Flurry of surveys re-opens debate on education reforms

(Baton Rouge – August 22, 2013) New surveys demonstrate that parents overwhelmingly favor public education as the best choice for children, Louisiana Federation of Teachers President Steve Monaghan said today. The results call into question continued efforts to privatize the state’s education system and judge teachers by standardized test results, he added.

“Seventy percent of Americans oppose vouchers for private and religious schools,” Monaghan said. “That is the highest negative ever recorded in 45 years of research by Phi Delta Kappa and the Gallup organization.”

Monaghan’s comments came after release of the annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the public’s attitudes toward public schools.

Reflecting public support for neighborhood schools, Monaghan said, was the PDK/Gallup finding that 71 percent of public school parents would grade the school their oldest child attends as “A” or “B.”

Another poll released about the same time, from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, shows that 76 percent of public school parents rate their child’s education as good or excellent, and that 82 percent have high opinions of their children’s teachers.

“These are careful, scientific surveys,” Monaghan said, “that need to be taken seriously as we debate the nature of education reform in Louisiana.”

The state’s reliance on standardized tests for determining everything from teacher salaries to school funding does not seem to have great public support. In the PDK/Gallup poll, for example, only 22% of Americans believe that increased testing has helped the performance of local public schools. A solid majority (58%) reject the notion that teacher evaluations should include “how well a teacher’s students perform on standardized tests.”

In the AP-NORC survey, parents agreed that the proper use of standardized tests should be “to identify areas where students need extra help.” But according to Monaghan, the testing imposed under new state law has little diagnostic value, and is used primarily to label teachers, students and schools.

Also in the AP-NORC survey, parents were asked to rank the importance of different factors in determining teacher salaries. The top three responses were classroom observation by local school officials, the type of training or advanced degrees obtained by the teacher and years of teaching experience. In Louisiana, all three have been eclipsed by testing, and state officials downplay the importance of degrees and experience.

The PDK/Gallup poll shows support for community charter schools, as well as a belief that students can “receive a better education at public charter schools than at other public schools.”

“We’d like to see more research on that question,” Monaghan said. “Apparently people see charter schools as places where there is parental support, where discipline is enforced, where disruptive students can be removed and where learning is prized. Instead of abandoning traditional public schools, we need to inculcate those values into them.”

The PDK/Gallup survey also reveals general support for “increasing opportunities for students to earn high school credit online over the Internet.”

While that may seem to bolster Louisiana’s controversial Course Choice pilot, Monaghan urged caution.

“Louisiana had a viable public school online learning program,” Monaghan said, “but it was supplanted by Course Choice, which is little more than an online voucher scheme. Course Choice opens the state treasury to profiteers as certainly as any other voucher program.”

Not all of the survey results would lead to policies favored by the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, Monaghan said. But the deeper issue revealed by surveys like these is that no real policy debate was allowed when still-contested reforms were rammed through the 2012 legislative session.

“Not since the days of Huey Long have such radical policies been imposed so quickly and with such overwhelming political force,” Monaghan said. “We are seeing the consequences of that action as courts overturn policies and teacher morale plummets.

“We need to reopen the education reform debate in Louisiana. It should be informed by surveys like these, by scientific research, and by input from educators and parents. Political ideology and potential profits should be left at the door when we discuss the education of our children.”

WWL-TV op-ed: Jindal plan shows disdain for teachers

Check out this op-ed by LFT President Steve Monaghan on the WWL-TV Web site!

When cultural historian Jacques Barzun wrote "Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition," he could have been describing the education “reform” movement pushed by Gov. Bobby Jindal and his allies in Louisiana. Jindal’s approach to education is typified by an apparent disdain for those who have made the profession their life’s calling.

The governor’s attitude about teachers emerged in a speech before the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry a year ago, in which he first outlined the radical overhaul that would become the hallmark of his education agenda. Jindal inaccurately and unfairly asserted to those influential business leaders that teachers “are given lifetime job protection…and short of selling drugs in the workplace or beating up” their students, teachers couldn’t be fired.

