or both: teaching evolution, teaching climate science, using homeopathy as an example to teach critical thinking (thus offending a local homeopath with connections on the school board), getting married, becoming pregnant, being seen at a bar while off-duty, communicating too truthfully with parents, teaching “subversive” books, advocating too forcefully for the best interests of a student, providing honest feedback to school administrators, moonlighting, requesting competitive compensation, failing a student who deserves it but has well-connected parents…
• There is no evidence linking revocation of teachers’ civil service protections to increased student achievement. Charter schools, which are exempt by design from all such regulations, do not (in aggregate) outperform community schools in any measure that’s been studied. Some charter schools are great, others terrible, and many mediocre–and nearly all of them non-unionized. The other nail in the coffin of this corporate reformer hobby-horse is the strong correlation between teacher due-process protection laws and student achievement at the state level. If ending “tenure” is (as Bill Gates is betting) the silver bullet, then why does Massachusetts have the best outcomes and Mississippi the worst? (I’m not arguing that teacher tenure laws have any causal effect here at all–there’s obviously a constellation of socioeconomic and political factors at play–but that very lack of a causal relationship refutes the claim.)
• Civil service protection does not make it “nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher”. This is one of those “big lies” that’s been repeated so often that it’s become generally accepted. Let’s look at the relevant Minnesota law, for example; it clearly and incontrovertibly provides for the dismissal of bad teachers:

After the completion of such probationary period, without discharge, such teachers as are thereupon reemployed shall continue in service and hold their respective position during good behavior and efficient and competent service and must not be discharged or demoted except for cause after a hearing…causes for the discharge or demotion of a teacher either during or after the probationary period must be:

(1) immoral character, conduct unbecoming a teacher, or insubordination;

(2) failure without justifiable cause to teach without first securing the written release of the school board having the care, management, or control of the school in which the teacher is employed;

(3) inefficiency in teaching or in the management of a school, consistent with subdivision 5, paragraph (b);

(4) affliction with a communicable disease must be considered as cause for removal or suspension while the teacher is suffering from such disability; or

(5) discontinuance of position or lack of pupils.

Termination for cause requires that an inconvenient procedure be followed; documentation must be assembled, a hearing held, etc. This is the necessary hurdle to prevent abuse. But behind any objectively bad teacher, there’s an administrator who has other priorities than pushing them out. Even the notorious “rubber rooms” of the NYC public schools were eventually revealed to be holding many teachers who did the very things that get you fired without due process: advocating “too forcefully” for the interests of students, participating in political activities deemed inconvenient by city politicians, or just being set up as a scapegoat or an “example”. In any case, the “rubber room” represented the easy way out for some administrator somewhere.

• Teacher quality is a real thing, but operationalizing, measuring, and isolating it with the precision required to make high-stakes decisions (i.e. retention and compensation) is probably neither possible nor desirable. With apologies to Justice Potter Stewart, everyone knows a truly terrible teacher when they see one. But how do we define an effective teacher–and what should we do when our yardstick of choice tells us who’s more effective or less effective? This is such a fiendishly complex question that I’ll set it aside and address it later. In short, the available evidence suggests that using tools favored by the corporate reform crowd (test scores and “value-added” measurements) to fire or demote teachers is not a good idea.
• We can’t fire our way to great schools. High teacher turnover is not a desirable characteristic in a school. My school has been notorious for high turnover rates for a number of years. Last year nobody was fired, and our “Multiple Measure” rating from the state improved. Are we really willing to take the corporate reform people seriously when they argue that public schools are packed with incompetent and/or apathetic teachers? Have they offered up any real evidence that there are more bad teachers than there are bad Marines, bad air traffic controllers, or bad civil engineers? And why is the emphasis always on firing–why not on positive attempts to recruit and retain well-qualified teachers in hard-to-staff areas like math, science, and special education? I don’t expect the constant drumbeat of attacks on our field will make these shortage areas any easier to fill.

I wonder why this crap only gets traction in education. Can you imagine a corporate health care reform movement that claimed to care about the obesity epidemic instead of the achievement gap? They’d claim to know how to make all the fat people thin across the country–it’s all up to the health care establishment! They’d get on a soapbox about our “failing urban hospitals” while opening substandard but shiny new clinics with inexperienced staff all around them. They’d decry the lazy nurses and their overly powerful unions and demand an end to seniority. They’d insist that doctors be evaluated by a couple of arbitrarily selected metrics like the average weight of their patients and the rate at which they keep their appointments. They’d run a complex and expensive battery of tests on every patient because they don’t trust doctors to make their own diagnoses. They’d argue that funding doesn’t matter because we spend so much on the sickest patients and they’re still sick. And they’d say we can solve the problem without taking on processed food or promoting healthier lifestyle choices–those things are just excuses used by bad doctors!

