A lousy way to rate teachers

Sent to USA Today

USA Today argues that gains made by students on standardized tests should be used as part of teacher evaluation (“Teacher evaluations, once a joke, hold a key to better schools,” March 22).
Everything is wrong with this idea.
A number of studies have shown that rating teachers using test score gains does not give consistent results. Different tests produce different ratings, and the same teacher’s ratings can vary from year to year, sometimes quite a bit.
In addition, using test score gains for evaluation encourages gaming the system, trying to produce increases in scores by teaching test-taking strategies, not by encouraging real learning. This is like putting a match under the thermometer and claiming you have raised the temperature of the room.
We are all interested in finding the best ways of evaluating teachers, but using student test-score gains is a lousy way to do it.

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California


Some sources:
Different tests produce different ratings: Papay, J. 2010. Different tests, different answers: The stability of teacher value-added estimates across outcome measures. American Educational Research Journal 47,2.
Vary from year to year: Sass, T. 2008. The stability of value-added measures of teacher quality and implications for teacher compensation policy. Washington DC: CALDER. (National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Educational Research.) Kane, T. and Staiger, D. 2009. Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student Achievement: An Experimental Evaluation. NBER Working Paper No. 14607 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14607;

Tennessee's New Era: Stealth Creationism, Crushing Teachers, and Corporatizing Education

Despite over 20 years of control by Business Roundtable education reformers, Tennessee test scores as measured by NAEP continue to hover where they were when Tennessee's corporate value-added crew took charge, which is near near the bottom of the 50 states.  That raw fact, however, has not deterred another generation of knights from the Business Roundtable from eagerly stepping up to claim their time in pretending to protect Tennessee's struggling little edu-kingdom.

I say "pretending" because today Tennessee school policy steering is a national affair of multi-corporate proportions, directed by plutocratic crews from corporations and their corporate foundations, with legislative language supplied by the Koch lawyers at ALEC.  Tennessee, in fact, is Ground Zero for the corporate war on public education that is going on across America, as the Wall Street hedge funders and the edupreneurs seek to turn public schools into major revenue streams, while maintaining an iron-fisted control on curriculum, instruction, and assessment. 

Yesterday The Tennesseean carried a story on the new stealth creationism bill that awaits the signature of corporate kingpin, Governor Haslam, who is now hovering with his lawyers to determine if the state can afford to litigate this ridiculous piece of backwards non-thinking legislation.  After all, the State's lawyers need be girding their loins and clearing their calendars for the lawsuits that are in the making, as thousands of teachers' professional reputations are now being subjected to test scores of children they did not teach on tests that vary wildly from year to year using a method of analysis that the National Research Council has warned against using for high stakes purposes. 

As a clear indicator that Huffman and his TFA cult lawyers have overstepped sanity and decency by recommending publication of these invalid and unreliable scores, they are following the Gates and Sanders advice to keep the teacher ratings out of the newspapers, as an attempt to keep it out of the courts.  I am afraid, boys, that this big nasty genie will not go back into that tiny bottle.

Ignoring the facts about American education

Sent to the Seattle Times, March 20

The Rice-Klein task force (“Education woes linked to national security,” March 19) ignores the facts about American schools. There is no evidence that American schools are failing. Middle-class American students in well-funded schools score at the top of the world on international tests; our overall scores are unspectacular because we have the highest percentage of children living in poverty among all industrialized countries.

This means that the major problem in American education is not a lack of standards. The major problem is poverty, which means food deprivation, lack of health care, and little access to books. The most ambitious standards, the highest quality teaching and the fanciest technology will have little impact when students are hungry, ill, and have little to read.

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

sources:
Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential;
Coles, G. 2008/2009. Hunger, academic success, and the hard bigotry of indifference. Rethinking Schools 23 (2);
Rothstein, R. (2010). How to fix our schools. Economic Policy Institute, Issue Brief #286. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/ib286;
Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership 55(4): 18-22;

Original article: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2017790002_apuseducationnationalsecurity.html

THE BIG LIE

Here we go again.