“Not only is this not a factual statement,”I said at the time, “but evoking images of those specific behaviors in reference to educators is unjust and insulting.”

The governor has often been quoted as saying that, prior to his overhaul, Louisiana teachers retained their jobs simply because they “keep breathing.” As proof, he and his supporters said that only a small percentage of teachers had been found incompetent and fired.

That ignored the fact that about half of all teachers leave the profession within five years of entering it. What other profession suffers such an exodus? One would naturally expect a higher level of competency among those who survived past their fifth anniversary.

As part of this assault on public school teachers, Act 1 (2012), a hodge-podge of policies that all but abolished teachers’ due process rights and tied their professional futures to an unproven new evaluation system, was steam rolled through the legislative process.

Simultaneously and in the same manner, Governor Jindal pushed Act 2 (2012), through the legislature. This bill comprises the most overreaching efforts at privatizing public education ever conceived in the United States.

Act 2 was so big, so bloated with various unrelated schemes, and was rushed through the system with so little scrutiny, that few paid much attention to its details.

The act is best known for funneling public education dollars to private and religious schools. Some of those have been shown to be woefully inadequate in curricula, facilities and, ironically, teacher quality.

But Act 2 encompasses much more than vouchers, and provides public funding for all manner of private and quasi-public education alternatives, without appropriate safeguards to assure the instructional quality of the programs.

Under these so called reforms, public tax dollars flow to largely unregulated voucher schools and other so-called “course providers.” (Those can be any individual, business or institution that has an idea for providing an academic course and receives approval from the governor’s education department.)

Act 2 is replete with examples of disdain for teachers as well as for public education in general. For example, the act deletes any requirement that teachers in charter schools be certified, but grants automatic certification to anyone who is approved as a “course provider.”

If non-traditional schools are to be part of the reform mix, then there should be ways to compare their achievement with that of public schools. The governor and his allies steadfastly refuse to consider measurements on privatized education that allow the public to accurately assess the academic results in those schools.

That coincides with a second hallmark of the Jindal agenda: a blind faith that private is better than public, and that profit is a guarantee of quality.

Across the United States, some $500 billion a year is spent on public education. In Louisiana, our Minimum Foundation Program budget is $3.41 billion. The privatizers want a big piece of that, and have donated millions to politicians who support this agenda. They have been rewarded with an astoundingly lax system of accountability.

The purpose of any real reform should be to guarantee all that children have equal access to high quality, well resourced public schools regardless of geography or economic circumstances. The reforms should be based on research which demonstrates the efficacy of the program or policy. No such research was presented to support these reforms as they were pushed into law.

So there you have it. An apparent lack of respect if not outright disdain for the profession of education, in combination with extreme ideological and profit motives have spawned these misbegotten reforms.

Fortunately for parents and the taxpaying public, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers’ constitutional challenges to this agenda have served to heighten public awareness and to encourage greater scrutiny.
Even though appeals are pending, there is a growing awareness that this agenda is not the right direction for education reform to take in Louisiana.

Our message to lawmakers is simple: these laws are terribly broken, and we're depending upon legislators to fix them.

Dumpster diving for compliments

So State Superintendent of Education John White went dumpster diving for compliments, and emerged from the pile waving this affidavit from former Washington, DC school superintendent Michelle Rhee. It certifies that Louisiana is the best state in the nation at punishing public school teachers for all the faults of a society that ranks last in nearly every indicator of a decent quality of life.

Not in so many words, of course. Rhee’s press release actually ranks Louisiana first in the nation for what she calls “policies that prioritize the interests of children.” Those happen to include the punitive new rules that link nearly every aspect of a teacher’s professional life to the results of standardized tests.

