Bush/Obama Ed Reform: The Road to Glory

The utter collapse of ed reform in 2016 and beyond really hasn’t received much notice in the mainstream media, although the conservative branch of the old movement certainly talks about it. So prompted by Spotted Toad, I’m expanding (of course), the rise and eventual fall that I began in response to a question in a comments section.  As an aside, if you haven’t read Spotted Toad’s outstanding article referencing this collapse, do so after finishing this piece, however long it becomes, the better to appreciate his sublime analogy.

While education reformers were of both the left (Howard Fuller, Theodore Sizer, Andrew Rotherham) and right (Checker Finn, Rick Hess), the Republican party eventually seized the agenda and made it their own. Most teachers (raises hand) considered the GOP adoption as a weapon to weaken teachers’ unions, but motives aside, the school reform movement was traditionally considered as conservative policy, primarily because teachers, whose unions are very much of the left, were the opposition. But ultimately, education reform efforts in this era were shared and then arguably taken over by Democrats.

Beginnings

Understand that there’s always education reform going on in our country, so I’ll be specific: in the late 80s/90s, several highly influential books created momentum for specific public school reforms. Public education was, these people argued, corrupt, inefficient, incompetent, and expensive. Proposals to address its failures fell into three categories, broadly. First, give parents public money to spend freely on their own educational choices. Second, invest and examine instruction and curriculum. Finally, tie up federal education funds with demands that the dollars are being spent well, holding schools accountable. (For more on choice and accountability, see my thoughts here.)

Charters

During the Clinton administration, Democrats were still eager to prove they weren’t McGovern leftists.  California and Minnesota already had authorized charter schools by 1993, when Clinton became president. Clinton and Congress passed a new version of the ESEA, Charter Schools Program, which gave a whole bunch of federal money to charter schools. From the start of Clinton’s presidency to the end, charter school growth increased by 1, 992 schools–literally, from 1 to 1, 993.

I was surprised to learn while preparing this piece that most states had authorized charters during the Clinton administration–by my count, 36 states had charter laws and charter schools by the time Clinton left office.

One of the two most famous charter chains and the only one that really tries to reach throughout the nation, KIPP, was founded in 1994–and arguably created the market for charters as selective schools for inner city African Americans and Hispanics whose public schools were chaotic and/or academically undemanding.  KIPP’s success, which was originally evaluated without controlled comparisons, seemed miraculous and charter advocates saw an immediately compelling “killer app” (to use the parlance of  the times). While many advocates were honestly interested in improving educational outcomes for poor African American and Hispanic students, it’s hard to believe they would have gotten as much funding for their efforts if wealthy conservative organizations didn’t see the growth of charters as a way to wipe out teachers’ unions and their Democratic party donations. It’s hard to escape noticing that neither educational advocates nor charter funders have ever been much interested in improving academic outcomes for poor whites.

Alternative Teacher Credentialing

In 1990, billionaire Ross Perot gave half a million dollars to Wendy Kopp to help her get a new organization,Teach for America, off the ground. Based on the premise that the education gap was created by ignorant teachers, Kopp got corporate funding and political support by making it attractive for elite college graduates to teach for a few years in inner city schools. TFA attracted idealist 22 year olds who also, pragmatically, saw the value of a TFA stint on their resume–as Kopp herself put it, she wanted TFA to be the equivalent of a Rhodes scholar award.

It was during the Clinton era that it first became common to think of public school teachers as dull mediocrities. Credential tests for elementary school teachers started to show up in state requirements by the late 1980s, and the Higher Education Act of 1998 required them. Eager to dethrone ed schools as a means of teacher production, education reformers succeeded in including a requirement for ed schools to publish their credential pass rates, certain that outrage at teacher incompetence would push parents and politicians to join with reformers in demanding alternate education credential paths.

Republicans had been targeting teacher tenure and unions as the obstacles to educational excellence since at least “A Nation at Risk”. But Terry Moe, a Democrat, started making such heresy popular among Democrats (at least the neoliberals, as some called them) in the late 80s. Increasingly, critics of  teachers held them responsible for student test scores, and compared them unfavorably to non-union charters.

Governance

Another notable development during the Clinton era was the high school exit exam, although the media really only began to notice during the Bush and Obama administrations. A number of states had very simple exit exams (called MCE for minimum competency exam) in the 1970s, but the “Nation at Risk” report led to the cancellation of many of these. Texas instituted a more difficult test in 1985; that’s the earliest I could find of a more typical high school exam requirement. But the rise of the modern high school exit exam is definitely linked to the Clinton administration. Somewere between 24 and 26 states required a high school exit exam by 2002, and increasingly these exams required passage for a diploma.