A new report, part of the shock and awe campaign being waged against public education, teacher unions and anyone who can still think critically and ask questions, is being brought to us by Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein. The nation's security is at risk if the nation's public schools don't improve. Excuse me while I throw up.

With education budgets being slashed to the bone across the country: more money being spent on a failed policy of testing and filling in the bubbles, a dysfunctional Congress and Republican party that is more interested in preventing women from getting birth control and outlawing pornography; two wars that have bankrupted the country while sending service men and women to do three and four tours of duty; Wall Street crimes that have brought down the standard of living and left cities and towns broke; a crumbling infrastructure and a widening gap between rich and poor; one in five children now living in poverty; this time the lie is so big that anyone with the slightest bit of sanity and intelligence can see through the propaganda.

Yet, that doesn't stop people like Joel Klein and his henchmen and women who will stop at nothing to get their greedy hands in the corporate takeover jar as they privatize public education with fear mongering.

The biggest threat to our national security at this point is the continued attack on education, intelligence, creativity and freedom perpetuated by liars and crooks who have way too much power and need to be called out and exposed as evil, destructive liars who have no shame.

Education woes linked to national security

By KIMBERLY HEFLING, AP Education Writer – 8 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation's security and economic prosperity are at risk if America's schools don't improve, warns a task force led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City's school system.

The report, obtained by The Associated Press, cautions that far too many schools fail to adequately prepare students. "The dominant power of the 21st century will depend on human capital," it said. "The failure to produce that capital will undermine American security."

The task force said the State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies face critical shortfalls in the number of foreign language speakers, and that fields such as science, defense and aerospace are at particular risk because a shortage of skilled workers is expected to worsen as baby boomers retire.

According to the panel, 75 percent of young adults don't qualify to serve in the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records or inadequate levels of education. That's in part because 1 in 4 students fails to graduate from high school in four years, and a high school diploma or the equivalent is needed to join the military. But another 30 percent of high school graduates don't do well enough in math, science and English on an aptitude test to serve in the military, the report said.

The task force, consisting of 30 members with backgrounds in areas such as education and foreign affairs, was organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based research and policy organization focused on international issues. The report was scheduled to be released Tuesday.

Too many Americans are deficient in both global awareness and knowledge that is "essential for understanding America's allies and its adversaries," the report concludes.

"Leaving large swaths of the population unprepared also threatens to divide Americans and undermines the country's cohesion, confidence, and ability to serve as a global leader," the report said.

Rice and Klein said in interviews that they are encouraged by efforts to improve schools such as the adoption of "common core" standards set in reading and math in a vast majority of states and the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" competition, in which states compete for federal money in exchange for more meaningful teacher evaluations.

But, they added, the pace to improve America's schools must accelerate.

"The rest of the world is not sitting by while we, in a rather deliberate fashion, reform the education system," Rice said.

Klein said he hopes the findings will prompt discussions beyond the education community that engage those in the defense and foreign policy establishments about how to improve schools.

"I don't think people have really thought about the national security implications and the inability to have people who speak the requisite languages who can staff a volunteer military, the kind of morale and human conviction you need to hold a country together. I don't think people have thought about it in those terms," Klein said.

The panel makes three main recommendations:

—Adopt and expand the common core initiative to include skill sets critical to national security such as science, technology and foreign languages;

—Structural changes to provide students with more choices in where they can go to school, so many students aren't stuck in underperforming schools;

—A national security readiness audit, prepared by governors working with the federal government, that can be used to judge whether schools are meeting national expectations in education.

Not all panel members agreed with all the task force findings. One dissenting opinion said a proposed national audit will only increase the pressure to focus on standardized tests and that money would be better used to improve the neediest school districts. That opinion was issued by Carole Artigiani, founder of Global Kids Inc., and agreed to by Stephen Walt, an international affairs professor at Harvard, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Weingarten, in another dissent, said that some elements of the report undermine schools, and that school choice options such as vouchers and charters, which use public funds but are run by a third party, have not proven to be sustainable or to improve schools. Artigiani and Walt supported that argument.

