Jeb Bush Loves Pitbull

There are lots of reasons to dislike Jeb Bush - here's another one in this NY Times piece about Bush's alleged "sense of humor":

Jeb Bush had grown fond of Pitbull, the Miami performer gone global, who seemed to share his zeal for education policy. But Mr. Bush, a former Florida governor, had a question: Why the stage name? 

The artist replied that a friend had suggested it years ago while they were en route to a pit-bull fight.

“Well,” Mr. Bush replied at their meeting early this year, “good thing you weren’t on the way to a cockfight.”

Hey, great - Bush is pal's with misogynistic rapper/charter school entrepreneur Pitbull and can make penis jokes.

What a dick.

There - I can make penis jokes too.

One of the delights of this presidential season so far is to see that the more money Bush and his surrogates spend on pushing Bush as a candidate, the more people dislike him and his poll numbers plummet.

If he sticks around much longer, he's going to be in Jindal territory.

What The Clinton Shills Don't Get: Few Trust Hillary Clinton

Had some fun on Twitter with a Clinton shill calling me a liar for this post here entitled "Hillary Clinton Vows To Close Every Public School In The Country."

His message was basically the same one that I've seen elsewhere on the Internet as the "Clinton Wants To Destroy Public Education" meme has rolled along and Clinton shills have begun to push back on it - Clinton doesn't want to close all the schools that are rated "below average," as she said wanted to in the Iowa clip, she simply misspoke.

But the thing that Clinton shills and apologists don't get here is this - given Clinton's elasticity with truth and honesty, given her past fondness for school closures, DFER, charter schools, and the Common Core, given the fondness her pals at the Center for American Progress (basically a Clinton administration in exile ready to roll into power as soon as she's elected) have for this same stuff, given her shillery for Walmart in the past and given the fact that she's a Clinton and no one believes a word these people say, it doesn't matter what she really meant.

See, couple the Clinton administration's ed deform policies in the past with the betrayal that many felt when Barack Obama doubled down on the Bush ed deform policies of NCLB with his Race to the Top program and you have an entire generation of teachers out there not going to cut these lying politicians any slack when they "misspeak" or say stuff that sounds kooky (as Clinton did.)

The larger issue here for me, and why I even blogged the thing in the first place (if you notice, it's almost all Cuomo/NY all the time here at Perdido Street School blog these days, so I'm not doing much 2016 presidential race stuff) is that it was the perfect crystallization of the mistrust many teachers have for Democratic politicians in general and Clinton in particular.

That people didn't give her the benefit of the doubt over this "misspeak," that even now she needs the shills to go around defending her, goes to show you just how little trust or affection she has among many rank and file educators these days.

How do you know when a Clinton's lying?

You don't have to try and figure it out because they're ALWAYS lying.

Time For Another Hedge Fund Manager-Funded Pro-Common Core Ad Buy

From State of Politics:

High Achievement New York, a group that has been supportive of Common Core, is launching a six-figure radio campaign aimed at boosting support for the education standards.

The campaign, set to run through December, is being launched as Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s task force convened to study and potentially recommend changes to the standards is concluding its round of public hearings.

In the ad, two Buffalo teachers discuss their support for the standards, saying they “are working” for students.

“But opponents want to pull the rug out on teachers,” says teacher Lucy Mendola in the spot.

Teacher Heather McCarthy adds: “Help us strengthen New York Standards, not dismantle them.” 

The ads will be targeted for audiences in New York City, the Capital Region, Buffalo and Rochester.

This isn't the first time pro-Common Core ad buys have run.

They haven't worked in the past.

I have a difficult time seeing these work either - the polling is pretty clear in its trends where the public at large stands on Common Core.

But there is a strategy, perhaps, behind the ads:

The spot...directs listeners to the task force’s comments page as well as the Department of Education’s feedback survey.

NYSED has already been touting its CCSS survey, the one that takes intimate knowledge of the standards and hours to fill out, as proof positive New Yorkers love them some Common Core.

Perhaps Hedge Fund, er, High Achievement New York wants to juice the numbers even more by directing people to that survey.

Then they'll point to the survey to say New Yorkers don't want any changes to the Common Core.

Perhaps this is all part of Cuomo's plan to make it look like changes are coming to the state's education policy when no real change is coming.

Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some coordination between the group and the Cuomo administration, since the backers of High Achievement come from the same place as his donor class, and Cuomo has been known to coordinate with ed deformers before (see here, for example.)

Be A Teacher! Read A Script! Administer Tests! Fear For Your Job At All Times!

That's the message that young people have gotten in the Era of Education Reform about the teaching profession according to Stephen Mulcher, director of the Bard College Master of Arts Teaching Program in Los Angeles:

Finding candidates to fill this role, especially good candidates, may be more difficult than policymakers are willing to admit. Despite their clear interest in public service, the students I meet betray little enthusiasm for teaching as it now exists. And I see even less indication that major trends in public education—standardization, the proliferation of testing, the elimination of tenure and seniority, and expansion of school choice—have made teaching any more attractive as a career option.  Prospective teachers, much like the young educators already working in schools, are especially skeptical of accountability measures that tie a teacher’s job security or pay grade to student test scores. And many are bothered by the way teachers are blamed for much broader social problems.

As a result, today’s college students, including those currently marching on campus, are significantly less likely than their parents to see teaching as a viable way to become agents of social change. Of all age groups, voters 18-29 are the most pessimistic about the teaching profession. Only 24 percent are “very likely” to encourage a friend or family member to become a K-12 teacher today.

...

