It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on in the California State Capitol behind closed doors with regard to two education reform bills now under consideration. This legislation is being pushed through hard and fast so that the state can apply for some hundreds of millions of dollars available through one-tie grants under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) under the Race To The Top (RTTT) program.
Senate Bill X5 1 (Romero) is stalled out in the Assembly after passing the Senate and Assembly Bill X5 8 has been passed by the Assembly and sent over to the Senate.
Why the two bills? Because there are some behind-closed doors competing interests driven primarily by a difference in philosophy and underwritten by powerful education lobby interests, namely, the California Teacher’s Association and in all likelihood, the State Teacher’s Retirement System. The key differences in the two bills are language about Charter Schools and parent rights. The teacher’s union is trying hard to make sure that Charter Schools are following the same regulations that public schools have to follow. The issue of parental rights is about giving parents of children in failing schools the right to take their child and enrollment them in any school in the state. Not sure why they are worried about that, parents in poor schools are in poor neighborhoods which normally leaves poor families with inadequate resources to send their kids elsewhere to school unless there’s one really close by.
So it’s all about money, big surprise right? So what’s confusing about this whole scenario is why anyone thinks that it’s wrong for teachers to advocate for themselves?
If we start with Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education for the Obama administration, who believes that, “To make the American dream of equal educational opportunity a reality, we need to recruit, reward, train, learn from, and honor a new generation of talented teachers.” (A Call to Teaching: Secretary Arne Duncan’s Remarks at The Rotunda at the University of Virginia, 10/9/09). So Mr. Duncan believes that reward is part of what good teachers should receive, give them money.
Of course good rewards for teachers should be limited to the “talented”, the “good”, the “superior”. The common line out there is that every child deserves an excellent teacher. Well, I went to school and I had a handful of excellent teachers along the way (3 – I would say), a few good ones, a few average ones, a few poor ones, and a few hideous ones. But all that said, these comparisons are made from the perspective of what I would call an “excellent” teacher.
So how is it that money is an issue at the Capitol if there is to be an excellent teacher in every classroom who is to be adequately “rewarded” for their work? How does the Federal Department of Education build requirements into their legislation that “creates” teaching excellence?
A big piece of both bills in California is elimination of part of the education code that limits the number of Charter Schools in the state. I wonder if increasing the number of Charter Schools will increase the number of excellent teachers? I don’t immediately see the nexus.
Developing state standards is another RTTT requirement, and not just state standards, they must be standards across a region of states. Why not just get it over with and develop a national set of standards? Why this ridiculous intermediate step? And does developing content standards improve instruction? I don’t see the nexus. Telling teachers WHAT to teach is not the same as telling them HOW to teach it.
Connecting teacher evaluation to student test results is another RTTT requirement. So Arne Duncan and Newt Gingrich think that making teachers responsible for the test scores of their students, and putting them in jeopardy of losing their job if their kids don’t test well is going to improve their teaching ability? I don’t see the nexus. Telling teachers that assessment of student achievement will be used in their evaluation is not the same as teaching them how to be a more effective teacher.
The great fiscal conundrum is this, if Arne Duncan wants to reward excellent teachers AND he wants an excellent one in every child’s classroom, then he is going to have to come up with a lot of money. That’s because the RTTT money is going to be spent on a lot of things peripheral to teaching and developing good teachers.
In my view, the bills being kicked around the California state capitol are just an effort to pretend to make education reforms without using language that really making them stick. The problem is that it’s all stick and no carrot for the teachers.
The hysterical thing about all of this is that Obama’s administration has the state legislature dancing to education bullets being fired at their feet. And MAN are they doing the fast-steppin’ tap dance. There’s no debate about whether the RTTT reforms will produce better teaching which is what the rhetoric in Washington is all about. Why isn’t the California legislature at least stopping in their “EXTRAORDINARY” session to debate whether the money is worth the changes to the education code, will these changes improve education in California or are they just “following the money”. Any non-profit organization worth its salt knows its’ mission and if a funding opportunity presents itself that is outside that mission it says, “no thanks”. Maybe that’s what California needs to do on the RTTT money, simply say, “NO THANKS!”.