In an interview, Weingarten said it doesn't make sense to provide an "opt-out" option with school choice, when public schools should be strengthened instead.

Council on Foreign Relations: http://www.cfr.org/

Speaking truth to Eva Moskowitz and Gideon Stein's wealth and power

What is really, really outrageous to me — as a thirty year...forty years in this community, of advocacy — is that there has been a systematic exclusion of the leadership of this community. — Frances Lucerna (El Puente Leaders for Peace and Justice)

The illustrious Real Reform Studios bring us this brilliant short documentary showing the community of Los Sures' principled resistance against the vile privatizers running the lucrative Harlem Success Academy.



Pay close attention to hedge fund backed Moskowitz's advertising budget. That huge amount alone would provide arts programs or English Language Learner classes for many students. Also, see Karen Sprowel's testimony about how her special needs child was mistreated by the Stein and Moskowitz money making machine.

Please support the Grassroots Education Movement and Real Reform Studios. The work they do on behalf of social justice and public schools is invaluable. If you haven't seen (or even if you have) The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman, arrange a house party showing now!

Colocation is a crime, let charters locate on someone else's dime!

Why are we suddenly so interested in teacher evaluation?

My contribution to the NY Times Sunday Dialogue on how to evaluate teachers.
Published in the New York Times, March 18, 2012

Dr. Yatvin’s suggestions for teacher evaluation are excellent. But why are the Times and many others suddenly interested in teacher evaluation?
It is because of the belief that poor teaching is the reason American schools are failing. The perception that our schools are failing, however, is based only on American students’ international test scores. Rarely mentioned is the finding that middle-class American students in well-funded schools score at the top of the world on these tests; our overall scores are unspectacular because we have the highest percentage of children living in poverty among all industrialized countries.
The problem is thus not teacher quality. The problem is poverty, which means poor diet, poor health care, and little access to books. Quality teaching has little effect when students are hungry, sick, and have nothing to read.
Let’s improve teacher evaluation, but there is no evidence that there is a teaching crisis in the US.

Stephen Krashen

Save money by eliminating useless testing

Sent to the Los Angeles Times, March 17, 2012

State Supt. Torlakson urges us to find the “will and the resources to end the financial emergency facing our public schools,” and prevent California from laying off 20,000 teachers. How about eliminating the High School Exit Exam? (“About 19,500 public school teachers in state get pink slips,” March 16).
Analyst Jo Ann Behm has estimated that the combined state and local costs of California's high school exit exam exceed $500 million per year, about 10% of the proposed budget cut.

The most recent review of research on exit exams, done by researchers at the University of Texas, concluded that high school exit exams do not lead to more college attendance, increased student learning or higher employment. In fact, researchers have yet to discover any benefits of having a High School Exit Exam.

It makes no sense to lay off teachers while keeping a useless and expensive test.

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California

310 924 2490
Rossier School of Education, USC, Los Angeles 90089-0031

Most recent review: Holme, J., Richards, M., Jimerson, J., and Cohen, R. 2010. Assessing the effects of high school exit examinations. Review of Educational Research 80 (4): 476-526.

Charter Schools Not the Answer, Especially if We Fail to Identify the Question

One pattern of failure in education reform is that political leadership and the public focus attention and resources on solutions while rarely asking what problems we are addressing or how those solutions address identified problems. The current and possibly increasing advocacy of charter schools is a perfect example of that flawed approach to improving our schools across the U.S.

Let’s start with two clarifications.

First, the overwhelming problems contributing to school quality are pockets of poverty across the country and school policies and practices mirroring and increasing social inequities for children once they enter many schools.

Children who live under the weight of poverty attend buildings in disrepair, sit in classrooms with inexperienced and un-/under-qualified teachers, and suffer through endless scripted instruction designed to raise their test scores. Citizens of a democracy share the responsibility for eradicating both the out-of-school and in-school failures often reflected in data associated with our public schools.

Then, what is a charter school and should any state increase resources allocated to charter schools, and in effect, away from public schools?