In a comparison across 14 professions, teaching ranked last among respondents who felt that their “opinions seem to count,” or included workplaces with “an environment that is trusting and open.”  Three out of four teachers complain that high stakes testing takes too much classroom time away from actual teaching. Nearly 9 in 10 teachers feel that linking teacher evaluations to students’ test scores is “unfair.”

...

“All teachers do now is read from scripts and administer tests all day,” a Senior psychology major at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro told me last spring.

Why would anyone in their right mind go into teaching these days when you are evaluated via test scores (often the scores of students you don't even teach!), you can be "drive-by evaluated" at any moment by an administrator who will come into your classroom for fifteen minutes and rate you using a rubric that you cannot possibly fulfill in that fifteen minute snippet of teaching, your seniority and tenure protections are stripped from you, your pay is increasingly tied to "student performance" as measured by standardized tests and you have no autonomy to teach what you want to teach or how you want to teach but must read from pre-approved EngageNY scripts that suck the soul and life out of education?

Seriously, why would anyone want to go into that king of "profession"?

I'm not sure if education reformers, whose goal has always been to destroy public education and privatize schools, wanted to create teacher shortages and disdain for teaching among young people or not.

I know they wanted to drive down perceptions of teachers within the culture (thus the decades long "Teachers Are Criminals!" public relations extravaganza in the media) and I know they wanted to diminish teacher autonomy, work protections and compensation so as to exert more control over schools while simultaneously lowering labor costs.

But if they thought that young people wouldn't notice how shitty a job teaching is these days and decide they'd rather do anything but that for work, they were mistaken there.

Teacher shortages are already a problem in many states (google the phrase "teacher shortage" and you'll see) and they are only going to get worse in the near term as the economy continues to improve (and it is - the Fed is finally going to raise interest rates next month for the first time in nearly a decade) and the job market gets better.

It will be interesting to see how the education reform movement responds to widespread teacher shortages.

The shortages haven't come to New York yet, but they'll get here too and once they do, pushing shitty contracts that strip teachers of autonomy, seniority, and work protections while imposing longer days/hours/health care costs on them isn't going to be the way to attract younger people to the profession.

Reformers may think technology will replace the human teacher, but I have a hard time seeing that working well over the long haul state-wide.

And the way things are going now, they're going to have an awfully hard time finding enough younger people to become teachers to replace the retiring older ones (or fleeing ones!)

Campbell Brown To Hammer De Blasio For Not Being Reformy Enough

Keshia Clukey at Politico NY:

ALBANY — Campbell Brown, the former news anchor turned anti-teacher tenure advocate, is hoping her keynote address Wednesday night to the Business Council of New York State's annual conference will spur its members to focus attention on education reform.

...

Brown said she will focus her speech on student achievement and income inequality and that the keynote, which she will deliver at The Sagamore Resort in Bolton Landing, will also take issue with New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, whose policies “not only have been inadequate but, in many situations, have made the situation worse.”

“We can’t afford to have incremental changes. We don’t need any more speeches. We need real change,” Brown said.

We can't afford incremental changes - we need drastic, sudden, dramatic change.

Interestingly enough, Brown gets lumped in politically with "conservatives".

In fact, her husband Dan Senor was one of the "conservatives" who helped bring drastic, sudden, dramatic change to Iraq. 

That went well, didn't it?

So you know the drastic, sudden, dramatic change Brown wants to bring to the education system will go just as swimmingly.

When Brown says de Blasio's policies “not only have been inadequate but, in many situations, have made the situation worse," she can look to husband Dan and the policies he helped engineer in Iraq as a model.

Cuomo, Master Of Triangulation, Calls For Minimum Wage Hike To Distract From His Ed Deform Policies

Governor Cuomo took one of Bill de Blasio's signature issues, a minimum wage hike, away from de Basio yesterday by calling for a $15 minimum wage in New York State.

Earlier this year, Cuomo dismissed de Blasio's call for raising the minimum wage to $13 an hour, saying it couldn't be done, that Republicans in the state Senate wouldn't go for it.

How did Cuomo go from saying the minimum wage couldn't be hiked to $13 an hour to calling for a $15 dollar an hour minimum wage?

Let's just say it had to do with politics:

A confluence of factors seemed to bring him to that moment: accusations from liberals in New York that he had strayed from Democratic principles, polls demonstrating growing support for a higher wage, a sense the national Democratic Party was shifting left and the belief that Mr. Cuomo could make the issue a defining part of his legacy.

It cemented the image for many that Mr. Cuomo is a master of triangulation, picking and choosing issues while zigging and zagging across the political spectrum.

Besides, said a former Cuomo aide who still advises the governor, Mr. de Blasio’s imprint on the issue had tarnished the matter for state Senate Republicans, and Mr. Cuomo believes that he can pressure those in swing districts to support his own plan during an election year.

“I’m sorry to see the mayor be the sacrificial lamb, but it looks pretty clearly the mayor is the sacrificial lamb for the low-wage New Yorkers,” New York City Council Member Brad Lander said. “That is a positive thing.”

Said the former Cuomo aide: “Now he can go to [Senate President John] Flanagan and say, you’re not passing de Blasio’s minimum-wage increase, you’re passing Cuomo’s minimum-wage increase or Biden’s minimum-wage increase.”

And:

Mr. Cuomo’s proposal had more to do with lingering liberal dissatisfaction with the governor, according to Mr. Benjamin. “He was a little embarrassed to the degree by which he lost support and he has to repair those relationships,” he said.

If he is successful, Mr. Cuomo would oversee the implementation of the highest minimum wage of any state in the country and cement a stronger reputation among liberals, who supported his push for gay marriage in New York but have grown disillusioned with his more centrist positions on issues such as charter schools and lower tax policy.

