Ravitch: Lessons from Finland that America won't learn

Every time I read Diane Ravitch -- who takes on Louisiana's governor and ALEC in her most recent blog post -- I learn something new and useful. Last month, I learned a new acronym thanks to her: GERM, which stands for Global Education Reform Movement. Poetic, isn't it?

For the New York Times Book Review, Ravitch reviewed "Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?" by Pasi Sahlberg. Ravitch knows the author and the nation, and she treated her review assignment as a bit of a travelogue. Ravitch assures us that the book is worth reading; the review too is worth reading for its lessons and insights from Ravitch.

In recent years, elected officials and policymakers such as former president George W. Bush, former schools chancellor Joel Klein in New York City, former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have agreed that there should be “no excuses” for schools with low test scores. The “no excuses” reformers maintain that all children can attain academic proficiency without regard to poverty, disability, or other conditions, and that someone must be held accountable if they do not. That someone is invariably their teachers.

You can count on Ravitch to cut to the chase.

The belief that schools alone can overcome the effects of poverty may be traced back many decades but its most recent manifestation was a short book published in 2000 by the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., titled No Excuses. In this book, Samuel Casey Carter identified twenty-one high-poverty schools with high test scores. Over the past decade, influential figures in public life have decreed that school reform is the key to fixing poverty. Bill Gates told the National Urban League, “Let’s end the myth that we have to solve poverty before we improve education. I say it’s more the other way around: improving education is the best way to solve poverty.” Gates never explains why a rich and powerful society like our own cannot address both poverty and school improvement at the same time.

For a while, the Gates Foundation thought that small high schools were the answer, but Gates now believes that teacher evaluation is the primary ingredient of school reform. The Gates Foundation has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to school districts to develop new teacher evaluation systems. In 2009, the nation’s chief reformer, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, launched a $4.35 billion competitive program called Race to the Top, which required states to evaluate teachers by student test scores and to remove the limits on privately managed charter schools.

The main mechanism of school reform today is to identify teachers who can raise their students’ test scores every year. If the scores go up, reformers assume, then the students will enroll in college and poverty will eventually disappear. This will happen, the reformers believe, if there is a “great teacher” in every classroom and if more schools are handed over to private managers, even for-profit corporations.

The reformers don’t care that standardized tests are prone to measurement error, sampling error, and other statistical errors.1 They don’t seem to care that experts like Robert L. Linn at the University of Colorado, Linda Darling-Hammond at Stanford, and Helen F. Ladd at Duke, as well as a commission of the National Research Council, have warned about misuse of standardized tests to hold individual teachers accountable with rewards or sanctions. Nor do they see the absurdity of gauging the quality of a teacher by the results of a multiple-choice test given to students on one day of the year.

Testing can provide useful information, showing students and teachers what is and is not being learned, and scores can be used to diagnose learning problems. But bad things happen when tests become too consequential for students, teachers, and schools, such as narrowing the curriculum only to what is tested or cheating or lowering standards to inflate scores. In response to the federal and state pressure to raise test scores, school districts across the nation have been reducing the time available for the arts, physical education, history, civics, and other nontested subjects. This will not improve education and is certain to damage its quality.

No nation in the world has eliminated poverty by firing teachers or by handing its public schools over to private managers; nor does research support either strategy.

Read that again: No nation in the world has eliminated poverty by firing teachers or by handing its public schools over to private managers; nor does research support either strategy.

Yet our lawmakers believe -- they certainly say it aloud -- these very things.

But these inconvenient facts do not reduce the reformers’ zeal. The new breed of school reformers consists mainly of Wall Street hedge fund managers, foundation officials, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, and policymakers, but few experienced educators.

Wonder why "few experienced educators" are on the fire-bad-teachers bandwagon? Maybe it's because they are far fewer "bad" teachers than everyone likes to speculate, though the "bad" ones certainly get all the publicity.

Or maybe it's because experienced educators recognize that it takes a lot more than the experienced educator to turn around a societal culture.

The reformers’ detachment from the realities of schooling and their indifference to research allow them to ignore the important influence of families and poverty. The schools can achieve miracles, the reformers assert, by relying on competition, deregulation, and management by data—strategies similar to the ones that helped produce the economic crash of 2008.

Great observation. By dismantling and privatizing public education, we might as well be setting in motion the great educational crash of 2018, or 2022, or 2030.

In view of the reformers’ penchant for these strategies, educators tend to call them “corporate reformers,” to distinguish them from those who understand the complexities of school improvement.

The corporate reformers’ well-funded public relations campaign has succeeded in persuading elected officials that American public education needs shock therapy. One is tempted to forget that the United States is the largest and one of the most successful economies in the world, and that some part of this success must be attributed to the institutions that educated 90 percent of the people in this nation.

Faced with the relentless campaign against teachers and public education, educators have sought a different narrative, one free of the stigmatization by test scores and punishment favored by the corporate reformers. They have found it in Finland. Even the corporate reformers admire Finland, apparently not recognizing that Finland disproves every part of their agenda.

I've heard Ravitch deliver this part before, but it tickles me to read her breakdown again.

Pay close attention:

It is not unusual for Americans to hold up another nation as a model for school reform. In the mid-nineteenth century, American education leaders hailed the Prussian system for its professionalism and structure. In the 1960s, Americans flocked to England to marvel at its progressive schools. In the 1980s, envious Americans attributed the Japanese economic success to its school system. Now the most favored nation is Finland, and for four good reasons.

First, Finland has one of the highest-performing school systems in the world, as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which assesses reading, mathematical literacy, and scientific literacy of fifteen-year-old students in all thirty-four nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including the United States. Unlike our domestic tests, there are no consequences attached to the tests administered by the PISA. No individual or school learns its score. No one is rewarded or punished because of these tests. No one can prepare for them, nor is there any incentive to cheat.

Second, from an American perspective, Finland is an alternative universe. It rejects all of the “reforms” currently popular in the United States, such as testing, charter schools, vouchers, merit pay, competition, and evaluating teachers in relation to the test scores of their students.

Third, among the OECD nations, Finnish schools have the least variation in quality, meaning that they come closest to achieving equality of educational opportunity—an American ideal.

Fourth, Finland borrowed many of its most valued ideas from the United States, such as equality of educational opportunity, individualized instruction, portfolio assessment, and cooperative learning. Most of its borrowing derives from the work of the philosopher John Dewey.

Ah, John Dewey, the educator's educator, whose "My Pedagogic Creed" is education Scripture and whose "Democracy and Education" should rank among the nation's most important civic documents. I'll post more on him later, but I'm pleased that Ravitch points out Dewey's influence on Finnish education.

In Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?, Pasi Sahlberg explains how his nation’s schools became successful. A government official, researcher, and former mathematics and science teacher, Sahlberg attributes the improvement of Finnish schools to bold decisions made in the 1960s and 1970s. Finland’s story is important, he writes, because “it gives hope to those who are losing their faith in public education.”

