It's Not (Only) About the Money

I am a teacher in Oklahoma. I come from a family that values service. My grandfather, uncles, dad, stepdad, and son all have served or currently serve in the military. My mother and one sister have or currently work in law enforcement. That same sister and I work in education. None of those jobs pays well, and that is what we hear most about. Law enforcement, fire, military, education, and other public service jobs have the distinction of being among the lowest paid professions requiring either a degree or extensive training outside of a high school education. Professionals working in those fields advocate tirelessly for better compensation, as well they should. No one who works full time in a career, the aim of which is a public good, should qualify for public assistance or find the American Dream woefully out of reach. But it's not only about the money. Low pay is a symptom, not the disease. Everything teachers want flows from a place of respect for the profession, for us, and for our efforts with the nation's children. As Aretha Franklin would say, "All I'm askin' is for a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t!"

What does respecting teachers mean?

It means putting someone who values education in charge of education departments at the state and Federal levels. One cannot vilify and attempt to marginalize an entire profession and all who practice it and expect to lead it into a new era. Putting someone with no experience in education, someone who has never attended public schools, whose children have never attended public schools, and who has spent his or her entire career attempting to quash public schools is not just bad policy-it is incredibly contemptuous. Using the nation's children as a political football or an opportunity for profit serves neither the children nor the nation. Public schools exist for the benefit of society in creating an informed citizenry. Recognize that, and understand that a strong system of public education is in everyone's best interest.

It means understanding that pedagogy, content knowledge, instructional planning, class size, and classroom management all matter, and none are one-size-fits-all. The research has borne out time and again that class size matters, and there is an optimal range in numbers of students by age group that allows for the most effective learning environment. Pedagogical choices-when and how to teach a concept-are as important as what is taught. Our students are not widgets. They are not one-size-fits-all, and they cannot be standardized.

It means trusting us to teach that which is necessary and that which is simply learning for its own sake, because it's interesting. Many school districts have the goal of fostering lifelong learning. Most of the learning that our students do over the course of their lifetimes will be because they are interested in that learning. Those are the learning experiences that stick. Our students need foundational knowledge in math, languages, language arts, social sciences, empirical science, and the arts to be well-rounded and educated citizens, but they also need those things in order to pursue their own passions and endeavors in life. Sometimes that means we will engage in learning for its own sake in our classrooms. Not everything taught has to have "real-world" implications. It is ok to learn a new word for the sheer beauty of the language. It is perfectly acceptable to know how to solve complex equations because of the new pathways it will create in the brain even if our students do not plan to become mathematicians. Sometimes we will chase rabbits down the rabbit hole. Those times are not meaningless.

It means recognizing that we are not miracle workers. We cannot solve all of society's ills, nor do we cause them. But we can make a dent, and we try to do just that every day. We work with students who don't know if there will be food at home when they get there. We work with students who have overcome unimaginable challenges just to be here. We work with students that would rather be anywhere but here. We work with students who struggle to accomplish what most of us do easily and take for granted.

It means recognizing that we work unpaid overtime during the school year, and the breaks are our comp time. Every teacher I know works more hours than those for which they are contracted. This is not because they are inefficient. It is because there is not enough time built into the contract day to do all that is contractually required of us. What the public sees is the act of teaching. Teachers, in whatever methodology is appropriate for the concept and lesson, teach students, usually in a classroom setting. That only accounts for about half of the job, but it is more than 80% of the average contract day. My current contract is for 6.5 hours of instruction time inclusive of a 50 minute plan, so 50min/390min is 12.8%. That means my teaching time is 87.8% of my contract, but accounts for only half of my duties. Teachers must plan and align instruction to complex standards. We must grade work. We create, administer, grade, and analyze tests. We contact parents and guardians. We must modify and align work and assessments to individualized education plans for special ed students. Many of us must translate work (or have it ready far enough in advance to have it translated) for students who do not fluently speak English.  We analyze standardized testing data. We analyze standardized testing blueprints, alignment, and sample questions. We serve on committees. We volunteer our lunch, planning, before school time, and after school time to help students. All of this cannot be accomplished in a single daily planning period, and none of this is compensated time.  The average teacher in the United States works 55 hours per week. That's the equivalent of 15 extra weeks of uncompensated full-time work. We get six of those back in the summer, one in the fall, two at Christmas, and one in the spring on average. Even if we consider the time off comp time, we are still donating the equivalent of five weeks of full-time work in service to your children.