Minneapolis residents: nowhere does your vote count more than in local elections! This will be a close one. Informed voting is a civic duty!

Daniel Sellers is throwing around money “like confetti at a Citizens United parade“:

In “The Disgust Election,” Egan rips apart the post-Citizens United world, noting that this 2010 Supreme Court case has given “wealthy, secret donors unlimited power to manipulate American elections.”…This is what we have before us, nationally: “Oligarchs hiding behind front groups—Citizens for Fluffy Pillows–…pulling the levers of the 2014 campaign…In Minneapolis, this is what we have: Secret, unnamed funders hiding behind groups such as the Minneapolis Progressive Education Fund (MPEF), attempting to pull the levers of the 2014 school board race, and overwhelmingly aiding those with an anti-public school agenda.

The Minneapolis Progressive Education Fund appears to be yet another project of Daniel Sellers, who also heads up both the 50CAN Action Fund’s Minnesota office and its education reform cousin, MinnCAN. In a recent article on this new “fund,” Sellers “declined to say how much the group may spend or where the funds are coming from.”

Brilliant. Those funds, which perhaps Sellers found at the end of a rainbow, are being thrown around like confetti at a Citizens United parade. In the last ten days, the MPEF has sent two glossy mailers (approximate cost, according to my calculations: $50,000 each) sailing into Minneapolis mailboxes, telling people to vote for at-large school board candidates Don Samuels and Iris Altamirano, and to avoid incumbent candidate Rebecca Gagnon like the plague.

Again, I can only speculate about why the corporate reform people would endorse Altamirano, who has given no indication that she supports their agenda of more high-stakes testing, repealing civil service protections for teachers, and expanding questionably-effective charter schools. My best guess (based on the primary results) is that they’re attempting to guarantee a Samuels victory by siphoning off some of Gagnon’s supporters to Altamirano, thereby bumping Samuels into first place.

Hint: Remember those word association questions on the old SAT? “Progressive” is to MPEF as “Democratic People’s Republic” is to DPRK.

I recently received this mailing:

Since we all know Samuels carries water for powerful interests whose policy positions are anything but progressive, I knew this must be a front group, and so did everyone else. The MPEF website’s “About Us” page, predictably, contains absolutely no information about them–just a vague claim about being a “group of Minneapolis parents, public school teachers, students, graduates of Minneapolis Public Schools”. (Hint #2: nope, it’s actually MinnCAN’s Daniel Sellers.)

So what’s the angle? I can only speculate:

• The overriding goal is to unseat Rebecca Gagnon. Since this is effectively a three-way race (sorry, Ira, nothing personal), a Gagnon/Altamirano victory is the nightmare scenario for the corporate reform people. If the two DFL-endorsed candidates beat Samuels, it would send a clear message to the think tanks and their out-of-state wealthy financiers that we’d like to keep control of our own politics, thank you very much, and their dark money is not welcome in Minneapolis. On the other hand, if enough votes could be siphoned from Gagnon to Altamirano, it would guarantee a Samuels win. Some circumstantial evidence for this interpretation can be found on the MPEF “News” page, which is basically a long string of anti-board propaganda, much of it penned by controversial MinnPost education reporter Beth Hawkins.
• There’s no policy agreement–it’s just cynical politics as usual. Think about it–why would the 50CAN people, for whom union-busting is an article of faith–support Iris Altamirano, a professional union organizer and the only labor-endorsed candidate in the race? Iris supports teachers, and is against diverting badly needed funds from community public schools to charters. In their eyes, the only thing worse than an advocate for strong community schools is an advocate for strong community schools with a track record on the Board.
• The corporatists are seizing an opportunity to fracture the DFL base. To win this election, those of us who support teachers and community schools need to stick together, and our candidates need to engage the public at every opportunity. Unfortunately, some are unhappy about seeing Altamirano appear at public events with Samuels, a division the Samuels people must be all to happy to exploit. By trying to link Altamirano to Samuels, they may be trying to siphon votes from Altamirano to Ira Jourdain. Don’t get me wrong, I really like Ira–everything in his platform letter resonates strongly with me–but we need to be realistic about his chances, and he’s not really staking out different territory from the endorsed candidates anyway.