Detractors say that Finland performs well academically because it is ethnically homogeneous, but Sahlberg responds that “the same holds true for Japan, Shanghai or Korea,” which are admired by corporate reformers for their emphasis on testing. To detractors who say that Finland, with its population of 5.5 million people, is too small to serve as a model, Sahlberg responds that “about 30 states of the United States have a population close to or less than Finland.”

Sahlberg speaks directly to the sense of crisis about educational achievement in the United States and many other nations. US policymakers have turned to market-based solutions such as “tougher competition, more data, abolishing teacher unions, opening more charter schools, or employing corporate-world management models.” By contrast, Finland has spent the past forty years developing a different education system, one that is focused on improving the teaching force, limiting student testing to a necessary minimum, placing responsibility and trust before accountability, and handing over school- and district-level leadership to education professionals.

To an American observer, the most remarkable fact about Finnish education is that students do not take any standardized tests until the end of high school. They do take tests, but the tests are drawn up by their own teachers, not by a multinational testing corporation. The Finnish nine-year comprehensive school is a “standardized testing-free zone,” where children are encouraged “to know, to create, and to sustain natural curiosity.”

Can you believe this?

Finland -- the nation that America's education reformers use as the gold standard, for its student achievement -- invested in teacher quality, doesn't impose any standardized testing until the end of high school, and lets education professionals run their schools.

These are three things that American educators have advocated for generations -- and they are the very three things that our corporate owners will never let happen, because they cost too much, they measure too little, and they remove the profit motive from education.

At an event in New York City, Sahlberg explained to Ravitch and others that "Finnish educators don’t care about standardized test scores and welcomed the international results only because they protected the schools against conservative demands for testing and accountability."

Imagine that: Right-wingers demanded testing and accountability, and educators -- supported by Finnish parents -- said no. And there flourished a fantastic system of public education that is now the envy of the world, or, the envy of the United States' education reformers.

Finnish teachers, Sahlberg said, are well educated, well prepared, and highly respected. They are paid about the same as teachers in the United States in comparison to other college graduates, but Finnish teachers with fifteen years’ experience in the classroom are paid more than their American counterparts.

I asked Sahlberg how it was possible to hold teachers or schools accountable when there were no standardized tests. He replied that Finnish educators speak not of accountability, but of responsibility. He said, “Our teachers are very responsible; they are professionals.”

When asked what happens to incompetent teachers, Sahlberg insisted that they would never be appointed; once qualified teachers are appointed, it is very difficult to remove them. When asked how Finnish teachers would react if they were told they would be judged by their students’ test scores, he replied, “They would walk out and they wouldn’t return until the authorities stopped this crazy idea.”

Look at that: A place where educators organized, and educators and their students win.

To be sure, Finland is an unusual nation. Its schools are carefully designed to address the academic, social, emotional, and physical needs of children, beginning at an early age. Free preschool programs are not compulsory, but they enroll 98 percent of children. Compulsory education begins at the age of seven. Finnish educators take care not to hold students back or label them as “failing,” since such actions would cause student failure, lessen student motivation, and increase social inequality. After nine years of comprehensive schooling, during which there is no tracking by ability, Finnish students choose whether to enroll in an academic or a vocational high school. About 42 percent choose the latter. The graduation rate is 93 percent, compared to about 80 percent in the US.

Finland’s highly developed teacher preparation program is the centerpiece of its school reform strategy. Only eight universities are permitted to prepare teachers, and admission to these elite teacher education programs is highly competitive: only one of every ten applicants is accepted. There are no alternative ways to earn a teaching license.

Did you catch that? "There are no alternative ways to earn a teaching license." Here in South Carolina, leaders have poked so many holes in the criteria to become qualified to teach that almost any Tom, Dick or Harry can walk into a school off the street and be hired.

In fact, our leaders brag about establishing public education as a fallback opportunity for private-sector professionals who have an epiphany, a change of heart, and suddenly want to do something productive with their lives.

It sounds like, in Finland, such individuals have to go to the back of the line and apply for teacher education programs like everyone else. And guess what? Finland's outpacing the planet in education outcomes. How 'bout that!

Those who are accepted have already taken required high school courses in physics, chemistry, philosophy, music, and at least two foreign languages. Future teachers have a strong academic education for three years, then enter a two-year master’s degree program. Subject-matter teachers earn their master’s degree from the university’s academic departments, not—in contrast to the US—the department of teacher education, or in special schools for teacher education. Every candidate prepares to teach all kinds of students, including students with disabilities and other special needs. Every teacher must complete an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in education.

Every teacher has a master's degree.

Because entry into teaching is difficult and the training is rigorous, teaching is a respected and prestigious profession in Finland. So selective and demanding is the process that virtually every teacher is well prepared.

Sahlberg writes that teachers enter the profession with a sense of moral mission and the only reasons they might leave would be “if they were to lose their professional autonomy” or if “a merit-based compensation policy [tied to test scores] were imposed.”

Meanwhile, the United States is now doing to its teachers what Finnish teachers would find professionally reprehensible: judging their worth by the test scores of their students.

Here in America, our leaders are champing at the bit to do the very opposite of all the things Finland has done to achieve the same results, knowing that what they're trying to do won't work.

This very afternoon, our state lawmakers are weighing passage of a voucher plan, knowing it will harm public education, but holding it up as the silver bullet to solve our education problems because it's a way to dismantle our public school system.

We know what we don't know; we know what we do wrong; we know what it takes to do better; yet we reject every good and useful idea and seize every bad one, to spite those we want to keep constrained, either for profit or from hate.

Guess what else Finland does that we don't -- won't ever -- do:

The children of Finland enjoy certain important advantages over our own children. The nation has a strong social welfare safety net, for which it pays with high taxes. More than 20 percent of our children live in poverty, while fewer than 4 percent of Finnish children do. Many children in the United States do not have access to regular medical care, but all Finnish children receive comprehensive health services and a free lunch every day. Higher education is tuition-free.

Sahlberg recognizes that Finland stands outside what he refers to as the “Global Education Reform Movement,” to which he appends the apt acronym “GERM.” GERM, he notes, is a virus that has infected not only the United States, but the United Kingdom, Australia, and many other nations. President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law and President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program are examples of the global education reform movement. Both promote standardized testing as the most reliable measure of success for students, teachers, and schools; privatization in the form of schools being transferred to private management; standardization of curriculum; and test-based accountability such as merit pay for high scores, closing schools with low scores, and firing educators for low scores.

GERM: a virus.

Finland: the antidote.

Ravitch: the physician.

But in America, we refuse to seek treatment because it'll cost too much.

POSTSCRIPT.
In my fervor for this topic, I emphasized a point -- that Finland offers no alternative paths to certification, and that South Carolina's solons have so weakened the criteria that there may as well be none -- and in so doing, I offended at least one reader, a veteran educator who came to an education career after spending time in the private sector. Re-reading that text, I'm sure it may have offended other great educators who came to teaching likewise.