(note: I added the above the next day.)

Ascending to Glory

In 2000, George W. Bush’s election put school reform in the driver’s seat. For the next dozen years, reformers achieved almost all of their major policy goals with two consecutive, supportive presidents–as my title notes, the era will be named after them. There’s at least one book on the subject already.

No Child Left Behind

The decade started with the rewrite of ESEA famous enough to get its own name: No Child Left Behind.  NCLB was bipartisan; Democrats George Miller and Edward Kennedy were co-sponsors. Accountability was always a key component in the education reform agenda. In a nutshell, NCLB required that all students in all categories score at proficient or higher by 2014,  leading to the absurd demand that all students be above average. Schools that didn’t meet what was called “adequate yearly progress” in state-defined proficiency were put on “program improvement’;  students were allowed to go to any other public school that accepted them. Oddly enough, the threat of students leaving wasn’t all that terrible, as students who wanted to go to charters were already leaving, and public schools weren’t terribly interested in accepting students outside their geographic district. But there was plenty left that was horrible about program improvement, including the never-ending relentless focus on test scores.

TFA had solid growth during the Bush era, although it wasn’t the soaring rates that they’d see next term.

Charters

Absolute growth slowed from 2001 to 2011.  As a percentage, though, the decline from 2001 to 2011 was steep, slowed slightly but still declined through 2017. Part of this is because most states had authorized charters before the Bush administration; from 2001 to 2008 Iowa, Maryland, New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Wyoming authorized charters.

However, charters saw a major boost because of a natural disaster. Education reformers were a little too ecstatic about the “opportunity” provided by Hurricane Katrina, when the Louisiana legislature summarily fired the vast majority of New Orleans teachers, 71% of whom were black women, in order to turn New Orleans’ schools over to the State Recovery District. (More than half of these teachers never taught again.) New Orleans became a predominantly charter school district after that, and less than 50% of its teaching population is black (as of five years ago).

New Orleans became the crucible for education reformers. Finally, they’d been able to completely scrub (one might say bleach) a school district and redefine it the way they thought schools would run. Overwhelmingly, they believed that New Orleans would serve as an impetus for more cities to go full charter, or at least full-scale choice.

Another famous charter network, Success Academy, was founded in 2006 when Eva Moskowitz lost her election for the NYC council and needed a backup job.

Charters were still being primarily targeted as a method to improve black and Hispanic student outcomes, but Summit Prep in the Bay Area, California was began as a suburban charter in 2003.

Governance

School and district takeovers continued to be an important strategy to institute charters and choice. TFA alum Michelle Rhee was appointed the head of Washington DC schools by mayor Adrian Fenty after the DC Board of Education was stripped of its power.  Joel Klein, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s support, instituted choice throughout the NYC school system and supported dramatic growth in charters.

The outcry against ed schools got stronger, aided in no small part by the National Council on Teacher Quality (which, in my view, is the educational equivalent of the Southern Poverty Law Center). Founded in 2004, NCTQ is well-known for providing research fodder for sympathetic education reformers that is generally ignored by teachers, even more than they ignore most research.

NCLB built on the 1998 Higher Education Act to require that all states define “highly qualified teachers” that test in through credential test or other rigorous standard.  In many states, middle school teachers had to meet the same requirements as high school teachers (although existing teachers were grandfathered in). The credential test created significant challenges for new black and Hispanic teachers.

One crushing blow, however, to ed school critics, was the failure of the 1998 HEA to create an ed school ranking system. Ed schools were required to publish their graduates’ credential test pass rate which critics expected to be low for many schools. This, they hoped, would create a ranking system and thus an opening for alternate credentialing programs to break the near-monopoly of university-based ed schools. Alas, ed schools bit hard on a bullet and simply denied diplomas to any ed school candidates who couldn’t pass the credential tests. Thus, the vast majority of ed schools had a 100% pass rate, and alternative ed school programs simply copied the prevailing requirements. Curses! foiled again.

However, this new ed school policy, coupled with NCLB’s demands for teacher quality, led to many black and Hispanic teachers losing their jobs. In the 90s, ed schools simply issued diplomas to everyone who completed a program, leaving the credential test an open issue. Teachers who couldn’t pass the tests (a disproportionately black and Hispanic population) just applied for an emergency credential and kept teaching with that, sometimes for years. No Child Left Behind eliminated the emergency credential, thus forcing teachers, sometimes with a decade or more experience, to take the credential tests.