It means seeing that when we organize, we are not being selfish; we are asking for reasonable working conditions and compensation. We organize to advocate for a fully funded  public education system. We organize for class sizes somewhere south of 40 students because students learn better in smaller classes. We organize to combat the overuse of standardized tests for making broad and unrelated decisions. We organize so that we can be heard, make our workplace better, and make our schools stronger. We organize to stem the increasing demand to give up yet more of our family and personal time without additional compensation, to not have our insurance and pensions held up as a political football every legislative session, not to have test scores of students we don't teach used to calculate our evaluation score.  We organize so that so many of us do not have to leave the profession as soon as their personal circumstances allow in order to actually provide for themselves and their families. We are not asking to become wealthy through teaching, but we do plan to organize our way out of the poverty-level salaries in this state. We organize to combat the misinformation about our profession spread by those who would like to privatize and monetize it, and who see in your children only their profit potential.

And finally, respecting teachers means compensating us according to our education, experience, and worth. Respecting teachers means acknowledging us as the highly trained and educated professionals that we are. There are more than 3.5 million teachers, mostly in public schools, across the nation, all of whom hold at least a Bachelor's degree, and 56% of whom have at least one advanced degree. It means that one must recognize the cognitive dissonance of refusing to compensate teachers for education and experience while simultaneously requiring them to have both. It means understanding that you cannot court a first-rate workforce if you pay third-rate (or 48th) salaries. Newly minted teachers are fleeing out state for better standards of living and qualities of life. Experienced teachers who can leave are doing so as well, and for the same reasons. It means recognizing that Oklahoma teachers are dedicated professionals, and should be treated, and compensated as such.

The Hostile Takeover of Public Education

I have been reading a lot lately about education reform, charter authorizers, and a number of education policy topics that make the most dedicated teachers see red. I have seen members of the public talk about what they "know" about the teaching profession. This has reminded me that we need to take the conversation in a new direction if we are to reclaim public education from the hands of edutourists and hostile takeovers. We have to act now because the reform movement has a 30 year head start. And a plan:

Step One: Manufacture a Crisis
The reform agenda has been active for at least three decades attempting to convince the public that there is, in fact, a problem with public education as a whole. The narrative is not that underfunded inner city schools are in trouble, but the whole system of public education is in shambles. Since the 1980s reformers have banged the "Nation at Risk" mediocrity drum ad infinitum. The claim is that one standardized test given to only 6,000 or so students in the nation tells us that the US is falling behind the rest of the world in educational achievement. This is simply not true.

Many of the countries ahead of the US on the PISA list do not educate every child. You heard me right: they do not educate everyone. The poor, those with special needs, those that do not test well are either not educated at all, or do not go to the upper level schools which are included in the samples for those countries. We test everybody against other countries' top notch students. A level playing field this is not--but a manufactured crisis, this certainly is.

The decline in both ACT and SAT scores is also attributed incorrectly to mediocre public education. That is simply not true. Prior to the 1980s, most students didn't take the ACT or SAT. Most students didn't plan to go to college or need to. A shift began to occur in which business and industry began to require a college degree for positions that previously did not require one. As a result, more students needed a degree and began taking the ACT and SAT. What was once required of the top 10-25% began to be required of the top 50-75%. In states like Oklahoma, all high school students will take the ACT at some point in their academic career, even if they do not plan to go to college. When more students take the test, and those students are no longer just those in the upper academic performance levels, the average will go down. It is inevitable, and it is not because those students have not received an excellent education.

Step Two: Assign Blame
First the blame was placed on a lack of standards, so standards-based education was introduced, mandated, implemented, scaled, changed, and turned into a series of fiery hoops. Then blame shifted to teachers. Teachers have been categorized as lazy money grubbers out only for themselves. There is a real and relentless attack on the profession and the professionals within it. I hear or read daily how teachers only work 185 days a year while the average professional works 220. I hear that our work day is only 5 or 6 hours while the rest of the workforce labors for 8. I hear about long Christmas, Thanksgiving, and spring breaks, and summers off. I hear about lavish pensions and benefits. I hear that we should have known the profession paid so little, and we shouldn't complain about it, or try to change it now.

Here's the truth. Teachers have students in class for 185 or so days a year, but those are not the only days we work. On average, teachers have 20 professional days in which we have to report for work without students. My summer break is about six weeks, much of which is spent attending conferences and professional development to improve my craft and depth of knowledge or teaching summer school. I am here long before my students arrive and long after they leave. I take work home with me. I am an advisor to a student organization for free, and on my own time. Long breaks are in lieu of the vacation time, paid holidays, and comp time offered in the private sector. And those lavish pensions? When they retire many Oklahoma teachers will qualify for food stamps if TRS is their only source of income.