Rather than simply approve the comment and move on, I need to address it: In this case, I am chagrined and regret having offended.

Perhaps my sensitivity on this matter arises from the denigrating old saw -- "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" -- and from hearing of the education profession being used as a "fall-back" position, an option to keep open in case of emergency.

In haste, I called to mind more examples from my experience of those who came ill-advised, ill-prepared and questionably-motivated to the task than those who brought the traits necessary to succeed in the classroom.

Indeed, among my many fine teachers in public schools was one who came to his profession after a career of military service, and who provided inspiration that influenced the course of my own education and career choices.

My correspondent appropriately reminded me, "There are MANY of us who have taken this route, and while I am sure there are those who weren't ready for the rigors, I can assure you that we, too, are professionals."

"...[Y]ou must realize that I am also a TEACHER. I love and take great pride in what I do. I KNOW I have made an impact on the young lives with which I have been lucky enough to be associated."

Point taken and certainly appreciated; I have utmost respect for educators who give voice to this sentiment. Thank you for what you continue to do, for your profession and your students.

Autonomy, mastery, purpose -- not performance pay

Interested in knowing what studies show about performance pay schemes when they're implemented among professionals?

The folks at RSA Animate invited social theorist Daniel Pink, author of "Drive," to speak to them some months ago. A fascinating 10-minute version of Pink's lecture is available online, in a format that educators will love.



Share this with the ones you love.

Darlington adopts fair-minded incentive rewards plan

This is one of the more fair-minded ways of administering "pay-for-test-scores" that has come around recently. It doesn't pit teacher against teacher as a lot of "merit pay" proposals do. And it recognizes that everyone in a school community contributes to children's education, so education support staff and others are eligible for the bonuses.

The Darlington County Board of Education approved a set of guidelines for awarding around $1.33 million in incentives among some 1,400-plus Darlington County School District employees as a reward for the district’s improvement on the 2010 state school report cards.

The money for the incentive rewards is coming from one-time funds that are coming from the state.

The incentive rewards are not limited to just teachers but include support staff as well.

School district employees are getting no raises in the new $63.4 million general fund budget that went into effect on July 1. Teachers are also not getting their annual step increase in pay based on years of experience this year. This is the second straight year the step increase has been eliminated.

But Superintendent of Education Dr. Rainey Knight said she wanted to find some way for the district to reward employees for their efforts in bringing about the improved report card ratings.

Higher test scores on the state’s PASS (Palmetto Assessment of State Standards) and improving the district’s high school graduation rate to the fifth highest in the state among all 86 S.C. public school districts helped make Darlington County the 12th highest performing school district in South Carolina and the highest performer in the Pee Dee region on the 2010 report cards. The previous year, the district ranked 46th in the state in school report card performance.

This, to me, is a sore spot. It is impossible to measure a child's learning based upon a standardized test score. If we really understand and believe that children learn differently and show different competencies -- and if we understand that taking standardized tests is, in fact, a competency -- then we should also allow for and use multiple measures in determining student achievement.

Still, Darlington has done something rational and good for its educators, and that's the point to be commended:

“We just wanted to find a way to say thank you to these employees for all their hard work,” Knight said.

The board approved the guidelines during its regular monthly meeting Monday. The guidelines spell out eligibility for the rewards.

For full-time employees, the guidelines are as follows:

- Full-time employees making the minimum Darlington County School District teacher salary ($31,826) in 2010-2011 will be eligible for a one-time $1,000 incentive.

- Full-time employees making less than the minimum teacher salary will receive a one-time $500 incentive.

- Only personnel employed with the district in 2010-2011 are eligible.

- A full-time employee must have worked at least 30 hours a week in order to be eligible for the incentive.

- Full-time employees must have worked a minimum of 152 days as a full-time employee during 2010-2011 to be eligible for the incentive.

- Any employee who was terminated by the district in 2010-2011 is ineligible for the incentive.

For part-time employees and substitutes, the guidelines are as follows:

- Only part-time employees or substitutes who worked in the district in 2010-2011 are eligible for the one-time incentive.

- Any part-time employee or substitute who was terminated by the district in 2010-2011 is ineligible for the incentive.

- Part-time employees (working less than 30 hours a week) who worked a minimum of 152 days as a part-time employee will be eligible for a one-time incentive of $250.

- Substitutes in the areas of custodial, food service, maintenance, teacher assistant or teacher who worked a minimum of 152 days will be eligible for a one-time incentive of $250.

Knight said district officials will send letters to employees explaining the incentives and the guidelines. State and federal taxes will be withheld from the incentive payments, but retirement will not, Knight said.

Sheaffer: "You are more than a number. And so am I."

The following letter -- simple and eloquent -- was posted at Education Week's Teacher Blog on Monday by Amanda Sheaffer, a third grade teacher in Nashville, Tennessee, and a credit to her profession.

To my students,
I greet you at the door with a smile, but I feel uneasy. I see your bright faces and hear your cheerful words with an inadvertent cringe. I am caught in a struggle between what I have been told to do and what you deserve. In my mind, I am clawing and scraping for solid ground, but I cannot find it.

I obey and trust the wisdom of an unknown authority whose face I cannot see but believe to be honorable. I follow, with your hand in mine, and ignore a call beckoning to me from my gut—this isn’t the right way. You come along without resistance, a partnership of blind trust and good will.

For a while I am able to maintain the integrity of our space. Academic rigor coexists with preparation for judgment day, and I meet your needs as individuals. But the crescendo of fear plays in my mind as the test steadily marches toward us. While I am proud of your achievement, I know it is too complex to be represented so simply.

Inevitably, I surrender to the pressure. I cannot serve two masters. I panic and reluctantly declare allegiance to that which holds the most power.

I proceed with infamous rituals of submission. I have you read lengthy irrelevant passages, practice strategies for multiple-choice items, and make marks that are suitably heavy and dark. You barely maintain attention, but I give you the you-can-do-it song and dance and promise fun times will follow. We suffer through this ridiculous charade, squeeze in a lesson of value with any remaining time, dismiss, and repeat in the morning. Caught in a trap I cannot define, I steal your time and give it away. I am afraid, but I continue on a mission to higher scores with determination and focus in the name of success for my school, for me, and for you, yet you do not look at me as though you feel successful.

I realize you are silent. It occurs to me that I barely recognize you. I feel uneasy again. Finally, I stop and look in the mirror. I choose to acknowledge my shame while I can still feel it. I must consider my character and decide to what extent I will participate. I sort through this confusion in search of resolve. Though the nation will applaud when your numbers rise, the cost is high. At my core, I am uncomfortable with the sacrifice required.

I am here with you and must make it my responsibility to speak your truth. You are not products to be homogeneously assessed and used as bragging rights. You are much more. Each of you is intricate, a contradiction to the implications of standardization. When given opportunities for curiosity, fascination, and discovery, your insights amaze me. When I offer you occasions to be brave in thought and expression, I am impressed by your abilities. You are smart, and you know that you could never tell the world who you are with a No. 2 pencil within the tight constraints of an itty-bitty bubble.