Don’t let the plutocrats divide us along trivial lines. Our best chance to reject the influence of corporate money is to elect Rebecca Gagnon and Iris Altamirano.

The Northeaster, a neighborhood paper, recently interviewed the four candidates for the two at-large MPS board seats. None of them came out guns blazing with any hot-button policy proposals, but all four called for change, as they must; if you scrambled the names, I doubt I’d have been able to tell them apart.

Well, except for this bit:

Samuels has drawn media attention for winning support from national education groups. There’s big money being raised against him, Samuels explained, so he has to work to counter it. “I don’t think the public should be concerned (about campaign donations) unless it’s corrupt money,” he said.

Ahem.

First, let’s have a look at the public campaign finance disclosure documents. I pulled up the most recent filings available for Samuels, Gagnon, and Altamirano. The reports were filed just before the primary election, the first week of August. So, just how big were the fearsome war chests of Mr. Samuels’ opponents?

On June 20, Rebecca Gagnon had raised $1800, and Iris Altamirano was holding $3050. That day, Don Samuels received his first campaign contribution–$1000–and just like that, he was one-third of the way caught up with his leading opponent. (This particular $1000 check, along with several others for the same amount, came from individuals who listed Teach for America as their employer–probably brass from the organization’s Minneapolis HQ, since real teachers aren’t in a position to drop a cool 1K on a non-deductible political campaign and I imagine most TFA teachers aren’t either.)

So, right from the start, Samuels’ fundraising was outpacing his opponents’ by an order of magnitude. How did that turn out for him? When the disclosure paperwork was filed right before the primary, Gagnon had raised $2050, Altamirano $8790, and Samuels…*drumroll*…

$27,470.

Now, a distinction must be drawn between this rigorously documented “hard money”, which campaigns raise and spend directly, and the “soft money” independent expenditures made by outside groups that have no limits or reporting requirements. How’s this working out for him? Pretty nicely. I’ve written before about the influx of ideologically-driven, out-of-state money into our (formerly local) school board race; this is the post-Citizens United crap that we have to put up with, and it’s troubling that it doesn’t meet Samuels’ definition of “corrupt money”.

No one can be sure exactly how much money these plutocrats are spending in their bid to buy our local election, but Samuels seems to be saying he needs it because of all the money being spent on Altamirano’s behalf. There’s a big difference, though: while Samuels boosters are billionaires and their foundations who evidently view our city as a little terrarium for them to experiment on, Altamirano’s “soft” expenditures are coming from, well, us.

Iris Altamirano has the DFL endorsement, which means (among other things) that the party is spending money and allocating staff time to get her elected. But the DFL isn’t made up of one rich guy, some satellite groups, and a dog; it’s made up of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Minnesotans who get together before elections, talk amongst themselves, and decide who would best represent them. Then, having already hashed out all of their issues, they pool their resources to get those people elected. It’s what a political party is designed to do, its raison d’être. The endorsement process, while not perfect, is fundamentally democratic and probably represents the best tool we have for defending ourselves against plutocracy.

And how does one win an endorsement? By talking to ordinary people and earning their trust–the same skill set that makes one a successful school board member. Don Samuels had a chance to do that, and he didn’t even try. That first $1000 campaign contribution he received was almost two months after the endorsement was awarded. But who needs the support of regular folks when the corporate reform movement will prop you up?

It’s a nationwide movement with a lot of tentacles. Funding comes from think tanks, wealthy financiers, and their foundations–not from people with “skin in the game” of public education (parents, teachers, school administrators, etc.)

Beliefs that characterize the movement include:

• District schools don’t care about improving their outcomes, but we can force their hand through:
  • Competition from charter schools
  • Punitive measures tied to high-stakes test scores
  • Attaching more strings to federal Title I and special ed funding, which of course impacts the schools that serve the neediest students
• High-stakes testing reveals all we really need to know about schools and teachers
• Education is an industrial process in which all meaningful inputs and outputs can be standardized, quantified and measured
• Bad teachers are behind all the problems in public education, which implies:
  • We could fire our way to great outcomes for kids, if only those horrible unions would go away
  • Teachers are not working as hard as they could be, and will respond to monetary incentives to do more
  • Racial disparities in educational outcomes must be due to teacher racism, and socioeconomic factors have no explanatory value

I’ll address these beliefs in later posts.