Does Cuomo really care about this issue?

Nahh - if he did, he woudn't have dismissed it out of hand a few months ago.

It's the politics around the issue he cares about.

Many traditional Democratic constituencies (including unions) have come to despise him, he faced a challenge from the left last primary, and his poll numbers have fallen and continue to fall.

So, time for some re-invention as a "liberal."

Thus the Common Core "review," thus the minimum wage hike for fast food workers that he engineered, thus the proposal to raise the minimum wage overall that he said just a few months ago couldn't be done.

As the WSJ story says, it's all politics, it's all triangulation and distraction, in part to make liberals/progressives forget his other "centrist" policies - including his education reform agenda like pushing for the "busting" of the public school system and the destruction of the teaching profession through his APPR teacher evaluation system.

Unionization Key To Closing Racial Wage Gap

Turns out busting public schools is NOT the secret recipe to closing the racial wage gap:

A study released on Friday, noting the gains made by black union workers in New York City, said that raising the rate of unionization among black workers across the country would help narrow the racial pay gap.

The study, conducted by two professors affiliated with the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York, which issued the report, described high unionization rates for black workers who live in the city compared with national rates.

Nearly 40 percent of black workers who are city residents are union members, compared with roughly 13 percent of black workers nationally.

The difference between the rates of black and nonblack unionization is also especially pronounced in New York City. The black unionization rate is nearly double that of nonblacks in the city, a difference that is much smaller nationally.

The authors, Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce, found that black union members enjoyed higher wages than black nonunion workers, and were also likely to have better access to employer-sponsored health care benefits and pensions.

“Unionism offers black workers a substantial economic advantage in regard to earnings — to a greater degree than is the case for nonblacks, reflecting the fact that larger numbers of blacks than nonblacks are employed in low-wage jobs,” the study said.

Gee, who'd a thunk it?

Workers with union protections and wages have economic advantages that workers without union protections and wages have.

Maybe reformers should try to stop trying to bust the public school "monopoly" and push for union jobs if they actually care about closing the racial wage gap.

But they don't actually care about any such thing.

The rhetoric around closing the racial achievement gap or racial wealth gap is just the cover story for their real aim - the privatization of the school system and the busting of the teachers unions.

The Next Time You Hear Some Edubabble Starting With The Words "Research Shows..."

...You can cut the person off by asking if they're sure the "research" they're citing isn't horseshit:

A painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction.

The vetted studies were considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so many of the studies were called into question could sow doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work.

...

More than 60 of the studies did not hold up. The project began in 2011, when a University of Virginia psychologist decided to find out whether suspect science was a widespread problem. He and his team recruited more than 250 researchers, identified the 100 studies published in 2008, and rigorously redid the experiments in close collaboration with the original authors.

Only 36% of the studies held up to scrutiny.  If you add in the so-called research in other fields, even that kind of accuracy is probably too high:

Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford, who predicted in the early 2000s that about half of the findings across medicine were inflated or wrong, said that the 36 percent replication rate for psychology might even be high once the results for other disciplines, like economics, animal research, cell biology and other areas of biomedicine, were also tested.

“Many of the biases found in psychology are pervasive,” Dr. Ioannidis said.

It would be interesting to see a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies of education research to see what the replication rate is.

You hear people on all sides of education reform issues throw out the words "Research shows..."

Our culture has fetishized "research" and "science," as if to say if something has been found by "research" in a "scientific study," it must be so.

This is not so, as one commenter at the NY Times notes:

I applaud the researchers ability to recognize the limitations of their research and their standard of peer review. There is an old saying in medical research: "half of what is published is worthless; the challenge is figuring out which half." The measures adopted help figure that out.

The bigger danger, however, lies not with the scientists but by the talking heads that like to cite (often incorrectly) these studies. President Obama famously said he would "restore science to its rightful place", implying that science was the highest level of understanding. These findings prove what every honest researcher knows- that published studies are often incorrect, that established but untested norms of behavior are often correct, and claiming science as an authority is limiting. Placing blind trust in science is just as foolish as placing blind trust in faith.

The take home message is simple- if a single scientific study claims something different than experience suggests, it needs to be re-tested before it is claimed to be true. Remember that the next time someone proposes a sweeping social change based on shoddy and poorly explained science.

Gee, re-testing scientific research before proposing sweeping social change based on shoddy and poorly explained science - that would never happen in education, would it?

Nahh - the accuracy and validity of the studies on VAM, the Common Core State (sic) Standards, the small schools initiative, teacher evaluations based upon test scores, students who have teachers who raise test scores make more money over their lifetimes, et al. were all tested and re-tested and have been found to be "objective science," as Governor Cuomo is fond of saying.

Right?

Sure.

And "untested norms of behavior" that have stood the test of time are always suspect until Raj Chetty or some other "researcher" gets his/her hands on them for some of their rigorous, scientific research to test them.

Right?

No, not right.

As the commenter at the Times writes, blind trust in so-called science is no better than blind trust in faith.

When you get back to school in a week or so, you can bet you'll hear the words "Research shows..." at some PD meeting sooner rather than later.

It is high time to challenge the research fetishizers when they throw out their "Research shows..." jive to prove that the "research" they're citing is part of the 36% that can be replicated and not the 64% that can't.

PDK/Gallup Poll: Americans Overwhelmingly Reject Test-Based School Accountability

Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post:

Americans overwhelmingly think there is too much emphasis on standardized testing in public schools and that test scores are not the best way to judge schools, teachers or students, according to a national poll.

