Thomas: Chicago teachers’ strike raises issues important to S.C. - Editorial Columns - TheState.com

Thomas: Chicago teachers’ strike raises issues important to S.C. - Editorial Columns - TheState.com

The Chicago teachers’ strike may seem to be a distant and mostly insignificant event in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, but it matters a great deal for public education in our state.

The national discussion of public education and education reform has painted union influence with a broad brush that is simplistic, as this influence varies from state to state. Further, the facts challenge the negative portrayal of teachers’ unions found in pop culture such as the documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’” and the motion picture “Don’t Back Down.”

The fact is that states with strong unions tend to have higher student test scores than states, such as South Carolina, that are non-union. Of course, that’s because there is a strong correlation between unionization, poverty and student test scores. That’s because test scores remain primarily a function of poverty and affluence. In other words, unionized states tend to be more affluent and non-union states tend to be high-poverty.

We must look beyond the union element and recognize that urban teachers in Chicago share with South Carolina the burden of poverty that is reflected in measurable student outcomes.

Next, the Chicago teachers’ strike must be recognized as a workers’ strike. Although South Carolina does not share the direct union influence on workers’ conditions and rights with Chicago, ours is primarily a state of workers. In education, we must not ignore that teachers are workers and that teaching conditions are student learning conditions.

Most importantly, the strike challenges education reform that is being promoted here in South Carolina without the same mechanisms for resistance that are available for unionized teachers.

About three decades ago, states began implementing top-down school accountability policies that have been further reinforced by the federal government in the past decade through No Child Left Behind. The central problem with the accountability era has been that these polices are not based on valid research and have not produced positive results.

Yet, in Chicago, South Carolina and all across the United States, political leaders of both major parties are erasing teacher professionalism through mandated standards, holding teachers accountable for outcomes beyond their control (standardized test scores of both their own students and students whom teachers do not even teach) and promoting experiments (such as charter schools and Teach for America) that do not produce better outcomes but do perpetuate the exact problems we claim to be fighting — notably segregating schools and providing the students who need schools most the worst possible educations.

To discount and stereotype the teachers’ strike based on South Carolina’s historical rejection of unions is to ignore key issues facing all workers in our state, as well as the future of public education.

If we believe in the power of public schools, we must support social policy that addresses childhood poverty — notably food insecurity, health and eye care, prenatal care and stable work for all families.

If we want to hold our schools and teachers accountable for the best education we can offer to all children regardless of their backgrounds, we must reject top-down education policy created by political leaders with no experience or expertise in education — notably rejecting Common Core State Standards, teacher evaluations linked to test scores, the expansion of charter schools and the hiring of Teach for America core members.

While union bureaucracy often deserves challenges from within and outside unionized states, erasing teacher professionalism and silencing teachers’ voices do not serve the needs of teachers, students or the public in South Carolina, where people living in poverty, the working poor, the working class and the middle class share burdens not experienced by the political leadership ignoring those realities.

Teachers are American workers, and few things should matter more to South Carolinians than the power and voices of American workers.

Thomas: Linking teacher pay to test scores helps no one - Editorial Columns - TheState.com

Thomas: Linking teacher pay to test scores helps no one - Editorial Columns - TheState.com

Starting in the early 1980s, education reform focused on increasing expectations for students by establishing state standards and graduation requirements that included high-stakes exit exams. In the past few years, education reform has shifted from student accountability to teacher accountability.

Under federal pressure from Race to the Top and opting out of No Child Left Behind, many states are addressing teacher quality through changes to teacher evaluation and pay scales that include student test scores.

Superintendent Mick Zais argues that teacher experience and advanced degrees are insignificant to both teacher evaluation and pay; thus, the SC Department of Education is currently presenting to teacher focus groups a plan to field test a new teacher evaluation system that will link teacher quality, at least in part, to student test-scores, constituting as much as 40% of that evaluation.

The Los Angeles Times created a great deal of controversy surrounding test-based teacher evaluation by calculating and publishing value-added models (VAM) of ranking teachers. From that controversy, a growing body of research reveals the significant flaws in linking teacher evaluation to student test scores:

“Many researchers have raised concerns regarding the use of value-added models (VAM) for teacher evaluation. Briefly, VAM do not provide guidance for improvement, are comparative rather than absolute measures, assess a small part of teacher’s responsibilities, force different kinds of teaching into one scale, do not produce consistent results for given teachers over time, and may not identify effects actually caused by the teachers.”

Just as no solid evidence supports SC increasing commitments to charter schools and Teach for America, test-based teacher evaluation should have no place in education and teacher quality reform in SC. Let’s consider the many reasons that addressing teacher quality through test scores is a waste of precious time and resources for our state at the expense of our students and teachers:

• As noted above, the relatively new but growing body of evidence on the validity and reliability of test-based teacher evaluations reveals that data are unstable; in other words, as the populations of students change or the school settings change, the rankings of the teachers fluctuate. Test-based teacher evaluation can be of value only if it can offer a stable message that a teacher is strong or weak. If that label isn’t predictive, it has no positive contribution to policy and personnel decisions.

• In order to implement test-based teacher evaluation that shows student growth, SC will have to create and implement two tests per course for every teacher in the state and in every content area taught. Since there is no compelling evidence test-based teacher evaluation data are stable or valid, this investment in time and money is a catastrophic failure by our state leaders. How will we identify growth in music, P.E., and art, and how can we justify the costs associated with generating all of these tests?

• Test-based teacher evaluations create a competitive environment in which teachers must choose between the welfare of their students and their own professional security as that becomes threatened by the outcomes of other teachers and their students. In effect, each teacher must seek to use her/his students against the outcomes of other teachers’ students for their own personal gain. Education is best served by a collaborative, not competitive, environment.