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Next up: Bush/Obama Ed Reform: Zenith

A Few Words on Janus

I’ve always thought the free speech aspect of the Janus case was purely nonsense. Eugene Volokh argued that Abood was wrongly decided in granting that free speech objection in the first place, observing that “compelled subsidy of others’ speech happens all the time”.   How many state-  or CDC-funded ads do we have to sit through, watching people smoke through their breathing tubes?  Or the various “join the military” ads?

I’m not a big fan of unions,although teachers unions come in for a lot of undeserved criticism. But my dislike of unions is professional–totally unrelated to the bizarro conservative hate-on which, I guess, has to do with the unions shoveling millions of easily collected dollars straight into Democrat coffers.

Still, I’m amazed, as always, at the utter cluelessness of the post-Janus gloating–which, typically, focuses almost exclusively on teacher employment, as if there’s no other public employee. I don’t think anyone’s focused on Janus’s impact on cops, for example–unsurprising, really, since the GOP likes cops and doesn’t want to fuss them.

But I’ll go with the flow and talk teachers, since that’s what I know.

First, left or right,  anyone who thinks education reform’s failure has anything to do with unions is kidding themselves. As I’ve written many times, education reform got everything it wanted for sixteen years–and as a result support for charters has plummeted,  support for unions and tenure has increased, and the ESSA deliberately and specifically targeted all the reform “advances” and ripped them into shreds.

So whatever changes Janus brings, I’d bet against Bill Bennett and Fordham Foundation.

We are in the middle of a teacher shortage, so good luck with cutting salaries, raising credential cut scores, or ending tenure. And has often been noted, the recent teacher walkouts have been in weak union states: Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky. Colorado’s governor refused to sign a law that would fire striking teachers.

You know how conservatives and others say look, we don’t hate teachers, we just hate unions. Well, specific union objectives, unlike their political spending, are pretty much in line with what teachers want. In a scarce labor market, killing unions won’t make it any easier to push teachers around.

I’m likewise unconvinced that the billions of dollars the unions send to the Dems has anything to do with Democrat political success. Lordy, did you all learn nothing from Trump? Dave Brat? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

So sure, Janus will lead to less money for unions. But dream on if you think Dems are crippled or the public will suddenly sign on for teacher merit pay.

Moreover, the idea that “millions of public employees” are being forced–yea, forced!–into paying to receive union-negotiated salaries just strikes me as bogus. I don’t like my dollars going to progressive causes, and as an immigration restrictionist, I get really annoyed at union shills wailing about family separations or the travel ban. But when Republican-leaning public employees growl about unions, they are, like me, unhappy about the waste of dollars sent to left-leaning organizations. How many public workers are actively opposed to the fundamentals of public employment? I’m skeptical. If  millions of public employees were outraged by job protections and pensions, conservatives wouldn’t have had to wait so long for the odd ball public employee to hang their case on. It took them years to find Friedrichs and then Janus out on the fringes to make the case.

But why should unions be required to negotiate contracts and protect employees who don’t pay for their services? The Supreme Court waved off the “free rider” problem, but who’s to say there will be paying riders? What’s stopping all teachers from saving hundreds of dollars a year, if the unions will work the contracts no matter what?

Considering that the state laws requiring unions to represent non-members have just been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the unions have a logical next step.

Unions should refuse to work for free. They won’t  provide any service to non-members.

Some services can be easily split between members and non-members. Job protections and other benefits, for example, are easily managed. Non-members who oppose job protections can just live with a greater risk of termination, while members can still ask for union representation.

But contract and salary negotiations apply to all employees, members or not. So unions should refuse to engage in these activities for any salary schedule that has less than 100% membership. Neither members nor non-members will get new salary schedules until someone else steps up to that task–and that someone else will want to be paid.

I can envision many ways out of the chaos that ensues, but certain truths seem obvious. Salary negotiation for millions of teachers, firefighters, police officers, DMV workers, prison guards and the rest is a labor (heh) intensive task. Right now, public employees pay for that task through their union representation. If unions refuse to do this, then how will public employees get raises? Fond fantasies aside, at some point the government is going to have to figure out how to replace that service.

While conservatives dream of a world in which government employees negotiate their salaries individually, absorbing the cost at a unit level, their dreams probably don’t include the onslaught of lawsuits that would follow in a world where local government officials decided salaries on merit. That’s why most charter and private schools use salary schedules, despite their ostensible freedom from these one-size-fits-all charts.

If unions just flatly ended all contract negotiations, the pressure for a Janus-fix would be immediate, particularly for teachers and cops. But wait! unions say–at least, this is what I think they should say. We’re not here to be obstructionist.  We’ll offer membership “tiers”.