The results released Sunday come from the 47th annual PDK/Gallup poll of attitudes toward public schools, the longest-running survey of Americans’ views on public education.

 The survey showed that the public rejects school accountability built on standardized tests, which has been federal policy through No Child Left Behind, the signature education initiative of President George W. Bush.

64% say there is too much emphasis on standardized testing in schools.

That's nearly two-thirds of respondents.

Here's an interesting finding on teacher evaluations and test scores:

A majority of respondents — regardless of political affiliation — opposed the notion of evaluating teachers based in part on test scores, an idea heavily promoted by the Obama administration and fought by teachers unions.

As Americans move away from the idea that tying teacher ratings to test scores is a practical way to evaluate teachers, Andrew Cuomo is moving toward it.

Until he is made to pay a political price for pushing what is clearly an unpopular education policy, he'll continue to do it, of course. 

As for Regents Chancellor Tisch and NYSED Commissioner Elia, they say they're going to get the opt out numbers down next year by convincing parents that standardized testing is swell and a civil right and schools just cannot function without them.

The PDK/Gallup poll shows they're going to have an uphill climb.

Same goes for Common Core - 54% oppose it according to the PDK/Gallup poll.

Also there's this interesting tidbit that goes right to the core of the testing issue:

In a rebuttal to those who say states should use common tests so that the public can compare how students perform across state boundaries, fewer than one in five public school parents said it was important to know how children in their communities performed on standardized tests compared with students in other districts, states or countries.

The rationale for the PARCC and SBAC tests was just that - to give the public the ability to compare how students perform in different states.

At less than 20% support, not so much on this tenet of the education reform agenda either.

So let's see, the public doesn't like standardized testing, doesn't think teachers should be evaluated using test scores, doesn't care about the PARCC/SBAC comparisons, and opposes Common Core.

Quite a victory for education reform, eh?

Oh, and one last thing - 57% of the respondents gave the public schools in their own communities (you know, the one's they're familiar with) either an A or B for performance.

So much for the "failing schools" crisis.

How Andrew Cuomo's "Reformy" Teacher Evaluation System Keeps "Great Teachers" Away From Schools That Serve The Most Vulnerable

Back in 2013, education reform organization StudentsFirstNY called for a strengthened teacher evaluation system to help ensure that every child has access to the best teachers in the school system.

They claimed to have done an analysis that showed "that New York City’s most vulnerable students have a disproportionate share of the city’s unsatisfactory-rated teachers" (this was under the old rating system when teachers were still given either "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" ratings.)

Their solution to this so-called inequitable distribution of excellent teachers across the system?

Why, a data-driven teacher evaluation system that incorporated student performance measures into the ratings, along with some other reforms like the following:

• Require parental consent for a student to be taught by an ineffective teacher
  
• Provide significant salary increases to highly effective teachers who stay in the classrooms of high-needs schools
  
• Prohibit schools from assigning to the class of an ineffective teacher any student taught by an ineffective teacher in the previous year
  
• Make it easier for top college graduates to enter teaching, and provide financial incentives for them to do so
  
• Impose a cap on how many ineffective teachers may be allowed to remain at any one school year after year
  
• Require annual reporting by the New York City Department of Education on the distribution of teacher quality across schools and student populations
  

Sounds swell, right?

They're going wash those "ineffective teachers" right out of schools with the most vulnerable student populations through a combination of a more rigorous teacher evaluation system that relies upon students' test scores to prove teacher effectiveness and reporting and capping measures for how many "ineffective" teachers can be at individual schools or teach individual students.

Ah, except that the new APPR teacher evaluation system hawked by education reform groups like StudentsFirstNY and imposed upon the state by Governor Andrew Cuomo (a recipient of much StudentsFirstNY/education reform group largesse) actually keeps "excellent teachers" from going to schools that serve the most vulnerable student populations because it ties 50% of a teacher's rating to student test score performance and few teachers want to teach at schools that have low test scores.

Here is a comment left at a Perdido Street School blog post from yesterday on the irrationality of the value-added measurement system that NYSED uses on teachers to prove so-called "effective teaching":

I am an assistant principal in the Bronx on the HS level. Unfortunately, we cannot attract teachers to our school due to our graduation rate, deriving from low scores (international school). I wanted to recruit an Earth Science teacher. She told me she'd never work at my school because 50% of her overall rating would basically give her a Developing as the HIGHEST rating. You see, the schools are taking a hit too with recruitment. Great teachers go to specific schools. You want to talk about segregation? Here it is at its finest. There are other HS in the campus that are premium. We are in the same campus but can't offer our kids a vibrant Science education, but the other school are. This is terrible and should additionally be reported from an administrators viewpoint. 

How ironic, that the very system StudentsFirstNY called for, paid for and had imposed on the state that they said would ensure that "all students, regardless of zip code, race or socioeconomic status, are afforded a quality education" by having access to quality teachers actually does the opposite.

Education people knew that this would happen, that the more "rigorous" teacher evaluation ratings would harm any teachers who teach in schools with the most vulnerable populations because the VAM rating based upon test scores would be brutal.

This is why NYCDOE Chancellor Carmen Farina said that she wanted to put an asterisk next to the names of "highly effective" teachers who go to teach at Recovery Schools, the pool of schools that the state has labeled "struggling" or "persistently struggling" and will take over in a year or two if performance doesn't improve.