Staring with Problems, not Solutions

Charter schools are public schools that function under agreements, charters, that allow those schools to function in some ways without the constraints placed on public schools.

Here, we must acknowledge that if charter schools are a viable solution to the serious problems I have identified above, a much more direct approach would be simply to allow all public schools to function without the restraints we know to be impacting negatively their ability to produce strong educational outcomes.

If innovation and autonomy are valuable for educational reform, then all public schools deserve those opportunities.

Powerful evidence that committing to charter schools is inefficient rests in the research that shows charter schools, private schools, and public schools have essentially the same academic outcomes when the populations of students served are held constant.

In his ongoing analysis of educational research, Matthew DiCarlo explains:

“[T]here is a fairly well-developed body of evidence showing that charter and regular public schools vary widely in their impacts on achievement growth. This research finds that, on the whole, there is usually not much of a difference between them, and when there are differences, they tend to be very modest. In other words, there is nothing about ‘charterness’ that leads to strong results.”

In other words, when schools succeed—which many public, private, and charter schools do—the success appears to have little to do with the type of school. The practices in any of these models can be replicated in any of the other models, but even then, scaling up or replicating what works in Public School A may not come to fruition in Charter School B.

The evidence, then, suggests that all states should avoid investing time and allocating tax dollars to charter schools, particularly when those commitments detract from addressing known problems in our public schools.

But there are additional red flags that should be considered about the charter school movement, cautions that are even more alarming:

• While charter schools across the U.S. are serving high-poverty and minority populations, charter schools tend to under-serve English language learners and students with special needs—two of the most challenging populations facing public schools. If our experiments with charter schools include ignoring populations at the heart of public school challenges, then the experiments are a failure from the start.

• The charter school movement is re-segregating public schools. This is the most disturbing fact of the charter school movement. Children of color and children living in poverty are disproportionately being isolated in charter schools that are without racial or socioeconomic diversity.

• Since charter schools create some degree of open enrollment, they create transient populations of students, thus producing data that are less valuable for mining policies and practices to address the problems facing neighborhood public schools.

• Charter schools have the power to manipulate the population of students served only because public schools must serve the students once they leave those charter schools. Public schools never have, and shouldn’t have, the power to reject students beyond expulsion.

Many states appear committed, then, to contradictory policies: Increasing charter schools and thus their autonomy while decreasing public school autonomy within an accountability system that prescribes curriculum and expands the testing regime.

Charter schools in theory represent a belief in innovation, experimentation, and school autonomy. If these qualities are valuable and if they can address the out-of-school and in-school causes of educational outcomes, then we simply need to allocate funding and policies to insure that our public schools are afforded the same, while also admitting that we have no evidence that a school type—pubic, charter, or private—insures the outcomes we seek.

Recommended Resources

Baker, B.D. & Ferris, R. (2011). Adding up the spending: Fiscal disparities and philanthropy among New York City charter schools. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/...

One contradiction of charter school advocacy is the claim that funding doesn't matter or is excessive at the public school level, but that many charter schools benefit from private donations or funding in addition to accepting tax dollars for running those charter schools. This study raises cautions about the wide variety of funding found in New York city charter schools. The authors warn about making careless comparisons and assuming that any charter schools are scalable as reform templates for public education reform.

Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO). (2009, June). Multiple choice: Charter school performance in 16 states. Stanford, CA: Center for Research on Education Outcomes. Retrieved from http://credo.stanford.edu/...

This comprehensive study of charter schools, though not without controversy, presents a solid picture of the range of quality found in any education format. Charter schools appear to have about 17% high achieving, 46% average, and 37% low achieving characteristics when compared to public schools. This data help place in context claims of “high flying” charter schools as all or even most charter schools, but the study does not address key issues such as the ideology and practices of those schools.

Frankenberg, E., Siegel-Hawley, G., & Wang, J. (2011) Choice without equity: Charter school segregation. Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 19(1). Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/...

We often fail to recognize the negative consequences of choice, but the charter school movement is exposing those consequences. This study concludes that charter schools "currently isolate students by race and class" and that charter schools may tend to under-serve English language learners and the extreme low end of poverty.