So as I look at my tired face in the mirror, I make my choice. I do not want to contribute to a system that limits you and expects so little, but if my only alternative is to abandon you, I will stay by your sides. I will steady my frustration and find a balance. I will prepare you for the test, but I will not forfeit your education. I will whisper as loudly as I can to you.

You possess unique qualities that are immeasurable. You are minds and voices unexplored, hotbeds of potential, a gift to your community.

You are more than a number.
And so am I.

Forward proudly and liberally.

Educators' simplest hopes damaged by political ideology

A friend in Darlington referred me to a letter published in the local newspaper there last week by a 2005 Milliken educator from Anderson, Mary Nell Anthony. Anthony's letter made a number of interesting points, and after pondering her perspective, I decided to share. Rather than copy her letter, let me describe its main ideas.

Anthony takes on the subject of accountability and how accountability is being presently used as a blunt club against school district employees across South Carolina. Lawmakers propose that adopting a pay-for-test-scores plan will promote accountability among the ranks of teachers and others. Anthony does not argue that school district employees should not be held accountable. Rather, she illustrates the absurdity of using pay-for-test-scores as a medium for achieving accountability.

Take public law enforcement, she offers. If our program of law enforcement is entirely effective, that will mean there is no crime in our communities. But we know differently; there is certainly crime occurring in our communities; our jails and courts are busy with the processing of crimes and those who commit them. Does this mean our law enforcement personnel should be penalized and paid according to whose "beats" yield the least reports of crime? If so, perhaps those patrolling federal parks and country clubs would be paid the most, while those risking their lives to raid drug dens and in violent gunfights would be compensated the least. That's pay-for-performance, is it not?

Anthony applies the same to dentists next. Effective dentistry means that patients will have great check-ups, zero cavities, regardless of the personal behavior and choices. Applying the pay-for-performance model, those dentists whose patients fit the bill will earn the most, while dentists filling cavity after cavity will earn the least. Best, then, that dentists seek to locate in the most economically-advantaged neighborhoods and communities, where good dental hygiene is taught and practiced in the homes, right?

And what if some dentists have repeat offenders, patients who come back again and again to have cavities refilled, and more cavities filled, and even more dental work done? Should those dentists lose their practices and their licenses? It would certainty hold dentists accountable for their effectiveness in promoting dental health.

Anthony suggests that, applying the same principle to physicians, any patient diagnosed with a terminal illness is clearly evidence of an ineffective health care provider. Such providers should be paid least, while doctors seeing patients with no health concerns would be paid most.

What about owners of health clubs and gyms, or registered dieticians? Isn't our present epidemic of obesity evidence that this group of service providers is ineffective? Shouldn't their compensations be penalized?

Anthony writes,

Sound ridiculous? We teachers think so, too. Yet, there are legislators, the Superintendent of Education, and our newly-elected governor that want mandates such as these placed on teachers. They have this mentality that if a teacher performs the right combination, the human mind will click into place and our entire population will be educated. Thus, underperforming teachers will not be paid.

Classrooms are microcosms of society. Each year, I have kids with privileged backgrounds and kids with adverse living conditions. I have kids that live on the lake, and I have had kids that live in their car.

I doubt any educator chose a career in education with an intent to get rich. But most educators chose their careers with the hope of emulating their own best teachers, inspiring students to learn and grow, and making a real and positive change in their communities one child at a time.

When educators enter the classroom, they have simple hopes. They hope their students come to school prepared by parents and ready, even eager, to learn. They hope they will have the professional freedom to address the individual needs of each student, as each is unique, and the unwavering support of their administrators when their professional judgment is questioned. They hope that their investment of time and energy will be rewarded through the years with compensation that recognizes their credentials and years of committed experience. They hope for basic respect, for safe and secure working environments, for constructive criticism and positive reinforcement. They hope their love for their profession is never diminished. They hope they have made the right career choices.

Educators manage the damage to these hopes daily. Many of their children do not come to school fed or rested, much less ready or eager to learn. Many do not come to school prepared by parents to be taught. Many educators feel they do not have the professional freedom to address the needs of each student, nor the time to address individual needs, with more and more children packed into each classroom. Many of them feel they don't have the unwavering support of their adminstrators. Many hear their professional judgment questioned and go undefended often enough that they question it themselves, and retreat into cautiousness and sheepish compliance; they know what is wrong and know what is needed, but dare not speak up or out. Many see their investment of time and energy discounted by leaders with political agendas. Many grow used to the general disrespect, from students in the classroom, from administrators and school board members, from community leaders and lawmakers. Many make personal adjustments to deal with cramped, unwieldy, even unsafe and unreasonable working conditions. Many hang onto their own love for their best teachers and best days, and for their families, to keep going.

What Anthony expresses in her letter is a poignant and real pain and frustration that her hopes -- and, no doubt, the hopes of her colleagues and co-workers throughout the profession in South Carolina -- are being pounded, subverted, undermined, destroyed unnecessarily by political ideologues. Her feelings are entirely valid when you consider how many school district employees hold college degrees, and how many years of experience they represent, and compare that to how few local school board members statewide hold the most basic teacher certificate, how few spent any time in a classroom, and how few members of the legislature have taught children in public schools.

Those with the most preparation and commitment hold the least political power; those with the greatest political power have the least preparation and commitment to serve children in any public school.

The proposal of "pay-for-test-scores" is merely the most recent iteration of that ideology.

Kershaw's superintendent: Merit pay isn't a simple answer

Superintendent Frank Morgan of Kershaw County has spent nearly four decades in education, and he says he's seen the flavors-of-the-month come and go. Speaking of pay-for-test-scores, he cautions against jumping headfirst into this month's flavor.

On the surface, merit pay makes a great deal of sense. The idea of rewarding teachers for performance seems intuitively fairer and more productive than the traditional way of compensating teachers, which is based on experience, degrees and certifications such as National Board. Unfortunately, the track record hasn’t lived up to the hype. The overwhelming majority of plans that have been implemented over the past 30 years have ultimately been abandoned.

As recently as September, a study by Vanderbilt University concluded that merit-based bonuses did not raise student achievement, as measured by standardized tests. (We could have a long discussion as to whether standardized tests are an accurate measure of achievement, but we’ll save that one for another time.) The study looked at fifth- through eighth-grade math teachers in the Nashville public schools from 2007 through 2009. Teachers could receive between $5,000 and $15,000 per year, based on how their students performed on standardized tests. The money; however, didn’t result in a significant difference in academic growth.