The cynic in me thinks the education reformers at StudentsFirstNY and elsewhere knew that the teacher evaluation system they got Cuomo to impose on the state would do the opposite of what they claimed, that it would harm vulnerable student populations they claim to care about by keeping any teacher who wants to remain in the system for more than two years away from schools where they are likely to get mauled on the APPR test score VAM.

I dunno exactly what the game is, perhaps just making things worse at the most vulnerable schools so that they can claim the public school system sucks and needs to be blown up, perhaps ensuring that many of the schools that serve the most vulnerable populations end up in receivership and get handed over to charter operators, perhaps a combination of the two.

In any case, the rationale behind the APPR teacher evaluation system tied to test scores was always to harm public schools, harm the teaching profession and push as many teachers out of the system as possible by a) increasing the ineffective ratings (two consecutive "ineffectives" in a row can get a teacher fired these days) and b) making the workday so onerous and odious for teachers that they quit in droves and new ones don't come to replace them (both of which are happening all across the country now.)

Keep in mind, education reformers have made sure that charter schools don't have to abide by any of these evaluation reforms, just public schools.

StudentsFirstNY claims to care about students and children, claims to speak for and stand up for the most vulnerable, but the net effective of their reform efforts has been to harm those very students and the schools that serve them.

Teacher-Bashing Frank Bruni Can't Understand Why There's A Teacher Shortage

You can't make this up.

Teacher-bashing, "Won't Back Down"-loving NY Times food critic Frank Bruni thinks we need to study out why there's a teacher shortage across the nation:

"Fewer people are training to be teachers," reports @motokorich. We need to grapple w/ reasons and repercussions, http://t.co/12Ausvx3QQ

— Frank Bruni (@FrankBruni) August 9, 2015

I've already covered the main reason for why fewer are becoming teachers here, but let's do it in a serious of embedded tweets as well:

@FrankBruni Teacher-basher/Campbell Brown ally Frank Bruni wants to explore reasons why fewer become teachers.

— rbe (@perdidostschool) August 9, 2015

@FrankBruni Read your own columns - young people see the disdain elites have for teaching/teachers, say "No thanks..."

— rbe (@perdidostschool) August 9, 2015

@FrankBruni It's not rocket science. 10+ years of teacher bashing, ed deforms that scapegoat teachers have borne fruit.

— rbe (@perdidostschool) August 9, 2015

Bruni is pals with teacher-bashing Campbell Brown and writes edu-claptrap for a living, so it's not a surprise that he tweeted something inane in response to the article Motiko Rich wrote in the NY Times today about the teacher shortage problem across the nation.

Neither Brown nor Bruni can see (or want to see) that bashing teachers and public schools for all the ills in society, calling for diminished work protections and salary (e.g., based on merit pay) and pushing for reforms that sap the souls of teachers have real world consequences.

Who wants to go into a job where they blame everything bad in the world on you, continually abuse you in the newspapers, try and take away the salary and benefits you have, and impose new, odious and unfair ways to evaluate you?

NY Times Covers National Teacher Shortage, But Misses Point Of Why It's Happening

And so we've gone from "How do we fire teachers!" to "Gee, we can't find teachers!" in a pretty short period of time - even the education reporter at the NY Times noticed:

ROHNERT PARK, Calif. — In a stark about-face from just a few years ago, school districts have gone from handing out pink slips to scrambling to hire teachers.

Across the country, districts are struggling with shortages of teachers, particularly in math, science and special education — a result of the layoffs of the recession years combined with an improving economy in which fewer people are training to be teachers.

...

Louisville, Ky.; Nashville; Oklahoma City; and Providence, R.I., are among the large urban school districts having trouble finding teachers, according to the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban districts. Just one month before the opening of classes, Charlotte, N.C., was desperately trying to fill 200 vacancies. 

But as is usual with the Times ed coverage, they screw up the story and miss why the shortage is happening:

Educators say that during the recession and its aftermath prospective teachers became wary of accumulating debt or training for jobs that might not exist. As the economy has recovered, college graduates have more employment options with better pay and a more glamorous image, like in a rebounding technology sector.

In California, the number of people entering teacher preparation programs dropped by more than 55 percent between 2008 and 2012, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Nationally, the drop was 30 percent between 2010 and 2014, according to federal data. Alternative programs like Teach for America, which will place about 4,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall, have also experienced recruitment problems.

Yes, it's true that a rebounding economy leads fewer people to go into teaching - there are more opportunities available for other kinds of work with "better pay and a more glamorous image."

But unexplored in the Motiko Rich Times piece is one big reason why teaching isn't a job with a glamorous image. - the consequences of 10+ years of corporate education reforms.

Every day you open the newspaper or turn on the TV, you see or hear some teacher-bashing crap, some politician like Christie saying he wants to punch teachers in the face, some rag like the Post blaming teachers for destroying the lives of children by using the Three Little Pigs as a DO NOW exercise to teach POV and bias.

Then there are the new "accountability rules" - the constant observations, the evaluation ratings tied to test scores (as high as 50%), the increased work load and stress for the same (or less) money, the decreased benefits, gutted pensions, and diminished work protections like tenure (Kansas is an emblem of this, but it's happening nationwide too.)

I'd say if kids are looking around at the job landscape and saying "Hell, I can do better than be a teacher!", they're right - and smart for saying it.

I teach seniors and I tell the ones who say they want to be teachers to think twice about the major - that teacher bashing and odious accountability measures (most of which simply add more work to a teacher's load without making them better teachers) make the job miserable these days.

I also tell them that teaching isn't really a career anymore, that the politicians and educrats and oligarchs who fund education reform see it as a McJob that can be filled by untrained temps who do it for a couple of years and move on (or get moved on by accountability measures) to something else.