Step three: The Hostile Takeover
Here's where reform tactics get interesting. Take the problems of the worst schools in America (made the worst by willfully starving them of resources) and declare that those problems exist in nearly all American schools. Then design a test that measures students' standards-based performance, but rig the game so that a large number of students fail, thus furthering the narrative that schools are failing students. Deprive schools of funding and staff based on the results of those rigged tests. Swoop in and declare that vouchers charters choice Education Savings Accounts are the answer. Expand the failure narrative and insist that the only solution is to wrest control away from local schools and their boards (democratic control is messy, after all), and put corporate boards in place instead. Make decisions based on profit motives rather than educational ones, and drill-and-kill students to testing excellence and critical thinking stagnation.

Here's the rub: Charters, whether for-profit or public, are not held to the same standards as your local public school. They do not have to be transparent with their spending, discipline, or any number of factors that public schools must report. Charters do not have to take every child, rarely honor IEPs, suspend and expel students for minor infractions, and have the latitude to be selective in their admissions processes (whether in the open or by requiring so much paperwork and parental involvement so as to discourage the application.)

Public schools take all comers with the mission to educate every child. Public school teachers are professionals who are trained to educate children. We know our content areas, can demonstrate mastery in curriculum and pedagogy, and work with children every day of our working adult lives. If we were treated as the professionals we are (allowed to teach as we know to be best, allowed to choose content based on our students and their needs, paid enough to not need second and third jobs, and respected as the dedicated individuals that we are), the public would see that the teachers as a whole are not the problem. The highest ranking schools in America all have something in common: low poverty rates among students. This is inarguable fact, and is the problem that needs to be addressed, because the opposite is also true. Those schools with the highest rates of poverty also have been attributed the lowest performance.

What Do We Do?:
It is interesting that the majority of Americans believe that the public school system is ineffective and headed in the wrong direction, but that their neighborhood schools are high quality schools. I would suggest that most schools do an excellent job educating their local population of students, and the general public is satisfied with the role of their local schools on balance. There are few truly inadequate or inferior public schools, and they are almost entirely found in impoverished areas and have been starved for resources. We know this. What is needed is the collective will to actually fix this. The solution is not takeover or turnover. It is the investment of resources, time, and talent that will make the difference in underperforming schools.

Why do public schools work? It is because they acknowledge the role of education in the lives of students, the place of the local school in the community, and when they have the resources, they do extraordinary work. If the edutourists, advocates of hostile takeover, and enablers of the undermining of public education and public educators can't commit to tackling poverty and the withholding of resources in a way that honors the role of neighborhood schools and their place in the community, then they should get out of the way of those of us who are doing the work that matters in these schools every day. All we need is the resources to do our work and the latitude to do it without interference by those who have never done it.

That Didn't Take Long

Oklahoma released a draft of the new K-12 standards for English Language Arts and math, and it didn't take long for OCPA to begin calling out the standards and those who worked with them. Andrew Spiropolous penned one for the Journal Record yesterday.

"So it turns out, despite the hullabaloo, that the task force charged with writing superior English and math academic standards has submitted a proposal that, poking below the surface, isn’t that different than the Common Core version the legislators ordered it to reject.
Many of us predicted this ironic turn of events after the Legislature, running in fear from the grass-roots activists opposing Common Core, noisily disposed of the hated standards. Our suspicions were raised when education leaders issued an urgent call upon the Legislature to swiftly approve the new proposal. They were confirmed when the leaders coupled their pleas with affecting tales from local administrators and teachers lamenting how the uncertainty made doing their jobs impossible."

There are a few things going on here, but what is revealed throughout the column is Spiropolous's apparent disdain for public education and those associated with it.

Firstly, those "grass-roots activists" that the Legislature was busy "running in fear from" and that Spiropolous is busy sneering at--they are voters. You know, those pesky people the Legislature is supposed to work for, and whose wishes they're supposed to take into account when governing. The article again takes a contemptuous tone regarding the role of the governed in determining governance. "The larger lesson here is that grass-roots passion unaccompanied by serious policy chops, leads, at best, to empty symbolic victories and continued popular frustration." The connotation here is that we should leave the entirety of governance to our betters--those with "serious policy chops." Our role is only to vote them in and sit quietly by while they determine what's best for us.