Louisiana and Florida rank the highest in the nation, according to Rhee’s organization, StudentsFirst. States that rank beneath Louisiana include every state with higher student achievement and standards of living.

That prompted education curmudgeon Diane Ravitch to tweet, “Does anyone move to Louisiana or Florida for their schools?”

As Ravitch put it, “Rhee wants teachers to be evaluated and fired by test scores; she wants schools to be closed by test scores. But when she ranked the states, she didn’t look at test scores. If she had, her number-one state—Louisiana—would have been at the bottom of her rankings.”

No state in the StudentsFirst survey received a grade of A – Louisiana earned a B+. Among the 11 states to be graded F was California. That state’s chief deputy education superintendent, Richard Zeiger, called Rhee’s rating a “badge of honor.”

Zeiger told the New York Times that StudentsFirst “is an organization that frankly makes its living by asserting that schools are failing. I would have been surprised if we had got anything else.”

He is on to something. One Web site pointed out that among the states rated by Rhee’s organization, “the higher the StudentsFirst grade the lower the students’ performance.”

As it turns out, StudentsFirst is not so much an education organization as a right-wing, anti-tax group dedicated to privatizing public education.

Which explains Gov. Jindal’s glowing response to the big wet kiss from Michelle Rhee. “This report confirms that Louisiana is now leading the nation in education reform,” Jindal wrote in the prepared statement that he provided instead of talking to reporters, “because of our commitment to put a great teacher in every classroom and give every child the opportunity to get a great education.”

That’s the same Gov. Jindal who loves children so much that he is slashing a mental health program for children with behavioral health problems. In the same state whose commitment to children earned us a D from the Pew Center on the States because we don’t “provide crucial dental care to low-income children,” according to this story by NOLA.com reporter Laura Maggi.

For lots more on Michelle Rhee and her faux-grassroots organization, check out Tom Aswell’s Louisiana Voice post on the subject: “The report confirms nothing and it validates nothing and it’s highly doubtful if the people of this state are truly excited at what this administration passes off as reform. The courts certainly are not as three separate courts have knocked down various aspects of the education reform measures.”

Letter: A lump of coal from Jindal

Ponchatoula High School teacher and LFT member Kevin Crovetto penned this letter to the editor of the Hammond Daily Star.

Dear Editor:

In reference to the recent violence at Sandy Hook Elementary School by a mentally deranged assailant, it should be noted that our own Gov. Bobby Jindal has officially turned his back on the mentally ill in Louisiana by providing over 300 pink slips to the workers at Southeast Mental Hospital who cared for both young and old mental patients.

Of course, Bobby says that they can apply for jobs with the private companies who will attempt to provide some of the services, and of course, those jobs will be for lower pay with little or no benefits.

Bobby Jindal has given Louisiana citizens the proverbial lump of coal this year, while his legislators nod and grin because most refuse to upset “Bobby the Grinch.”

This is the same Legislature that passed a new, all-inclusive law to deter bullying in schools; yet, they allow themselves to be bullied by Jindal’s political schemes.

Jindal’s educational “water-boy,” State Superintendent John White, is in charge of the new state initiative called “Louisiana Believes,” which is supposed to promote the educational programs that the legislature was bullied into voting for called Acts 1 and 2.

John White wants us to buy into “Louisiana Believes,” but, like his boss, Bobby, White does not really believe in Louisiana. He is now a finalist for a $300,000-a-year superintendent job for an out-of-state school district in a major city.

White is following his boss in looking for the next best thing for his personal gain, while “giving hell” to the rest of us about what we need to do to be better.

If Jindal and White want better results, it is only because they want better perceptions of their own success to gratify their own financial, political and personal success.

As native Louisianians, we DO believe in Louisiana. That is why we DO NOT believe in the selfish actions of Bobby Jindal and John White. It is now time to prepare a real Christmas present for Mr. Jindal and send it via our legislators.