To that end, the Times again:

Ms. Cavins, 31, who once worked as a paralegal and a nanny, began a credentialing program at Sonoma State University here in Rohnert Park less than a year ago. She still has a semester to finish before she graduates. But later this month she will begin teaching third grade — in both English and Spanish — at Flowery Elementary School in Sonoma. Ms. Cavins said she would lean on mentors at her new school as well as her professors. “You are not on that island all alone,” she said.

Esmeralda Sanchez Moseley, the principal at Flowery, said she could not find a fully credentialed — let alone experienced — teacher to fill the opening. “The applicant pool was next to nothing,” she said. “It’s crazy. Six years ago, this would not have happened, but now that is the landscape we are in.”

Before taking over a classroom solo in California, a candidate typically must complete a post-baccalaureate credentialing program, including stints as a supervised student teacher. But in 2013-14, the last year for which figures are available, nearly a quarter of all new teaching credentials issued in California were for internships that allow candidates to work full time as teachers while simultaneously enrolling in training courses at night or on weekends.

In addition, the number of emergency temporary permits issued to allow non-credentialed staff members to fill teaching posts jumped by more than 36 percent between 2012 and 2013.

At California State University, Fresno, 100 of the 700 candidates enrolled in the teacher credentialing program this year will teach full time while completing their degree.

“We don’t like it,” said Paul Beare, dean of the Fresno State school of education. “But we do it.”

Mission accomplished for education reformers - a cheap untrained temp workforce is soon going to be commonplace in schools, this will lead to an even bigger "teaching quality crisis" and allow reformers to promote privatization as the answer to the "education crisis."

Shame Motiko Rich missed the part of the story about how education reform has helped bring about the national teacher shortage.

But alas, this is another example of a Times ed article that only gets half the story: the "national teaching shortage" is reformer-generated and will serve the ultimate goal of may education reformers - to destroy the public school "monopoly" and privatize the public school system.

Jeb Bush Calls For Merit Pay For Federal Employees, Disruption For Federal Government

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush laid out a plan today to "disrupt" the federal government if he is elected president, saying that he will cut the federal workforce by 10% and institute merit pay for government workers:

In a speech on Monday in Florida, the Republican presidential candidate unveiled his plan for "disrupting" Washington by downsizing the federal government.

Bush's plan takes aim at the federal budget. He proposes cutting the number of federal employees by at least 10% and radically overhauling the budget process to require a balanced budget, a controversial prescription popular with the conservative base.

"It will not be my intention to preside over the establishment, but in every way I know to disrupt that establishment and make it accountable to the people," Bush said.

...

Bush says that he will institute a policy of hiring one employee for every three who leave when it comes to federal hiring, with the exception of national-security related jobs. Bush suggested that federal agencies shouldn't replace many workers who retire — according to the governor, 10% of the federal workforce will retire within the next five years, and "not everyone who leaves has to be replaced."

And then there's this:

• Merit pay. Bush claims too many mediocre federal employees are being paid the same as exemplary employees. Though he didn't delve too far into specifics on this point, the former Florida governor said that he'll make it easier to fire bad federal employees.

It seems both the rhetoric and policies of Jeb's education reform agenda will now be leveled at the federal government and federal workers too.

Can "turnarounds" for federal departments be far behind?

Maybe receivership for some federal departments, with goals to be hit or the whole thing gets turned over to a non-profit charter entity?

Oh, the ideas for bringing education reform ideas to Washington government are limitless.

How exciting! 

Tenant Advocates Blame Cuomo For Tying Education Tax Credit To Rent Regulation

Crains reports that tenant advocates are holding Governor Cuomo accountable for the expiration of rent regulation laws in NYC and plan to primary him in three years:

"Cuomo has alienated a massive number of rent-regulated Democratic voters by not delivering stronger rent laws this session," said one operative working with tenant groups. "His base blames him, not anyone else, for the dysfunction and corruption in Albany."

By linking rent regulation with a $150 million education tax credit proposal opposed by Assembly Democrats, Mr. Cuomo has poisoned the debate, said Jonathan Westin, director of New York City Communities for Change.

"Tenants across New York City, especially in communities of color, folks that supported the governor in his re-election, are furious at what's happening," Mr. Westin said. "Albany, and the governor specifically, are playing games with their homes."

"The only thing holding up his poll numbers are New York City liberals and communities of color," he continued. "And if he loses those, I don't know what will be left. He's completely vulnerable."

I've said before, I'll say again, it's a shame these activists didn't realize Cuomo would betray them before this, so that more damage could have been done to him in the 2014 primary.

Nonetheless Westin is right that the only thing holding Cuomo up from complete political collapse in polls is the liberal base and communities of color in NYC.

If he loses that support (and God knows, he should), he will fall below Spitzer territory in approval.

Hell, he's almost in Spitzer territory now - won't take much to put him there.

A commenter at Crains points out the real danger here for Cuomo politically:

The point is not so much that "tenant activists" would pull this off but that at the rate our esteemed governor is going that by 2018 there could be a rather formidable coalition of tenant activists, anti-frackers, parents and teachers fed up with Cuomo's education policies, people finally exhausted by the Roman level of decadence now playing out in Albany and an assortment of other moderate and liberal Democrats that a real candidate willing to show some courage, like Eric Schneiderman or Tom DiNapoli, or, yes, even Zephyr Teachout would have a real chance in a primary with a lot of energized anti-Andy voters in it.

All of this assumes he's not carted out in handcuffs as the third arrest in the "Three Amigos In A Jail" show US Attorney Preet Bharara is putting on for the state.

