As we deal with the wreckage of the recent and deeply destructive budget deal, one of the last things we need is for the Obama Administration to twist the knife and worsen the collapse of public services in California. Unfortunately that is precisely what is poised to occur as President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan threatened to withhold funds from California schools unless we embark on a questionable and reckless education “reform” the administration is championing:
President Obama singled out California on Friday for failing to use education data to distinguish poor teachers from good ones, a situation that his administration said must change for the state to receive competitive, federal school dollars.
Obama’s comments echo recent criticisms by his Education secretary, Arne Duncan, who warned that states that bar the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers, as California does, are risking those funds. In an announcement Friday at the Education Department in Washington, Obama and Duncan said the “Race to the Top” awards will be allocated to school districts that institute reforms using data-driven analysis, among other things.
“You cannot ignore facts,” Obama said. “That is why any state that makes it unlawful to link student progress to teacher evaluations will have to change its ways.”
The remarks escalate a disagreement between the Obama administration and California education leaders. While a 2006 law prohibits the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers on a state level, it does not mention local districts, where state officials say pupil data can be used to judge instructors. A handful of districts currently are doing that; L.A. Unified is not.
There’s so much wrong with this White House attack on California’s schools that it is difficult to know where to begin. As anyone with any passing familiarity with the state’s budget crisis knows, the main problem facing our schools isn’t accountability, but cuts. It’s so simple a 12 year old can explain it:
Timothy Dominguez was surprised to hear he’ll have six more classmates in his seventh-grade classes when school resumes.
“Wow, 31 students? That’s too many kids for one adult,” the 12-year-old said.
I am curious to hear how Arne Duncan and Barack Obama believe California test scores will rise when you have classes of 30-35 students. When instructional days are being cut. When school buses are being cut (meaning many students will have a harder time getting to school, or will have longer travel times, leaving less time to study and do homework).
There is a very rich and deep discussion in the educational community on the value of focusing on test scores as a method of improving education. I fall squarely in the camp of those who are skeptical. I’ve taught college courses in two states with a heavy emphasis on testing – Washington and California – and in my experience, it hasn’t done a goddamned thing to help students learn to write, to study, to think.
Still, even if I am wrong and it were true that focusing on tests is a great way to improve education, it is extremely difficult to imagine how scores will rise when the basic elements of education in California are under a sustained assault. Teachers are going to have their hands full maintaining the existing level of educational quality with larger classes and fewer assistants and resources. I cannot see how Arne Duncan and Barack Obama can reasonably expect California teachers to improve test scores in such an environment. If they know how it can be done, by all means come here and teach us.
This isn’t the first time Obama has shown a stunning disregard for the education crisis in California. At his Southern California townhalls back in March Obama made similar remarks and appeared to not have been briefed on the massive school layoffs facing California’s students.
As Paul Rosenberg remarks at Open Left, this appears to be motivated by ideological concerns:
Of course, as I blogged recently, there’s no evidence that charter schools “work”–they do not differ dramatically in performance, but rather slightly underperform standard public schools. Nor is there any substantial research showing that merit pay tied to test scores is an effective way to improve educational outcomes. Thus, Obama’s competition is based entirely on ideology–an ideology that is primarily about shifting control of education as far out of the classrooms and into America’s boardrooms as possible.
Rosenberg also showed that the $4.3 billion total being offered by the Obama Administration in this “Race to the Top” program is not nearly enough to patch the $10 billion hole blown in our education budget by the legislature and the governor this year. Since the $4.3 billion sum must be split among all the states and territories, it is difficult to imagine that California will get much more than a couple hundred million at best.
California’s schools are facing a severe crisis. Without an educated population it is difficult to imagine how we will have economic recovery, either in the near or the long term. Numerous studies have shown that students who finish high school, and who attend college, earn more money and have fewer run-ins with the law than those that do not.
Fueled by ideology, and seemingly ignorant of the dire realities about to be experienced on California campuses, the Obama Administration needs to take a time-out and reconsider its entire approach to education policy. A program like “Rise to the Top”, leveraging desperately needed funds to impose merit pay, might have some intrinsic value (though I am doubtful). But not now. Not when California’s schools face a much more fundamental crisis.
The president would be doing education a much better service if he spoke out against the mania to slash school spending instead of cluelessly chiding California for refusing to saddle teachers and students with an unbearable burden. Let’s hope that the White House figures this out sooner, not later, and in time to help save education in our state.
Which was fundamentally correct: the federal government provides less than 10% of funding for most public schools; if we want more money for them, we, the people of the state, have to fix our state government to get them that money.