Studies are like statistics: People can produce both to support their case. When I hear about a study produced by a university, I like to ask who paid for it. Example: The University of Arkansas loves churning out studies that prove vouchers and tuition tax credits work. But knowing that the Walton family foundation contributes a lot of money to the University of Arkansas, and that the Waltons are staunch supporters of vouchers, tempers my enthusiasm for that university's reports. In this case, a study from Vanderbilt University says pay-for-test-scores isn't effective. I don't know who paid for the study, but I also don't know of any bias on the part of Vanderbilt.

Morgan continues with some points to ponder, if indeed South Carolina's lawmakers and State Superintendent Mick Zais are hell-bent on implementing pay-for-test-scores. You can read the whole column for yourself, but he identifies three causes for concern.

First, he writes, "If done right, merit pay will actually cost more in the long run." Colorado's plan is one example. Millions more were spent than were projected to be spent, but there were human-resource and effectiveness costs too, as "collegiality and cooperation that are hallmarks of any good school" are damaged by such schemes.

"Would teachers continue to freely share ideas and strategies if they were pitted against each other for the same dollars?" he asks. "I’m not sure that a school where this does not occur is the kind of school parents want. Teaching children is different than making widgets."

Second, Morgan proposes considering more than just standardized test scores. For one reason, "the performance of many teachers — those in the arts, teachers of severely disabled students or media specialists, for example — isn’t measured by these tests." I wonder if state lawmakers realized that.

And third, Morgan writes,

Pay is not the single motivating factor for teachers. Certainly, fair pay is important, but so are professional development opportunities, reasonable class sizes, good facilities and access to technology and supportive leadership. If a merit pay plan is being viewed as a single solution to improve teacher motivation and quality and improve student achievement, it will fall as short of the mark as other plans before it have. There are multiple areas other than pay that must also receive attention and support.

Morgan is surely a reasonable fellow, and I feel better knowing of his long history in K-12 education. He, too, seems to invest some esteem in the wisdom of those serving in the classroom. He writes, "I’m not sure that someone who has not taught in a K-12 classroom fully understands this. A process that is not thorough and thoughtful and diverse in terms of those involved will not result in a product that will move us forward."

I'll have to check my notes but I don't think Governor Nikki Haley or Superintendent Mick Zais have ever been responsible for teaching in a public school classroom. For even a day.

Did Michelle Rhee's merit-pay policies and firings lead to test irregularities?

Michelle Rhee knows how to get attention. Yesterday, USA Today published a huge expose on the "testing irregularities" at several schools in Washington, D.C., that made rapid improvements during Rhee's short and tumultuous reign as schools superintendent in that city. Specifically, USA Today found large numbers of "incorrect-to-correct" answer erasures, meaning that someone -- maybe it was the students, maybe it was someone else -- marked standardized test forms incorrectly, then erased the answers and marked them correctly.

How many erasures are we talking about?

Erasures are detected by the same electronic scanners that CTB/McGraw-Hill, D.C.'s testing company, uses to score the tests. When test-takers change answers, they erase penciled-in bubble marks that leave behind a smudge; the machines tally the erasures as well as the new answers for each student.

In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.

On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.

"This is an abnormal pattern," says Thomas Haladyna, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has studied testing for 20 years.

But when did it become criminal for a student to erase a wrong answer and mark a correct answer?

There can be innocent reasons for multiple erasures. A student can lose his place on the answer sheet, fill in answers on the wrong rows, then change them when he realizes his mistake. And, as McGraw-Hill said in a March 2009 report to D.C. officials, studies also show that test-takers change answers more often when they are encouraged to review their work. The same report emphasizes that educators "should not draw conclusions about cheating behavior" from the data alone.

Haladyna notes, however, that when entire classrooms at schools with statistically rare erasures show fast-rising test scores, that suggests someone might have "tampered with the answer sheets," perhaps after the tests were collected from students. Although not proof of cheating, such a case underscores the need for an investigation, he says.

Hmm. Why would anyone have cause to tamper with test sheets? Could bonuses for principals in the DC schools have anything to do with it? Bonuses worth thousands of dollars, offered by Rhee and her lieutenants for rapid gains on standardized tests?

Sorry; those who know aren't talking. Most of them evacuated after Rhee lost her job last November.

In April, state superintendent [Deborah] Gist left Washington to take a job as head of Rhode Island's state school system. Her successor, Kerri Briggs, then dropped the request for D.C. public schools to investigate its schools. Both Gist and Briggs, now director for education reform at the George W. Bush Institute in Texas, declined to comment.

But others are singing like canaries.

From the start, Rhee emphasized a need to raise scores, restore calm to chaotic schools and close those with lagging scores and small enrollments. She paid bonuses to principals and teachers who produced big gains on scores. She let go dozens of principals and fired at least 600 teachers. Others retired or quit.

Turnover was brisk. Richard Whitmire, author of The Bee Eater, a biography of Rhee, reported that Rhee hired 1,918 teachers during her three years in office –– about 45% of those on the payroll last October. Only 2,318 current teachers had been hired before Rhee took charge.

The pressure on principals was unrelenting, says Aona Jefferson, a former D.C. principal who is now president of the Council of School Officers, representing principals and other administrators. Every year, Jefferson says, Rhee met with each principal and asked what kind of test score gains he would post in the coming school year. Jefferson says principals told her that Rhee expected them to increase scores by 10 percentile points or more every year. "What do you do when your chancellor asks, 'How many points can you guarantee this year?' " Jefferson says. "How is a principal supposed to do that?"

Rhee churned through principals. The Washington Post reported that Rhee appointed 91 principals in her three years as chancellor, 39 of whom no longer held those jobs in August 2010. Some left on their own, either resigning or retiring; other principals, on one-year contracts, were let go for not producing quickly enough.

Union officials say the pressure for high test scores may have tempted educators to cheat.

"This is like an education Ponzi scam," says Nathan Saunders, head of the Washington Teachers' Union. "If your test scores improve, you make more money. If not, you get fired. That's incredibly dangerous."

Dana Goldstein, a columnist for the Daily Beast, took up the issue yesterday and explained why Saunders is right, that incentives for high test scores are dangerous.

In the social sciences, there is an oft-repeated maxim called Campbell’s Law, named after Donald Campbell, a psychologist who studied human creativity. Campbell’s Law states that incentives corrupt. In other words, the more punishments and rewards—such as merit pay—are associated with the results of any given test, the more likely it is that the test’s results will be rendered meaningless, either through outright cheating or through teaching to the test in a way that narrows the curriculum and renders real learning obsolete.

In the era of No Child Left Behind, Campbell’s Law has proved true again and again. When the federal government began threatening to restructure or shut-down schools that did not achieve across-the-board student “proficiency” on state reading and math exams, states responded by creating standardized tests that were easier and easier to pass. Alabama, for example, reported that 85 percent of its fourth-graders were proficient in reading in 2005, even though only 22 percent of the state’s students demonstrated proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard, no-stakes exam administered by the federal government.