This also assumes that the anger activists are expressing remains undiminished by whatever deal eventually gets worked out on rent regulation.

Still, the blueprint is there to continue to weaken and finally destroy Andrew Cuomo politically - and Cuomo keeps adding to it with every betrayal and fight he wages these days.

Teachers Union Leader Easily Satisfied With Hillary Clinton Response

Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post:

Hillary Rodham Clinton told the president of the National Education Association that she would listen to teachers if elected president, a simple promise Monday that impressed the president of the nation’s largest labor union.

“She used the most important word that I was personally looking for, the word ‘listen’,” said Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the NEA, which represents mostly K-12 teachers and paraprofessionals and has 3 million members.

Sure, she'll "listen."

Then she'll do what her wealthy education reformer donors want her to do and keep the Obama education reform policies going.

Protesters Plan To "Move In" To John Flanagan's Office Over Rent Regulations

Tenant-rights groups are getting aggressive in their push on rent regulations:

A day after affordable housing advocates protested outside of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Albany office, a tenant-rights group plans to push Senate Majority Leader John Flanangan on the issue as well.

Housing advocates and demonstrators plan to demonstrate at Flanagan’s Long Island office later today and call for stronger rent-law protections as regulations are due to expire June 15.

The demonstrators will plan to “move in” to the office if they aren’t assured rent control regulations will be protected, according to one of the event’s organizers.

At the same time, the Alliance For Tenant Power plans to release a letter knocking Flanangan (and really the Senate GOP at large) for the power wielded by developers like Glenwood Management, which has played a role in the indictment of former Majority Leader Dean Skelos.

Here's a blueprint for targeting Flanagan on education issues as well.

Quinnipiac Poll: Voters Disapprove Of Cuomo's Handling Of Education, 59%-30%

Yesterday Quinnipiac released a poll showing Governor Andrew Cuomo's job approval rating had fallen to his lowest level ever in that poll - 44%

Cuomo is also at lows in two other polls - the Siena (41%-59%) and Marist (37-59%)

Today Quinnipiac released more from the poll that shows how unpopular most of the Cuomo agenda is:

ALBANY—New Yorkers aren’t happy with Governor Andrew Cuomo on education, and they don't want Mayor Bill de Blasio to retain control of schools in the five boroughs, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday.

By a 59 percent to 30 percent margin, voters disapproved of Cuomo's handling of education, while 54 percent of those questioned said they trusted teachers’ unions more than the governor to improve schools.

Cuomo’s specific education reform proposals are even more unpopular. About 69 percent of respondents said teacher pay should not be based on students’ standardized test scores, and 65 percent said tenure should not be based on tests.

There's more:

Voters are also sour on the state’s standardized testing requirements.

A slight majority, 51 percent, think students should be able to refuse standardized tests, compared to 45 percent who said students should be required to take the exams.

In addition, the poll found, 64 percent of those questioned said tests aren’t an accurate way of measuring student learning.

Only two parts of Cuomo's reform agenda had support in the Q poll - the charter cap (53%-39% said it should be increased) and tax credits for education.

Cuomo's pushed through most of his education reform agenda successfully and I suspect he'll get more of it before everything is done in two weeks - the charter cap will likely get an increase and there's an outside chance the heavy hearts in the Assembly will cave on part or all of thee ducation tax credit.

But Cuomo's paying a political price for imposing his agenda - it's not a mistake that he's at "historic" (one of his favorite words) lows in three different polls (the Quinnipiac, the Marist and the Siena poll.)

He grows weaker by the week,with corruption charges in Albany taking a toll on him, his education agenda taking a toll on him and weariness with his "My Way Or The Highway" approach taking a toll on him.

No wonder he's going after Scheiderman in a very public way.

He's scared for his political life.

MaryEllen Elia Knows It All, Doesn't Much Want To Hear From Others

That's the subtext of this Wall Street Journal piece on our new NYSED Commissioner:

In Florida, she was known as a blunt, forceful whirl of energy, at times holding staff meetings at 6 a.m. “She’s one of the smartest, hardest-working people I know, but she doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” said Candy Olson, a former school-board member in Hillsborough County. “She knew everything going on in the district but that doesn’t leave a lot of time to reflect…. Sometimes she gets going and doesn’t always listen to all the other voices.”

And:

Doretha Edgecomb, a school-board member and former principal, called her a bold visionary but said sometimes it would help her to slow down, “making sure those around her also understand the depth of her vision.”

Since her appointment, Elia has used language that makes her sound "collaborative":

In an interview in Albany this week, Ms. Elia talked in careful, measured tones. She said the debut of higher academic standards, harder tests and new evaluations at the same time created extra tension, in New York and nationally. “Whenever there is something new, there is a stress level,” she said. “I hope I can be a facilitator to establish more collaborative relationships between all the parties.”

But there are enough warning signs from her Hillsborough tenure that she's going to be an autocrat as NYSED commissioner, imposing her vision on the state, critics be damned.

You can see more negatives here, here, here , here and here.

No Need To Worry For The Educrats And Their Shills In The "Non-Profit" World

Frank Bruni has another education reform column today that fetishizes the Department of Education, the educrats who run it and the reforms they impose, complete with quotes from Joel Klein, Kati Haycock and Michael Petrilli.

Gee, that's not rigging the column much, is it?

I'm not quoting from the column - you can read it yourself if you want.