However, I think now is an especially bad time to be threatening California with more cuts, and the effect of those cuts is likely to be the loss of talented teachers, not deadwood.
As far as charter schools go, when they are good, they are wonderful, and when they are bad they are horrid. I like to see local schools having more autonomy, as long as they are set up as not-for-profit.
i’m surprised it took him this long to overtly shock doctrine us with no child left behind v. 2.0.
the fundamental problem here is funding, and decades of explicitly anti-teacher and anti-child ideology in this state. a lot of my friends and some of my family are either teachers or in the process of trying to become teachers, and the big topic among them this year has been whether it even makes sense to look for jobs in california anymore, or whether people should be looking for other states to try to teach in. noone wants to move out of state, california is our home after all, and they all love teaching and want to pass on the kind of love of learning and good teaching that we got from our teachers in an earlier california still able to coast off the momentum of the pat brown era, but it looks so grim that it’s giving them pause.
education will suffer greatly by driving these people out of california, or out of the profession. to do so intentionally is damn near unforgivable.
You can not put a kid though school and require them to all turn out the same…learning is not assemblage…schools are not manufacturers.
A friend of mine is a teacher here in Santa Barbara. He teaches at a school where there is white flight. White kids who should be attending his school are attending private schools because their parents do not want them in a school with so many “poor” kids (i.e., brown skin kids.)
The sampling of some of the kids he gets to attempt to teach –
Kids who live in a three bedroom house with 4 other families. No privacy. And, he’s had to deal with kids who were molested by household sharers.
Kids who don’t eat three meals a day. (Last I heard, brain development is linked to, well, eating…)
Kids who come to school intermittently because they have to care for their ailing family members. One kid lost his 30 year old mother to cancer that could have been dealt with had she had any health insurance.
Kids who require medication (for depression, anxiety, add, etc.) but whose families can not afford medication.
Kids are born with learning disabilities, some possibly caused by their mothers working in the fields with pesticides or leadbased paint still previlent in lower class housing.
How can you base the quality of a teacher if there are other causes to a child’s inability to learn? We have to look at the entire picture. To assume that all kids start off at the same starting point with the same learning abilities is completely ignorant of real life.
A school’s API doesn’t currently reflect its success in English language development. English language learners get a test at the beginning and end of the school year, but those results aren’t factored into the API. So you could be a brilliant teacher in Coachella with amazing progress among your students, and still be labeled a failure.
Manuel Perez has a bill to incorporate that data into the API: AB1435. Still, the key issue is funding. All the data in the world doesn’t change that.
From my experience following my kids and my friends’ kids through the same schools in the same district, reading and writing have been in a constant decline as class sizes increased and teaching to standardized tests came to dominate the system.
And that’s just one of the things that kids aren’t learning when they’re learning exactly the right curriculum to pass the tests.
Research?
Critical thinking?
Practical skills like cooking, construction, mechanics?
Art and music to engage those whose intelligence in those areas?
Fuggedaboutit!
Paying attention to kids and giving them enriching educational opportunities is what works. All testing does is give you some kind of reasonable performance benchmark, but it can be meaningless to what those kids really know.
My kids got a lot of terrible grades, but aced every standard test they were ever given. Why? Because they read at college levels, thanks to mom and dad letting them read whatever they liked at home. I can’t remember how many times they were told they couldn’t read and report on a particular book for class, though, or do what they wanted for a project (even though they were building catapults and doing science experiments at home.)
What makes a difference is paying attention to kids and indulging their natural curiousity and providing interesting learning materials.
Sure, we need more resources for our school. And this latest round of cuts is unacceptable.
But it’s about more than money.
Our education system is completely broken in California and unfortunately major reforms have been resisted. Many communities and districts have broken the mold and the results have been impressive (“Stand and Deliver” anyone?).
President Obama is doing the right thing by requiring accountability and innovation. That one-third of our kids don’t make it out of high school now is unacceptable. And i know that’s going to get worse with less funding, but this is an opportunity to change the way our kids, particularly inner city ones, get educated.
….to see that the only candidate, the only truly progressive candidate for POTUS last year was….
…THE MAGIC MAN! YES, YES, YES,…HE IS SO MAGIC. Really we are so lucky to have President
HooverObama in charge….…are we not?
Thanks ever so much folks. I can spend the rest of what’s left of my life explaining to the foreclosed, the unemployed, the bankrupt and, oh YES, the uneducated that, ‘No,no,no Obama was and is not a progressive and they will….
…never believe me.