Simultaneously, instances of outright cheating were rising nationwide. The USA Today investigation on the probable cheating in Washington, D.C. is just one article in a must-read series based on student achievement data culled from 24,000 public schools across the country. The paper found 1,610 instances in which test score gains from year to year exceeded three standard deviations—a jump greater than that of 99.7 percent of all test-takers annually in any given state, the threshold at which statisticians agree that test results may be suspect.

The good news is that Campbell’s Law does not mean we should give up on assessing students and holding school systems accountable for their academic success. Research shows that certain kinds of exams—those that require essay writing on broad themes, for example—enhance student learning of key concepts. We can also assess students by requiring them to give oral presentations, or by looking for growth in portfolios of their work over the course of a year. Effective teachers produce students who excel when held to these more sophisticated standards, which are difficult to fudge or cheat.

Of course, creating better testing systems will be expensive, and implementing them will demand significant expertise on the part of school administrators. But as the Obama administration and national education reformers—Michelle Rhee chief among them—ask states and school districts nationwide to tie teacher evaluation scores and pay to student performance, it is crucial that we measure student academic growth in nuanced ways that encourage deep learning, not in over-simplified ways that create perverse incentives to dumb-down the curriculum and cheat.

Ravitch: Pay-for-test-scores "never works"

When Diane Ravitch takes a position, she doesn't disappoint. In fact, she's a primary example of why lawmakers want badly to get rid of veteran educators: The longer you remain in your career, the more you learn, the more effective you can become, and the more quickly you can summon to mind the resources and references that support the work you do. Ravitch is like that -- a walking encyclopedia of research, studies, conclusions and findings -- and when she turns her focus to such a scheme as pay-for-test-scores, she brings 40 years' worth of homework to bear.

That's the topic of her current blog post: "Thoughts on the Failure of Merit Pay," and I strongly encourage readers to read her post at her website, because she hyperlinks many, many of the studies that she mentions there.

"It is curious that teachers vigorously oppose merit pay," she writes, "even though they are the ones who are supposed to reap the rewards. What do they know? They know that merit pay undermines collaboration and teamwork. They know that it corrupts the culture of the school."

But corporate reformers think they know best, so they continue to push for a reward system that will give bonuses for "effective" teachers (those whose students get higher test scores) and, thus, magically, make teaching attractive to the theoretical "best and brightest," those graduates of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford who would stay in teaching if only they could compete every year for an extra $5,000 or so.

Then, the data cascade: Ravitch uncorks history.

Merit pay has been tried again and again since the 1920s. Sometimes scores go up, sometimes they don't, but the programs never seem to make much difference and eventually disappear.

The most rigorous trial of merit pay was conducted recently in Nashville by the National Center on Performance Incentives. It offered an extraordinary bonus of $15,000 to teachers if they could get higher scores from their students. Over a three-year period, there was no difference between the scores obtained by the treatment group or the control group. The bonus didn't matter.

Roland Fryer of Harvard University just released his study of New York City's much-touted school-wide merit-pay program. Fryer says it made no difference in terms of student outcomes and actually depressed performance in some schools and for some groups of students.

So the range of effects from these schemes in the past has been, on one end, the bonus didn't matter because scores wouldn't increase anyway, to the other end, where student performance suffered.

Not a ringing endorsement of Governor Nikki Haley's and Superintendent Mick Zais's scheme to tie teacher salaries to test scores.

Yes, yes, I know: South Carolina will be different. Our state has always been different. What doesn't work for any other state, anywhere, will work here because we'll make it work by sheer force of will and because our lawmakers say so. Until, that is, it buckles under the weight of its own stupidity and fails, at which point it'll be blamed on other influences, like Yankee intervention or Northern agitators or lack of citizen commitment, or the fundamental inability of certain groups of people to learn. Institutionally, South Carolina has never been wrong.

Well, pay-for-test-scores has been proven wrong when it's been tried elsewhere, as Ravitch explains. And here's a reference that should tickle the ribs of the state's corporate elite:

Andrea Gabor wrote an opinion piece recently for Education Week describes what she learned from the work of W. Edwards Deming, the eminent business consultant. I learned a lot by reading her book The Man Who Discovered Quality, about Deming's philosophy. Chapter 9 summarizes Deming's strong opposition to merit ranking and merit pay. Bottom line: It is bad for corporations. It gets everyone thinking about what is good for himself or herself and leads to forgetting about the goals of the organization. It incentivizes short-term thinking and discourages long-term thinking.

And a love letter to the Libertarian free marketeers among us:

Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational explains why money is not as good a motivator as a sense of purpose. Ariely is an economist of human behavior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he has demonstrated again and again that people will work harder for idealistic reasons than for a promise of money. He warns of the danger of shifting education from "social norms" to "market norms." This is precisely what the corporate reformers want to do.

And on the opposite end of the academic spectrum, a note for the human behaviorists in the room:

And then there is Daniel Pink, who has written Drive and also created a delightful YouTube video, to reinforce the view that a sense of purpose, the desire to make a difference, is a better motivator than cash on the table.

Again, I highly recommend going to Ravitch's column for yourself and clicking through the links she posts there to read the source material.

THEN, just for kicks, why not send the link to this post to YOUR member of the Legislature? (A) It's an easy way to communicate your thoughts on pay-for-test-scores (B) without having to talk to him or her yourself and (C) with plenty of source material available to prove your point with simplicity and elegance.

If he or she isn't a reader and needs you to break down the point for them, tell them Diane Ravitch says:

Merit pay is the idea that never works and never dies.

LWV addresses controversial pay-for-test-scores scheme

The Charleston League of Women Voters held a forum last week on the pay-for-test-scores scheme that Governor Nikki Haley and Superintendent Mick Zais are pushing through the legislature.

One educator on Tuesday's panel says the bill won't sit well with many teachers and principals.

"There are so many variables impacting the performance of students," stated Dr. Fran Welch, the dean at the College of Charleston's School of Education and a former public school educator.

Welch says the proposed bill raises a lot of issues.

"For many students, there's more than one teacher impacting their learning. How do you determine what the impact is of one teacher versus another teacher?" questioned Welch.

According to Zais, the state's best teachers should be paid the most. However, Welch says the bill comes with multiple flaws.

"If you're focused just exclusively on the bottom line of a test score, how much time can you engage student in things that will them to be better citizens?" stated Welch.

The bill, now winding through the Senate, includes a provision to allow teachers input through a committee. But the committee's function is questionable, as Zais has made it clear through spokesmen that he was elected to make such decisions and won't be hamstrung by the input of a teacher committee.

At least the League of Women Voters is asking questions about the controversial proposal -- and they're asking a lot of the right questions.

Summit shows others, elsewhere, may be doing the right things

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post published a great column by Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University at her blog today on the topic of last week's international education in New York City.

South Carolinians may recall that Darling-Hammond, who served as President Barack Obama's education advisor through the 2008 presidential campaign, was a witness for the plaintiffs in Abbeville v. South Carolina, the case questioning South Carolina's commitment to funding public education.