At the risk of navel-gazing, why do public schools exist? I think none of the school board candidates would provide appreciably different responses to such a question, but their actions reflect radically different views of the institution.

The American public school system arguably had its origins in the Land Ordinance of 1785, an act passed only two years after the end of the Revolutionary War, predating the US Constitution. The ordinance famously subdivided every township into 36 square mile sections, and “reserved the lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools within the said township.” The ordinance was drafted by a committee led by Thomas Jefferson. Public schools, perhaps more so than any other public institution today, reflect Jeffersonian ideals–egalitarianism, anti-elitism, local control, secularism, and civic engagement. If you want to see people taking ownership of & participating in their public institutions today, the best place to look is your neighborhood school. Public schools belong to the community, and work best when they both reflect and represent the community. Urban parents want to live in diverse communities, and want their kids to go to school with their neighbors. Nobody believes any good can come of segregated schools. (Well, almost nobody.) Advocates of corporate education reform would have you believe that teachers are practically the sole determinant of whether a school is “failing” (and ergo, if a school is “failing”, it must be because it has terrible teachers!) The reality is that what makes or breaks a school is who participates in it–parents, teachers, community organizations, and yes, even students.

My neighborhood in Minneapolis is a great example of the power of community engagement. Neighborhood families are increasingly resisting the pull of charters and open enrollment at suburban schools and enrolling in community schools. Yard signs advertising pride in our schools are popping up everywhere. Parents take an active role in school operations, special events, and student learning. I had parent-teacher conferences this week, and turnout was quite good, especially among immigrant families. At least seven different community organizations (and that’s just off the top of my head) are present and active in my school building every day, working directly with students on everything from tutoring and college visits to mental health counseling. Our principal and her community engagement staff have won recognition from the superintendent for their successful outreach efforts. Our local school board director is a fixture at community events and has talked one-to-one with hundreds of parents. She sat down and talked shop with me for half an hour at a recent neighborhood association meeting–not because she wanted my vote (she’s in a safe seat) but because she’s incredibly passionate about the community-school connection. For the same reason, our ward’s city council member is constantly engaging with our schools even though the city government has no formal role in the school system. (If you’re reading this, you know who you are! Sorry for the lack of a personal shout-out, but as a non-tenured teacher, I need to retain some degree of anonymity.) To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, it takes a village to make a great school.

The corporate education reform movement is a tremendous threat to the community orientation of the public school system. What I’ll refer to as the “community engagement approach”–the approach that I see working in my own neighborhood–encourages “opting in”. If you want your neighborhood school to work better, the thinking goes, then take some ownership of it and get involved! That’s what public institutions are for; that’s what makes them public; it’s the Jefferson way. The corporate reform movement, on the other hand, offers up a lot of quick fixes based on “opting out”. If you don’t like your neighborhood school, vote with your feet and get out–magical market forces will do the rest! If things aren’t going well, just fire everybody–that’ll fix things! That’s what makes this approach “corporate”. Proponents want to facilitate “opting out” of community schools by decreasing their funding on the one hand, and boosting charter schools and (via vouchers) private schools on the other. The ensuing exodus from the public school system will then vindicate their anti-public-school rhetoric. After all, the market will have spoken.

I think this approach is problematic in a democratic society because it directly undermines the community aspect of community schools by promoting the self-sorting of discrete constituencies into isolated silos. Private schools are the most obvious example of this, since they sort students by income bracket and/or religious beliefs. Charter schools contribute to this problem, too, though. Some overtly recruit specific ethnicities; the Twin Cities have multiple schools with “Hmong” in their official names, for example, and their student bodies are unsurprisingly 90-100% Hmong. Others end up segregated even though this may not be an official part of their mission; Minneapolis has charter schools that are overwhelmingly populated by Somalis, Latinos, African Americans, and whites. Inver Grove Heights had the notorious Tarek ibn Ziyad academy, an all-Muslim school that operated as a charter. The Minneapolis district, perhaps fearful of losing students (which is exactly the sort of motivation the reformers hope to instill), has responded by opening their own district-operated segregated schools. This is not an encouraging development for those of us who working to build strong school-community connections and restore the public school to its rightful role as a respected and fundamentally democratic institution. Perhaps this would all be moot if the “opting out” approach were fixing all that ails public education, but the evidence is mixed at best.