Fuller, E. (2011, April 25). Characteristics of students enrolling in high-performing charter high schools. A "Fuller" Look at Education Issues [blog]. Retrieved from http://fullerlook.wordpress.com/...

The choice dynamic of charter schools necessarily creates a student population unlike the community-based traditional public schools. In order to understand if and how charter schools in fact provide some evidence for reforming public schools, the populations of charters schools must be fully examined and understood. Fuller begins to examine the characteristics of students in charter schools labelled "high-performing" and identifies many disparities including special education students served, achievement characteristics among high-poverty students in both charter and public schools, and at-risk students, concluding: "This suggests that HP charter high schools do not serve the same types of students as the regular neighborhood schools. Now, granted, the HP charter high schools do enroll a greater percentage of students participating in the free- and reduced-price lunch program and in the free lunch program, but these economically disadvantaged students are not the same as the economically disadvantaged students in the regular neighborhood schools!"

Garcia, D. (2011). Review of “Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/....

Garcia debunks think tank advocacy for expanding rapidly charter schools. This review is important for remaining skeptical about charter schools and for continuing to be vigilant about distinguishing between advocacy dressed as research and credible conclusions drawn from scholarship and research.

Miron, G. (2011). Review of “Charter Schools: A Report on Rethinking the Federal Role in Education.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/....

Miron presents a mixed view of a report from the Brown Center on Education Policy of the Brookings Institution. The Brown Center report represents a growing endorsement of a federal role in promoting the expansion of charter schools. Miron argues for a tempered position on expanding charter schools and for using this report as just one initial piece of evidence in forming policy.

Miron, G. & Urschel, J.L. (2010). Equal or fair? A study of revenues and expenditure in American charter schools. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved from http://epicpolicy.org/...

Funding and how funding is distributed lie at the center of much of the charter school and public school reform debates. This study details the complexity of how charter schools are funding and how that compares to public school funding. Key in this study is a call for more research on charter funding along with greater and fuller disclosure of charter funding, since charter schools tend to receive less per-pupil funding that public school but additional private funding that is not disclosed. As well, public schools remain likely to offer services that charters do not provide, distorting further any comparisons of funding equity.

Miron, G., Urschel, J. L., Mathis, W, J., & Tornquist, E. (2010). Schools without Diversity: Education management organizations, charter schools and the demographic stratification of the American school system. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved from http://epicpolicy.org/...

This study draws a disturbing pattern being uncovered about the charter school movement: "The analysis found that, as compared with the public school district in which the charter school resided, the charter schools were substantially more segregated by race, wealth, disabling condition, and language."

Miron, G., Urschel, J. L., & Saxton, N. (2011, March). What makes KIPP work?: A study of student characteristics, attrition, and school finance. Teachers College, Columbia University. National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education. Retrieved from http://www.ncspe.org/...

Focusing on inputs instead of student outcomes, this study examines KIPP schools and finds that KIPP schools do enroll high-poverty student but under-serve special needs students and English language learners. The study also raises questions about student attrition and about the apparent inequity in funding that KIPP schools receive when all funding is examined, totaling about $6500 more per pupil than public schools in the area. Combined, this evidence challenges the KIPP model as scalable.

Ravtich, D. (2010, November 11). The myth of charter schools. The New York Review of Books. Retrieved from http://www.nybooks.com/...

Ravitch's scholarly commentary is important because of her credibility as a scholar and historian along with her recent shift in positions concerning accountability/testing and school choice. This detailed discussion confronts the media-driven claims of "miracle" charter schools.