• Test-based evaluations of teachers place far too much weight on flawed assumptions. First, high-stakes testing distorts how well any tests reflect student learning. Next, high-stakes testing decreases the quality of both teaching and learning since it encourages teaching to the test. Further, linking teacher evaluations to student outcomes confuses “high-quality teaching” with student test scores, although we have no way to insure that teacher quality is always positively correlated with those scores. And finally, test-based evaluations of teachers imply that student outcomes are or can be linked only to the teacher’s room that any student sits in when the test is administered. Here is the great failure of test-based evaluations of teachers: Data linked to a student are correlated with dozens of conditions (that cannot be controlled for) that distort any one teacher’s quality.

Claiming that teacher quality is central to education reform is a powerful and compelling message—although teacher quality is overshadowed by out-of-school factors. As I have noted about committing to charter schools, SC must stop pursuing solutions without identifying the primary problems, which include the inequity that creates poverty and the inequitable distribution of high-quality teachers.

Test-based reforms to teacher evaluation, pay, and retention are distractions from genuine reform to teacher quality and pay. To pursue test-based teacher evaluation while the state continues to struggle economically and educationally is an inexcusable failure of state leadership.

Thomas: Charter schools aren’t the right answer - Editorial Columns - TheState.com

Thomas: Charter schools aren’t the right answer - Editorial Columns - TheState.com

See the original and expanded piece at Daily Kos.

Thomas: Don’t jump from NCLB to more of the same - Editorial Columns - TheState.com

Thomas: Don’t jump from NCLB to more of the same - Editorial Columns - TheState.com

Poverty and Education in SC and the US

Op-Eds in The State:

Don’t ask schools to fix society’s problems

And The Greenville News:

Shift educational reform strategies

As children across South Carolina re-enter our schools across the state, two recent reports on childhood well-being are worth considering—the State of America’s Children 2011 Report (Children’s Defense Fund) and Kid’s Count 2011 (Annie E. Casey Foundation).

Both reports identify the growing fact of poverty in the lives of children across the U.S., a plight on the lives of children that disproportionately and increasingly impacts children of color. Low birth weight, infant mortality, child death rate, high school graduation, home conditions for children, access to health care, and a number of conditions associated with the socio-economic status of the child’s home are highlighted in the reports, resulting in a bleak picture for children in the richest country in the history of the world.

The Kid’s Count 2011 report also reveals that SC ranks 45^th in the country in child well-being—with low birth weight, children living in poverty, and percent of children in single-parent families increasing across our state since 2000.

While the data are alarming, particularly during an economic downturn that has depleted social services and education funding for several years, the reports also help highlight our misguided education reform policies across the state and the nation.

The overwhelming body of research shows that student achievement in schools is most strongly tied to the home conditions of those children, trumping significantly the quality of the school, the standards of the state, or the quality of the teacher. Research from Hirsch for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and from Hanushek [1] identify teacher impact on measurable student achievement as being only about 13-17%.

As well, David Berliner has identified six out-of-school factors that parallel the recent reports on childhood well-being: “(1) low birth-weight and non-genetic prenatal influences on children; (2) inadequate medical, dental, and vision care, often a result of inadequate or no medical insurance; (3) food insecurity; (4) environmental pollutants; (5) family relations and family stress; and (6) neighborhood characteristics.”

From the evidence we currently have on childhood poverty and measurable student outcomes, we must shift significantly our education reform strategies in SC and the U.S.

First, we must acknowledge, as Traubdid in 2000, “The idea that school, by itself, cannot cure poverty is hardly astonishing, but it is amazing how much of our political discourse is implicitly predicated on the notion that it can,” and as Martin Luther King Jr. did in 1967: “We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.”

In short, SC must begin to implement social policies that address the six out-of-school factors noted by Berliner and identified in the two reports about childhood well-being as a foundational step that allows education reform to work.

Once we confront the fact that schools alone cannot eradicate poverty—that school outcomes are primarily a reflection of social inequity and not school quality—we must implement education reform that addresses the ways in which our schools currently perpetuate social inequities through school practices—including the following:

• Confront and end deficit views of learning broadly and of children living in poverty narrowly. Programs such as those offered by Ruby Payne must be rejected for their baseless claims and we must re-imagine how we view poverty—particularly in terms of it resulting from social dynamics and not from the people trapped in the condition.

• Reduce and eventually eliminate our test culture in schools. Standardized testing, such as the SAT, remains biased by social class, gender, and race. The continued use of testing to label and stratify children can only perpetuate, not erase, inequity.

• End tracking and gate-keeping policies that block children from rich course offerings.

• End the tradition of assigning the most experienced and well-qualified teachers to the elite students. Children coming from poverty, ELL students, and children of color have the least experienced and un- or under-qualified teachers compared to their affluent peers.

• Re-imagine public school and college funding that makes college accessible to any student willing and capable, as many European countries do.

The much bemoaned achievement gap is primarily a reflection of the social equity gap in SC and across the U.S. To continue to suggest that schools cause inequity or can achieve Utopian accomplishments such as eradicating poverty is as fruitless as our cultural implication that poverty is the product of those living in poverty, and not the conditions being tolerated by the powerful who control the U.S.

No child chose the conditions of her or his home, and to ask children living lives in poverty just to work harder is a cruel and unfair request, particularly when it comes from adults living lives of privilege and affluence.

Social reform addressing the lives of children is educational reform.

[1] Hanushek, E. (2010, December). The economic value of higher teacher quality. Working paper 56. Washington, DC: Calder, The Urban Institute.