We should expect our legislators to represent our communities and not other people’s personal political agendas for selfish gain. This gift also comes with a price tag to the deliverer, the Legislature, which is that if this message does not get through to the governor, we as Louisiana citizens believe that our next gift to you will be a political lump of coal.

Many citizens continue to encourage me to speak up and write about the injustices we are facing. Although I am proud to stand up for the people of this state, I do not write to entertain but to implore, inspire, and encourage you to speak up.

Contact your local legislators. Take a stand with me.

— Kevin B. Crovetto, Ponchatoula

And then there was one...

After the November 19 election, it seems that there is only one reliable voice against knee-jerk, questionable "reforms" on the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

But if this letter to the editor from newly minted District 3 BESE member Lottie Beebe is any indication, that voice will be loud, clear and independent.

In just a few paragraphs, Beebe rankles at the implication that she is against "real education reform," expresses reasonable reservations about the incoming Value Added model of teacher evaluation, and calls for a nationwide search for a new, high-qualified state superintendent of education.

It looks like there may be a lot of 10-1 splits on BESE over the next four years. But never underestimate the power of one, if that one happens to be right.

What do they do in Singapore?

From time to time, an exasperated education reformer will bemoan that Singapore is ahead of the United States in student achievement.

The image of a third-world country outperforming our students is supposed to outrage us and spur us on to even greater rigor. If Singapore can make students learn, why can't we? The implication is that there is something wrong with our schools, our teachers and maybe our society.

And, as it turns out, there is something wrong. But it's not that we lack rigor. Louisiana has some of the toughest requirements for students in the nation - we are one of just seven states with a high-stakes test required for graduation. Yet we have not seen great leaps forward in student achievement.

So what's the difference between Louisiana and Singapore? In that bustling Asian tiger, teaching is an honored profession, and teachers are respected as professionals. Teachers are paid on par with engineers and scientists.

As Christian Science Monitor reporter Stacy Teicher Khadaroo writes here, it's not easy to become a teacher in Singapore:

Only the top third of secondary-school graduates in Singapore can apply for
teacher training. The National Institute of Education winnows that field down
more and pays a living stipend while they learn to teach. Each year, teachers
take an additional 100 hours of paid professional development.

Singapore teachers are highly paid, honored professionals. They even earn a living wage while they are learning to teach.

Naturally, one of the American school administrators interviewed for the story comes away with the wrong lesson: "...we can control university preparation programs [and] some licensure systems."

So when Singapore says, "teachers are highly paid, honored professionals," American administrators hear: "make it harder to be a teacher."

The change we need is bolder and broader than forcing teachers through smaller hoops and over higher hurdles. We don't want our society to look like Singapore's - it is in many ways repressive and authoritarian - but their attitude toward education is impressive.

Are our teachers honored professionals? We like to think so, but we don't pay them very well, and our tightly structured curriculum and reliance on standardized testing reduces them to robots, eliminating the art and sucking the joy out of teaching.

Too many of our schools are crumbling, with broken windows, leaking pipes and poor lighting. Where's the honor in those surroundings?

Our schools should be sources of pride and centers of community activity, but all too often they are bunkers surrounded with razor wire, their entrances bottlenecked by metal detectors and armed guards.

When we really get serious about education, we will shift our emphasis from making life tougher for teachers and students and focus instead on lifting entire communities from the grinding poverty that lies at the bottom of Louisiana's troubles.

LA lower in "Quality Counts" survey

Despite Louisiana's efforts at education reform, Education Week's newest Quality Counts survey actually shows that we have slipped a bit in relation to other states, as Monroe News-Star reporter Barbara Leader reveals in this article .

Unlike other comparisons, Quality Counts looks at intangibles like students' chances for success (our state gets a D-plus). It also takes a gander at the adequacy of state funding for education, a category in which we slipped from last year's C-plus to a D this year - not a good sign in light of the state's looming $1.1 billion deficit.

For more about the Quality Counts survey and comparisons with other states, click this link.