Must Read: Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement Is Never Discussed

Anyone over the age of 30 should recall phrases including "school choice" were the clarion call of segregationists and southern dixiecrats. [Still are.] — Robert D. Skeels

Professor Christopher Bonastia's Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement Is Never Discussed is perhaps the best work I've read on the modern segregation and eugenics movements that are cloaked in the rhetoric of school choice. Packed with historical precedents and an honest assessment of today's empirical data, the essay is a powerful antidote to the nonstop stream of privatization propaganda pumped out by the deep pocketed charter industry. The following excerpt provides an idea of why everyone must read the whole piece:

The driving assumption for the pro-charter side, of course, is that market competition in education will be like that for toothpaste -- providing an array of appealing options. But education, like healthcare, is not a typical consumer market. Providers in these fields have a disincentive to accept or retain "clients" who require intensive interventions to maintain desired outcomes--in the case of education, high standardized test scores that will allow charters to stay in business. The result? A segmented marketplace in which providers compete for the "good risks," while the undesirables get triage. By design, markets produce winners, losers and unintended or hidden consequences.

Read in on AlterNet and share it widely.

On adult education's critical role in social justice

Photo by Yoon Jung Lee

This essay first appeared March 13, 2012 on the National Coalition for Literacy site as part of their discussion series on "Cut the Excuses, Not Education! How SaveAdultEd.org Is Fighting the Proposal to Eliminate Adult Education in L.A."

The article series featured students, educators, and activists engaged in the struggle to save Los Angeles Unified School District's Division of Adult and Career Education from the designs of neoliberalism. Speaking on behalf of my fellow activists, we genuinely appreciate the National Coalition for Literacy bringing our struggle to a national audience. What happens in Los Angeles is often a bellwether, and we can only hope that our struggles won't be in vain and inspires people to stand up to what Freire called "neoliberal fatalism."

National Coalition for Literacy's mission is to advance adult education, family literacy, and English language acquisition in the U.S. by increasing public awareness for the need to increase funding and programs; promoting effective public policy; and serving as an authoritative resource for the field on national adult education issues.

---

On adult education's critical role in social justice

Robert D. Skeels

"I'm an adult ed teacher, and I just want to say thanks to those of you outside of adult ed who understand the importance of what we do, and are willing to stand with us as we fight to survive this year. When I go back to work tomorrow morning and greet my class full of ADULTS studying basic math, GED prep, and high school subjects, I will feel better knowing that you who work in K-12 understand the importance of what we do for families and communities. Parents who can't read or do arithmetic can't help their kids learn." — Michelle Cohen

Public education is a nexus of many issues paramount to social justice. Whether we're discussing equity issues in terms of class and race, fighting neoliberalism and privatization in the guise of vouchers and charters, advocating for the human rights of undocumented peoples, or engaged in many other critical issues, public education is an intersection where they all meet. This is even more true with adult education. In cities like Los Angeles the Division of Adult and Career Education (DACE) programs represent a literal lifeline for tens of thousands of Angelenos and their families. These programs are particularly essential for the poor and immigrant communities.

There are more than 345,000 students are currently enrolled in various adult education programs. DACE serves English Langauge Learners, provides both High School Graduation and General Equivalency Degree Preparation, Citizenship Preparation, life-changing Occupational Programs, and so much more. It's almost unthinkable that anyone would consider eliminating these vital services, but that's exactly what Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is seriously considering. This is by design, as I wrote recently in Echo Park Patch:

The consequences of decades of regressive tax injustice combined with the economic crash engineered by Wall Street mortgage derivative malefactors, have allowed for the neoliberal dream of carving public education to the bone.

This carving has been going on for years, but the supposed recent budget shortfalls have provided cover for those inclined to further dismantle the district. More sickening is that LAUSD actually has money as evidenced by massive spending on useless assessments [1] and consultants [2], highly discredited value added methodologies [3], and nine figure real estate giveaways to lucrative charter corporations [4]. Instead of looking to cut the former expenses, LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy, a former Gates Foundation executive and a graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy, is a polished practitioner of neoliberalism and has targeted programs that our communities depend upon most — Early Education, Student Readiness and Language Development Program (SRLDP), and Adult Education. Superintendent Deasy, along with LAUSD President Monica Garcia and her allies on the LAUSD Board of Education (BOE), figured they would balance the budget on the backs of the poor. As social justice educator José Lara said "this is an educational injustice."