Darling-Hammond's credentials and experience are impeccable, which makes it heartwarming to read her column in today's Post:

The first ever International Summit on Teaching, convened last week in New York City, showed perhaps more clearly than ever that the United States has been pursuing an approach to teaching almost diametrically opposed to that pursued by the highest-achieving nations.

In a statement rarely heard these days in the United States, the Finnish Minister of Education launched the first session of last week’s with the words: “We are very proud of our teachers.” Her statement was so appreciative of teachers’ knowledge, skills, and commitment that one of the U.S. participants later confessed that he thought she was the teacher union president, who, it turned out, was sitting beside her agreeing with her account of their jointly-constructed profession.

"Jointly-constructed," meaning that organized educators were welcomed and respected partners in decision-making about the quality and delivery of public education in Finland. What would it take for South Carolina's lawmakers to welcome and respect collaboration with South Carolina's professional educators in decision-making here -- and I'm not referring to ga-ga (go along, get along), milksop efforts mounted for show, like the proposed teacher committee to advise Superintendent Mick Zais on his pay-for-test-scores plan.

Teachers advising Zais on pay-for-test-scores is like chickens advising Colonel Sanders on the correct temperature and cooking time to achieve the best crunch on KFC's extra-crispy. It is not a win-win situation for any chicken.

Darling-Hammond gleaned several other eye-opening points from the summit, finding it "the first time that the growing de-professionalization of teaching in America was recognized as out of step with the strategies pursued by the world’s educational leaders."

Evidence presented at the summit showed that, with dwindling supports, most teachers in the United States must go into debt in order to prepare for an occupation that pays them, on average, 60% of the salaries earned by other college graduates. Those who work in poor districts will not only earn less than their colleagues in wealthy schools, but they will pay for many of their students’ books and supplies themselves.

And with states’ willingness to lower standards rather than raise salaries for the teachers of the poor, a growing number of recruits enter with little prior training, trying to learn on-the-job with the uneven mentoring provided by cash-strapped districts. It is no wonder that a third of U.S. beginners leave within the first five years, and those with the least training leave at more than twice the rate of those who are well-prepared.

Those who stay are likely to work in egg-crate classrooms with few opportunities to collaborate with one another. In many districts, they will have little more than “drive-by” workshops for professional development, and – if they can find good learning opportunities, they will pay for most of it out of their own pockets.

Depending on the surveys you read, teachers contribute upwards of $400 annually from their own pockets for school supplies.

I hear so-called taxpayer advocates argue constantly that any dollar taken by the government out of taxpayers' pockets is a tax, regardless of what it's called. And, say those advocates, average taxpayers are taxed too much.

So if South Carolina's educators, who are public employees in a right-to-work-for-less state and therefore earn less than education professionals in most other states, pay upwards of $400 annually for school supplies for their classrooms, is that not -- using the same taxpayer-advocates' rhetoric -- a tax on educators? After all, educators are taxpayers, too.

If that's the case, then I suggest we call it what it is, a Teacher Tax.

I'd go one step further. Since South Carolina's educators aren't paid near the national average, I suggest that we clearly identify what the national average is. Each teacher should subtract his or her salary from that average, add to the difference the dollar amount that reflects out-of-pocket expenses for their own classroom, and call that total their Teacher Tax for a given year -- their economic penalty for being a professional educator in South Carolina.

Darling-Hammond makes some salient observations about the quality of teacher preparation, too:

Meanwhile, some policymakers argue that we should eliminate requirements for teacher training, stop paying teachers for gaining more education, let anyone enter teaching, and fire those later who fail to raise student test scores. And efforts like those in Wisconsin to eliminate collective bargaining create the prospect that salaries and working conditions will sink even lower, making teaching an unattractive career for anyone with other professional options.

The contrasts to the American attitude toward teachers and teaching could not have been more stark. Officials from countries like Finland and Singapore described how they have built a high-performing teaching profession by enabling all of their teachers to enter high-quality preparation programs, generally at the masters’ degree level, where they receive a salary while they prepare. There they learn research-based teaching strategies and train with experts in model schools attached to their universities. They enter a well-paid profession – in Singapore earning as much as beginning doctors -- where they are supported by mentor teachers and have 15 or more hours a week to work and learn together – engaging in shared planning, action research, lesson study, and observations in each other’s classrooms. And they work in schools that are equitably funded and well-resourced with the latest technology and materials.

In Singapore, based on their talents and interests, many teachers are encouraged to pursue career ladders to become master teachers, curriculum specialists, and principals, expanding their opportunities and their earnings with still more training paid for by the government. Teacher union members in these countries talked about how they work closely with their governments to further enrich teachers’ and school leaders’ learning opportunities and to strengthen their skills.

In South Carolina, our chief education officer recommends that we pay teachers based on their students' scores on standardized tests, plus the subjective evaluations of an administrator, not credentials plus years of experience.

And, rather than unite behind an effort to kill that proposal in its tracks, some teacher groups play the roaster to ol' Colonel Sanders and ask to be included in the discussion about how we'd like to be plucked, battered and fried.

The answer, for the jackpot, is: "Because lawmakers say it will cost more than we choose to afford."

And the correct question, Alex, is: "Why don't we drag out the same set of time-tested principles that committees and commissions draft time after time when asked how to improve the quality of public schools in South Carolina, and adopt them?"

In these summit discussions, there was no teacher-bashing, no discussion of removing collective bargaining rights, no proposals for reducing preparation for teaching, no discussion of closing schools or firing bad teachers, and no proposals for ranking teachers based on their students’ test scores. The Singaporean Minister explicitly noted that his country’s well-developed teacher evaluation system does not “digitally rank or calibrate teachers,” and focuses instead on how well teachers develop the whole child and contribute to each others’ efforts and to the welfare of the whole school.

Perhaps most stunning was the detailed statement of the Chinese Minister of Education who described how – in the poor states which lag behind the star provinces of Hong Kong and Shanghai – billions of yuen are being spent on a fast-paced plan to improve millions of teachers’ preparation and professional development, salaries, working conditions and living conditions (including building special teachers’ housing). The initial efforts to improve teachers’ knowledge and skills and stem attrition are being rapidly scaled up as their success is proved.

It is, of course, offensive to South Carolinian culture to be shown in black-and-white letters and numbers how other people, elsewhere, attempt to accomplish the same goals we claim to pursue, except that other people, elsewhere, pour major resources into appropriate strategies and actually achieve goals -- while our leaders moan and groan that education costs more and more, and delivers less and less, and educators don't do what they're told, and if we only had vouchers and tuition tax credits, we would achieve exactly the same results as other people, elsewhere.

(Particularly in recent decades, our attempts at so-called education reform have been just as education researcher Richard Kahlenburg said: "Ninety-five percent of education reform is about trying to make separate schools for rich and poor work, but there is very little evidence that you can have success when you pack all the low-income students into one particular school.")