Tier 1: Contract and salary negotiations only. Price: a couple hundred at most.
Tier 2: Tier 1 plus performance issues representation. Price: five hundred at most.
Tier 3: Tier 2 plus the cool bennies, political spending, other perks. Price: one thousand at most.

All employees on a given salary schedule must be at least a Tier 1 union member. No 100% membership, no contract and salary negotiations.

Some districts might not be able to get 100% membership. They could then contract to bring the union in for salary negotiations. Still other district employees might decide to do without unions entirely. Maybe they’ll figure out another means of negotiating salaries. Or maybe they’ll realize that union salaries are higher than non-union salaries for a reason.

Unions should not put the cost of their contract negotiations solely on their members. They should demand compensation for the services they perform that benefit all employees. If the employees don’t pay, then no union negotiations.

At the same time, unions could stop charging so much money, accept that they can’t use all teachers’ dues as a piggy bank for their political spending, and be more focused on offering services that all members can benefit from.

Those states with laws requiring unions to represent non-members are welcome to take them to court. However, I like to think that the same conservative jurists who hate unions also think it reasonable that unions get paid if they provide a service.

I’d be shocked, although pleased, if unions took this approach–with adjustments, of course, because I have no idea how much unions costs in other parts of the country, much less all of their many activities.  If they don’t, though, I’m ending my membership entirely. I’ve always refused to do the paperwork for agency fees–too much work for too little money. But I’ve paid nine years of union dues that went to political goals I not only don’t share but actively opposed. That’s enough to cover my next six years to retirement.

 

 

Why Chris Christie picks on teachers

I don’t write about politics per se here, and I have no intention of turning this into a political blog, so bear with me on this first part.

I’m voting for Romney. It’s a done deal. I’m not sure who the Republicans could have put up that I wouldn’t have voted for. Mitch Daniels would have been best, but the wife he twice married refuses to deal with the river of media crap she’d face. Whatever. My reasons have nothing to do with Romney per se; I have voted Republican since 2008 when the Dems turned too far left for my liking. I am so not a fan of the current president; I’ve thought him a phony since he first showed up in 2004. (He shouldn’t take it personally. I’ve only ever voted for one candidate who won, and while my esteem for both Bushes and Reagan is higher than the absolute loathing I hold for Obama, Clinton remains the only president of my adult life I’ve ever liked. Which is different from agreed with; I rarely do that with any politician. There, have I alienated all sides sufficiently?)

And, as my various posts have made clear, I’m not protected by a union. I haven’t worked anywhere long enough to get tenure. I can get canned any time of the year, with no warning. I still pay my dues, which is annoying, but not as annoying as the paperwork to get the money back. If I didn’t have to belong to a union I wouldn’t, although I’ve never met a local union rep who wasn’t helpful, realistic, and honest, even if they are, surprise!, always recommending a straight Democratic ticket vote.

I am thus not particularly disposed to be annoyed at Republicans or protective of unions. So it should perhaps mean something that Chris Christie’s little rant on teachers thoroughly disgusted me.

A teacher, a firefighter, and a cop are sitting in a bar watching the Chris Christie speech. When Christie thunders “Real teacher tenure reform that demands accountability and ends the guarantee of a job for life regardless of performance!”, the cop and the firefighter turn to the teacher and ask, “Jesus, what’d you do to piss him off?”

Yeah, it’s been a while since anyone’s pointed out how hard it is to fire cops or firefighters. Haven’t heard anyone cry out that every citizen deserves “the best cop in America” on their doorstep when their house is robbed, or “the best firefighter in America” when Fluffy gets stuck in a tree. No one mentions that cops and firefighters have jobs for life regardless of performance, or that that “life” job is even more expensive because they usually retire earlier and are far more likely to take disability. Cops and firefighters don’t get promoted on merit, and they get raises every year on a step chart even if they just phone it in. Anyone want to talk about the number of cops who look the other way for bribes and sexual favors? Thought not. While everyone knows that parents are likely to hold a low opinion of public schools nationally while loving their local schools, when has that ever been true about cops or firefighters? And hell, firefighters don’t even actually fight fires any more.

Please do not interpret this as a broadside against either cops or firefighters. Cops in particular, please do not hunt me down and give me speeding tickets in your secondary primary role of revenue agents. (Kidding. Kind of.) And yes, being a cop can be dangerous, but it’s dangerous in the same places where being a teacher is primarily about checking for gang colors and guns, and it’s relatively safe in the same areas where being a teacher is actually about, you know, teaching. And of course, actually fighting a fire is dangerous but how often does that happen and anyway, cops and firefighters get a hefty premium precisely because of the increased danger of the job, perceived or genuine.