The pushback against Garcia and Deasy's unconscionable cuts has been inspiring to an activist that hasn't seen such passionate grassroots organizing since the 2006 marchas against the racist "Sensenbrenner Bill." Rather than explore the breadth and scope of organizing by United Adult Students (UAS) and Save Adult Education, I want to look at several anecdotes of how DACE transforms lives since, after all, we advocate social justice for people. In each of these instances we see how Adult Education touches and reshapes lives.

Photos by Robert D. Skeels, see the entire set.

I was among the founding members of the Southern California Immigration Coalition (SCIC), an organization that unapologetically fights for the rights of immigrants. Many of the individuals involved in the struggle for immigrant rights were, in addition to working, attending English and other classes at various LAUSD DACE schools. In almost every case if you asked them why they were taking these classes, they would say to help their children with their homework and be able to speak with their child's teachers. The courage, tenacity, and willingness of these parents to sacrifice on behalf of their families is beyond admirable. Taking DACE away from them would be tantamount to stealing futures. It's not uncommon for us activists to encounter families at schools like Union Street or Logan Street Elementary Schools to have entire families enrolled in LAUSD, with the parents attending DACE.

My wife Yoon Jung Lee, an immigrant herself, began attending Evans Adult School several years ago. While she has a Masters Degree from her native Korea, she felt taking High School courses would help her English skills. Help would be an understatement. Because her Evans work necessarily has her reading books, her English skills have improved exponentially. This last point isn't just anecdote, it's supported by myriad research by language acquisition experts like Professor Stephen Krashen. However, it's been courses like American History that she has really appreciated. She has told me learning the history of her new home has made her understand the culture much more than if she had never been exposed the class.

Moreover, Adult Education has given her confidence to do things she never would have done before. Not only has she taken a leading role in the UAS organizing to save her school, she has been photo-documenting the struggle, and wrote her very first activism article for the Save Adult Education website: Big Evans Rally on February 29, 2012.

In addition to immigrants, Adult Education serves diverse populations, including some that people may never have heard of. I volunteer at a recovery center for inner-city men located in the Westlake McArthur Park area called the Royal Palms. These are men that society, to all intents and purposes, has given up on. Very often these individuals, predominantly men of color and from poverty, can barely read when they begin working on their education. LAUSD Adult Education provides these men with an opportunity to earn their GEDs, learn computer skills, and reintegrate into society. The loss of LAUSD Adult Education would be devastating to these individuals so desperately needing a second chance in life. I've seen countless graduates of these GED and computer classes go on to get jobs and, in many cases, careers.

The last anecdote we'll explore is from the UAS meeting I attended in support of my wife on the first Saturday of March. The young woman who shared her story was developmentally disabled, and many of us had tears in our eyes as we listened to her tale. She was from Venice Skills Center and spoke of her horrible experience prior to her current school as a person with a learning disability at community college. She explained that they had neither the facilities, nor faculty willing to work with her. This is important since the press and several BOE members are now insisting a report by the Little Hoover Commission demonstrates community colleges could take on some of the functions of LAUSD DACE [5]. The student said that it wasn't until she went to LAUSD Adult Education that she was able to get both the attention and resources she needed. She explained how hard it is for people with learning disabilities to obtain vocational skills anywhere else. She went on to say she is learning how to be an office assistant and listed all the skills she had learned at her school. She pleaded "Please don't close adult education!"

Each story above encapsulates the struggles of persons suffering under various oppressions trying to transform their personal material conditions through education. It's a testament to the importance of adult education that it serves such a broad layer of people. It's also important to note that adult education serves an important social justice role in that it allows people to improve their lives despite a system that benefits from their remaining underprivileged. There's more, in that the struggle to save DACE has given students a valuable experience.

"A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible to transformation." — Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

The fight to save their schools has deepened the consciousness of these students. Instead of accepting their plight, as some of the neoliberal minded school board trustees would have had them, they see themselves as agents of change. Blanca Perez and Evelyn Escalante had already experienced the power of organizing when they saved Menlo Adult School and several others a few years ago. The combined efforts of students recently to delay the budget vote has shown a whole new layer of students and activists that collectively they are capable of transforming their reality. The struggle isn't over, and there's a very good possibility that students will have to fight for the life of their programs for months to come. Seeing how the one percent doesn't prioritize programs like Adult Education is likely to radicalize more students and bring them into the struggle for social justice.