Unfortunately, it is predictable that those associated with OCPA would call out local administrators and teachers while refusing to acknowledge how the Legislature's inability to determine a course of action and stay with it for more than a few years makes the job of teaching in Oklahoma more difficult than it has to be. Teachers cannot teach to standards that are not written. Those standards will drive the tests that the Legislature and reformers love. Those tests will, in turn, determine retention, graduation, and course options for students; funding for schools and districts; and employment for teachers and administrators.

"The truth is that our state’s education establishment, from the state superintendent of education on down, is not committed to writing and implementing world-class standards that will distinguish us from other states."

Spiropolous's truth is not the truth. My students would be able to identify that statement as opinion. The truth, at least as every educator to whom I have spoken sees it, is that educators would like world-class standards that are age appropriate and make sense in the larger contexts of the lives of students. We would like standards that are less prescriptive and allow for professional judgement and flexibility to meet the educational needs and goals of our diverse populations of students. If Spiropolous and his ilk spent time seriously engaging educators who are in public school classrooms every day doing the work that matters, and did so with an open mind, they would come to understand that we want what is best for our students. We may disagree on what that is, but it would allow for common ground to begin a serious discussion regarding the future of public education. Unfortunately, the level of disregard they show toward educators and the work we do prevents that conversation from getting off the ground. It appears that they would rather silence us than engage with us.

"I’ll take their word that they want to do better than we have in the past, but there is nothing about these people that inspires one to believe they seek to engage in bold, creative reform.

We should give up on the idea that the state education establishment will force excellence on local schools. Instead, we must encourage districts, schools and families to mount their own efforts to foster excellence."

It would be "bold, creative reform" to allow public schools to operate along the same parameters as the best preparatory academies. In one phrase, we are in agreement: "If the state wants to help, it can free local districts from disabling mandates and regulations." One cannot tout how much better the private sector could do the work of public education while simultaneously hampering the ability of the public sector to work as the private sector does. It is as illogical as demanding the "education establishment" to "force excellence" while asking everyone else to "foster excellence." It would be bold reform to eliminate needless testing and to convert, instead, to tests that universities and career fields already use to determine readiness. Students attempting to attend an institution of higher learning usually must take the ACT or SAT, and our Career Tech students take certification tests and Work Keys. These are already established and normed. They have the added bonus of decades of longitudinal data.

For reform to be successful, it must have support from those affected. Parents, who Spiropolous acknowledges are responsible for the education of their children, have loudly rejected the majority of the reform movement's ideas. Reformers should get serious about real reform, i.e. removing statistically unreliable "accountability measures" like VAM and A-F Report Cards, limiting standardized tests, removing "disabling mandates and regulations," rather than patronizing those who must implement the nonsense they have foisted upon public education.

Kill the Bill Part 1

As many of you have already heard, the OK House Education Subcommittee plans to hear HB 3154. Bluntly put, we need to kill the bill. Today. In the subcommittee. The bill would divert the FBA that currently pays 100% of teacher insurance to pay in the name of giving districts the "flexibility" to go broke in new ways. It shifts the burden for insurance benefits, which are already considered part of a teacher's salary, from the state to local districts and permanently caps at 2017 levels the state's contribution to the district's FBA funds.

To see an in-depth analysis of the bill, please see here and here.

Please call, email, tweet the representatives on the subcommittee and tell them to "Kill that Bill."

Representative	Phone	Email Address	Twitter
Cannaday, Ed	405.557.7375	ed.cannaday@okhouse.gov
Coody, Ann	405.557.7398	anncoody@okhouse.gov
Dunnington, Jason	405.557.7396	jason.dunnington@okhouse.gov	@jdunnington
Henke, Katie (VC)	405.557.7361	katie.henke@okhouse.gov	@KatieHenke
Kern, Sally	405.557.7348	sallykern@okhouse.gov	@SallyKern
Martin, Scott (C)	405.557.7329	scott.martin@okhouse.gov	@scottcmartin
Peterson, Pam	405.557.7341	pampeterson@okhouse.gov
Rogers, Michael	405.557.7362	michael.rogers@okhouse.gov	@rogersmichael21
Thomsen, Todd	405.557.7336	todd.thomsen@okhouse.gov	@ToddThomsen
Virgin, Emily	405.557.7323	emily.virgin@okhouse.gov	@RepEmily