But the reality is that the three jobs are strikingly similar. They have a relatively low barrier to entry but nonetheless require a high degree of skill and creativity. They are jobs that can’t really be learned except by doing. They require intellect, but not the sort that elites have, or look upon with favor. They are therefore jobs that the elites tend to opine about with a slapworthy degree of condescension, and jobs in which senior members display a distressing sense of entitlement to benefits and guarantees long since lost to the private sector and soon to be lost to the more junior entrants to the profession.

So what’d teachers do to piss off the Republican party while it leaves cops and firefighters alone? Or, as Lenin via Steve Sailer puts it, “Who? Whom?”

Yeah, well, unions, obviously. That’s not the big reveal, that cop and firefighter unions are, traditionally, most likely to support Republicans while teachers, the single biggest occupation in America, pour their millions into the Democrat coffers. And it may or may not be significant that Republicans might be making nice, that firefighters and cops both have been endorsing Democrats lately in large part because the Republicans had been talking tough on cutting government, or that Scott Walker conspicuously left these occupations out of his legislation.

No, the one I wonder about is whether or not teachers were targeted first because cops and firefighters are almost entirely white males, and teachers are mostly white females.

Because it certainly is odd, isn’t it, that the Republicans have a “woman problem” and they are spending all this time attacking an occupation that’s 60% female? Just a little? Around the edges? But what made me wonder about gender as opposed to pure union money is the readiness of the Democrats to attack teachers unions, that pro-reform progressives are lately attacking tenure, bad teachers, the need to bring in “new blood”, and so on. Why would these progressives attack their own, unless they could see that there’s play in attacking government workers? So then, they need a target. Would they have picked teachers, one of their most powerful and loyal donor unions, if teachers weren’t white females?

Eh. I know someone is going to see this as an identity politics bleat, and I don’t mean it that way. We can’t ever escape gender. We sure as hell can’t escape race. I also don’t think any gender bias is deliberate, like the Republicans got together and said hey, what’s the demographically safest union for us to bash? I do think it’s….interesting, and I think the Republicans might want to mull any potential advantages of maybe a little equal opportunity union bashing. The irony, of course, is that teaching is far more male than law-enforcement/firefighting is female. (And yet, while it’s common to call for improved teacher quality by bringing in more males…..yeah, you get the idea.)

But sure, it’s unions, mostly.

Back to my disgust with Chris Christie. It wasn’t the pandering to unions, or any kind of outrage at the use of gender politics, whether a product of my imagination or otherwise. If Mitt Romney were going to tell the truth as Christie so vehemently declared, then he’d talk about all public worker pensions, instead of picking the politically safest group to attack. But what else is new?

Of course, the Republicans aren’t actually interested in improving schools with choice, accountability, and standards. They need the reformer support and enthusiasm, they need white parents, and think they’ll get it with this rhetoric, which ties in neatly with their desire to weaken teachers unions (and do they realize that teacher unions are a whole bunch of white parents? Probably not). That is, yes, I think it’s a CYNICAL PLOY. Heaven forfend.

Democrats, of course, are entirely innocent of all this behavior. Let us all laugh. Ha ha!

No, it was the linkage of bad performance to goal of cutting government costs that just nauseated me. If every teacher, cop, and firefighter was doing a bangup job, pensions are still a huge problem. Salaries and the Baumiol Effect, still a huge problem. Even if teacher quality were a problem—and it’s not—transforming teacher quality wouldn’t do a thing to cut costs. Nor would higher standards, school choice, or accountability. The only way that attacking school quality brings about lower costs is if the results kill the unions and kill the protections, so that labor costs plummet. And again, I’m not against this, if that’s what’s needed, but it won’t help improve the schools.

The problem with our schools isn’t standards or choice or teacher quality. The problem with our schools isn’t money or poverty. The problem with our schools is our expectations, and the pointless demands we make of kids who don’t want to and/or can’t do the work.

So take all the usual political crap, throw in genuinely screwed up solution offerings that won’t fix a thing and ultimately make education even more expensive or, more likely, destroy public support for educating the hard to educate. Um, yeah. Also not new. So why, again, am I particularly bothered?

Back to Lenin and who, whom. I wasn’t a teacher for the other elections. I’m not upset or defensive at my ox being gored, but it’s a lot harder to hear this spew when I see the results of the near-criminal expectations that both political parties have put on schools, teachers, and the students, and the crap we have to go through even to pretend to follow the moronic mandates they legislate.

So nuts to you, Chris Christie. But hell, what do you care? Mitt’s got my vote anyway, because frankly—and oddly—I’m still banking on the unions and the public to stop politicians from doing permanent damage to our schools. Here’s hoping.