Do these cuts have to happen? It would be fatalistic and fallacious to say they do. Aside from the District making more rational budget decisions that place people before the profits of their vendors, there's the elephant in the room:

Given that California's economy is the ninth largest economy in the world, it's unconscionable that continual cuts now threaten programs like adult education. Instead of cuts, we need to demand tax justice. According to the California Budget Project, the bottom fifth of California income earners pay 11.7%, while the top one percent only pay 7.1%. Just raising the rate of the top to equal that of the bottom would make this discussion moot, and taxing the upper quintile at a fair rate would eliminate all budget issues in California. [6]

There's hope that fairer taxation could be on the horizon with movements like the Millionaires Tax gaining momentum, but LAUSD needs to craft a budget that would preserve vital programs until the additional funding arrives.

Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of lives will be disrupted and changed for the worse if the School District is able to shut down Adult Education. That would be an egregious attack on working class people during an already brutal economic crisis, and would further exacerbate already stark class inequalities. Social justice demands we do better than that.

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NOTES

[1] An excellent example of costly assessments that are neither State nor Federally mandated is the District's recent addition of DIBELS®, a product of a company called the Dynamic Measurement Group. Of course, standardized testing in general is resource depleting to our district and others. Professor Stephen Krashen cites an example of New York City spending some 542 million on computers to implement testing (In an unpublished paper entitled "The common core standards and national tests: We are backing the wrong horse." Much of that paper is covered in a series of talks he gave last year, including at the CTU). In another paper Krashen discusses the potential of "4.5 billion on new standards and tests." Of course assessment costs can't always be measured up front, but they instead are wasteful in other ways.

[2] There's a plethora of examples for this. "[S]upport the projected price tag of at least $18 million for outside consultants," a quote from the site of LAUSD's very own Tamar Galatzan. From the Daily News on consultants in general "[T]he audit found that $186 million was paid to 1,277 outside consultants in 2006-07, averaging $145,653 per person that year." The district's expensive boondoggle with payroll cost a fortune, and resulted in the recent hiring of even more consultants. We are still waiting for the price-tag on the ongoing Academic Growth over Time (AGT) fiasco, but by most accounts it will be very costly.

[3] The latest fad inflicted by right wing economists on education is Value Added Methodology (VAM), also known as Academic Growth over Time (AGT). There is no serious peer-reviewed research supporting VAM/AGT (henceforth VAM), but that hasn't stopped it's popularity among the corporate education reform crowd. On the other hand, there's copious research demonstrating that VAM is woefully inaccurate and, in the words of Professor Diane Ravitch, "should never be used for high-stakes decision making." The late Gerald Bracey was highly critical of VAM. The esteemed National Education Policy Center (NEPC) made short work of completely discrediting the Los Angeles Times' shoddy research and wildly irresponsible decision to publish VAM scores, which possibly may have led in turn to the suicide of one the slandered teachers. For more on VAM see this list of links, and also a reprint of Professor Mike Rose's response to VAM at the bottom of this post.

[4] LAUSD's deceptively-named Public School Choice (PSC) resolution gave district schools away to privately managed entities including Charter Management Organizations (CMOs). PSC was imposed on the District by school privatizer Yolie Flores, who was a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation employee at the same time that she held a LAUSD Trustee seat. Under PSC, dozens of schools were given away to private corporations, nearly all of which were brand new facilities. While no aggregate of the costs has been published, the cost of individual school sites are staggering. In my neighborhood, a brand new school called CRES 14 was given away to the CNCA Charter Corporation, that one school's construction alone cost 68.7 million dollars.

[5] The actual report Serving Students, Serving California: Updating The California Community Colleges To Meet Evolving Demands doesn't provide specifics as to how such a transition is to occur, nor would there be time to affect such a transition if LAUSD was to eliminate its adult programs straightaway.

[6] Quote from The struggle to save LAUSD's adult education program