But I did find this response in the comments relevant:

Six family members are teachers. Can anyone cite any measure by which initiatives instituted over the last 15 years achieved any success? No child left behind, common core, student growth objectives, over a hundred hours of standardized testing and teacher evaluations, just to name the ones I know. No child left behind resulted in half of my daughter’s 8th grade math class performing at a 2nd grade math level! These initiatives require so much administrative paperwork that the teachers don’t have enough time to prepare creative lesson plans. All six of the teachers I know work 60-80 hours per week. A substantial portion of the year is devoted to standard tests instead of teaching. Our children are at the greatest disadvantage in the history of this country and falling further behind. To what end? Do any of these decision-making bureaucrats/administrators ever speak with the teachers to learn what they would do to improve classroom effectiveness? Teachers are given unrealistic goals by which their performance is measured. For example, 2-3 grade level improvement in the students. I attended school in the sixties and believe the quality of my education is light years ahead of what our children get today. At that time, the teachers had a loose-leaf book with guidelines for each day’s lesson plan. There was at most, one standard test during the school year. Get rid of all the layers of six figure administrators and restore responsibility for the classroom to our teachers.

One big difference between the school experience the commenter mentions and now is the number of education "experts" in education "non-profits" who weigh in with the news media with their "expertise" on education issues.

There's an awful lot of money to be made shilling for corporate education reform, that's for sure.

And of course those "experts" in education working for the "non-profits" are all funded by very wealthy interests like Bill Gates or Eli Broad.

Frank Bruni need not worry for his beloved educrats and their reforms.

So long as the wealthy interests continue to back them, they'll be around.

StudentsFirstNY Sad That Assembly Watered Down Some Cuomo Education Reforms

From Capitol Confidential:

The Assembly passed Wednesday an omnibus education reform package that addresses both the updated teacher evaluation system and the Common Core standards.

The bill, which was introduced earlier this month, is a wide-ranging one-house proposal that grants an extension to when schools must fully implement the new evaluation system, delinks funding from the full implementation of the standards and requires the state Education commissioner to review the Common Core standards, among other things.

It would provide $8.4 million worth of funding to the state Education Department.
The bill passed 135-1.

There's not much positive to the bill in actuality - a kangaroo panel at SED to review Common Core, a slight delay in evaluation implementation, more money provided to SED for testing - but still this bill passage made education reformers StudentsFirstNY sad:

StudentsFirstNY, a group that has supported Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s teacher evaluation and education policies, didn’t view passage in the same light Wednesday.

“It’s disheartening to learn that certain lawmakers who approved teacher assessment reforms during the budget process have flip-flopped after a special interest group complained about the agreement,” StudentsFirstNY Executive Director Jenny Sedlis said in a statement. ”If New York State is serious about improving education, it must move forward with a better teacher evaluation system.”

A special interest group complained?

The heavy hearts in the Assembly were reacting to the opt out surge by parents all across the state, not to complaints by NYSUT.

Some commenters at Capitol Confidential pounced on StudentsFirstNY:

“It’s disheartening to learn that certain lawmakers who approved teacher assessment reforms during the budget process have flip-flopped after a special interest group complained about the agreement,” StudentsFirstNY Executive Director Jenny Sedlis said in a statement.

And:

“It’s disheartening to learn that certain lawmakers who approved teacher assessment reforms during the budget process have flip-flopped after a special interest group complained about the agreement,”Earth to Jenny Sedlis: Lawmakers are responding to the special interest group called “Taxpaying Parents of Abused Students” or TPAS for short….

Your organization is the Special Interest group, (The Executive Director title gives you away.) But, that’s what Republicans do best, renaming a hurtful policy with an Orwellian reverse speak… Student Advocate instead of test company-financed politicians, PeaceKeeper missiles instead of Weapons of Mass Destruction.. etc..

Also:

StudentsFirstNY Board of Directors: Mikael Andren, President, Jones Family Office ; Douglas J. Band , Counselor to President Clinton : David Boies , Chairman, Boies, Schiller, and Flexner LLP ; Tiffany Dufu , Chief Leadership Officer, Levo League ; Carl C. Icahn , Foundation for a Greater Opportunity ; Gail Golden Icahn , Foundation for a Greater Opportunity ; Paul Tudor Jones , Co-Chairman & Chief Investment Officer, Tudor Investment Corp. ; Peter Kiernan , Kiernan Ventures ; Joel I. Klein , CEO, Education Division, News Corporation ; Kenneth G. Langone , Chairman and CEO, Invemed Associates, LLC ; Daniel S. Loeb , CEO, Third Point, LLC ; Eva Moskowitz , Founder and CEO, Success Academy Charter Schools; Michelle Rhee , CEO and Founder, StudentsFirst ; Jabali Sawicki , Instructional Designer, Zearn ; Dan Senor , Author, Start-Up Nation; Senior Advisor, Elliott Management ; Michael Sullivan , Managing Director, SAC Capital. Special interest group, indeed!

Finally:

To clarify, not just special interest groups complained. Many informed parents had their students (over 200,000) refuse / opt out of the test. In this bill the legislature is trying to represent their constituents, hopefully they will be able to come together on a bill and make it veto proof. This would allow parents and teachers to see the exam in their entirety (like regents exams) and review their students individual results. Hopefully the length of test will also begin to mirror the regents exams. An 11th grader spends 2-3 hours on the English regents, but those in grade 4-8 spend three days and multiple days of prep to evaluate the same subject.

Only in Education Reform World are over 200,000 parents a "special interest group" but a small coterie of education reformers funded by some of the wealthiest interests in the country a grassroots organization devoted to improving education.

Reminds me of when former NYSED Commissioner John King had his meltdown in Poughkeepsie and claimed parents complaining about Common Core and the state's Endless Testing regime were "special interests."