After all, ours is the state that originated the concept of nullification -- declaring that we alone could veto any federal law we didn't like -- and ours is the state that seceded from America when America cast a dim view on slavery and conspired to elect Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. We don't take kindly to being shown that good ideas can come from other people, elsewhere, and that not all of our ideas in South Carolina are particularly good ones.

Can you imagine what would happen if South Carolina took a page from China's playbook and spent billions "on a fast-paced plan to improve millions of teachers’ preparation and professional development, salaries, working conditions and living conditions (including building special teachers’ housing)"? I can imagine it. Graduation rates might improve. And then the sky would fall.

Clearly, another first is called for if we are ever to regain our educational standing in the world: A first step toward finally taking teaching seriously in America. Will our leaders be willing to take that step? Or will we devolve into a third class power because we have neglected our most important resource for creating a first-class system of education?

Rights for South Carolina's workers too costly to profit margins

The same issue of Columbia's Free Times that included the great letter from Joanne Hafter featured an article by Al Dozier on the "tough times" facing unions in our state.

It called to mind what my civics teacher told us was the fundamental definition of a labor union: "Working people working with other working people to achieve mutual goals and improve the lives of all working people and their communities." He was a great civics teacher, one of the best.

Dozier, in his article, recounts the highlights of a recent meeting of union and professional association leaders in Irmo. Hoyt Wheeler, a USC instructor, told the group that "unions historically have provided important access to justice for workers by providing a collective voice that otherwise might not be heard. But they are unpopular in South Carolina, with a membership of only about 4.6 percent of the workforce, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2010 figures."

I wonder why that is. But I suppose I don't have far to wonder; South Carolina has always had a love affair with cheap (or free) labor. The English Barbadians who climbed off the boat at Charles Towne in 1670 had their chests carried off the boat behind them by slaves. When slavery was abolished, the same wealthy and increasingly industrialist class refused to pay wages to free blacks and turned to poor whites to supply the cheap labor, in sharecropping and factory work. Mill villages with mill churches and mill stores, and mill scrip to pay mill wages, were just an extension of the old plantation system.

We even exploited children -- kept them ignorant, stunted them with poor diets, paid them a pittance and made them part of the formula for ramshackle rental housing so it was necessary for them to work rather than attend school, assuming a school existed close enough to attend.

Let working people work with other working people to organize themselves, improve themselves, empower themselves and help themselves as a class into better economic conditions? Never: Do that, and cheap labor won't be as cheap. Progress is too costly. Better for the profit margin to keep people ignorant and disorganized.

Anyway, Dozier's article mentions the pay-for-test-scores scheme that Superintendent Mick Zais is foisting on South Carolina's teachers, and it was refreshing to hear that someone is standing up and saying no to Zais's dodge.

His pay-for-performance proposal, a measure designed to base teacher salaries on the success of their students, is opposed by the South Carolina Education Association.

Panelist Jackie Hicks, president of The SCEA, said making teacher pay dependent on student success has already been proven ineffective because so many other circumstances come into play.

“We do not support that,” Hicks said. “But an awful lot of people do and we will hear a lot of conversations on that.”

Hicks helped lead the March 12 rally at the State House to protest legislators’ plans to cut $700 million from the state budget by making severe reductions to Medicaid and education programs.

The SCEA also opposes the use of vouchers to pay for private education, a policy
advocated by many Republican leaders in the state.

Hurray, President Hicks. Teachers in South Carolina need a champion, someone not afraid to fight for them. Timidity, niceness and ga-ga (go along, get along) leadership have gotten us precisely where we are, and it's going to take leadership with a fighting spirit and stamina to get us out of the morass.

The discussion drew comments that educators should speak with a more unified voice on state issues and turn out in larger numbers at the polls.

Hicks replied that SCEA members did have a good turnout, but more statewide efforts need to be made by others in the education community.

Most teachers are performing well in spite of difficult circumstances, she said.

“I’m sick and tired of hearing how bad our teachers are. We are doing a fine job in South Carolina, considering what we are dealing with.”

Yes, yes and yes. Teachers -- educators at every level, really -- have to know that the profession is larger than themselves, that it was built on the backs of educators with lesser resources and personal means, and that present-day educators have a moral obligation to consider the profession that they will leave to the next generation of educators, and the generations thereafter.

I know too many educators personally who have refused to participate. I know one who was a fantastic teacher, Ms. B, who used that as her reason for not stepping up and helping to speak out when administrators abused others: I'm a good teacher, she said, as if it nothing bad would happen to good teachers. But, like nearly everyone else, she had a bad year, too, stemming from matters with a teenage daughter at home, and suddenly she was under attack, too. For some of our colleagues, it was a bitter pill to swallow, to defend Ms. B when she had been plainly apathetic about the same injustices to others for some years. In the end, she lost a great deal of respect, lost a leadership role and only worked for another few years before taking early retirement.

Other excuses are just as maddening. "My husband doesn't want me to get involved" is one. "I'm too busy" is another, when everyone employed by a school district is, by definition, too busy. And "I can't afford it" is the one that galls me the most, knowing that for generations, teachers who earned far less -- only a few thousand dollars a year in the 1950s, 1960s, etc -- and who raised larger families in those times, still banded together and made their contributions, often with the urging and blessings of their spouses who understood the importance of working and fighting together for progress. For these educators, the profession and its impact on their communities and their state was far more important than one's own career.

Anyway, conversation in Irmo ultimately turned to Governor Nikki Haley and her anti-worker bent, Dozier writes.

There is anti-union sentiment everywhere, and it is very evident in the administration of newly elected Gov. Nikki Haley. Haley stirred up a hornet’s nest with comments she made upon appointing Catherine Templeton as head of the department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation.

“We’re going to fight the unions, and I needed a partner to help me do it,” Haley said of Templeton, a Charleston lawyer who has experience in legal battles with unions.

Because working people in South Carolina, working with other working people in South Carolina to achieve mutual goals and improve the lives of all working people and their communities in South Carolina, are far too great a danger for a governor of South Carolina and her corporate campaign contributors. Such liberty is too costly to the profit margin.

Why must educators be professionally, politically organized?

"Union" is a bad, bad word here, unless we're talking about Union County and its county seat, Union, so named because abolitionist Quakers met with regional clergymen at the old Union Church. Governor Nikki Haley picked her new Secretary of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, Catherine Templeton, precisely because she had "taken on unions," presumably while training under industrial titan Roger Milliken in Spartanburg. Templeton's law-firm biography lists "union avoidance" as a specialty.

But it was hard not to laugh at Nancy Flanagan's blog post in yesterday's Education Week online edition, and her perspective on South Carolina's comic fear of unionism. (What's not comic but importantly historic is South Carolina's violent and self-defeating reaction to people wanting to organize themselves in defense of their dignity, their economic freedom and their civil rights, as in the cases of the Honea Path Massacre of 1934 and the closing of the Darlington Manufacturing Company in 1956. Google away.) Flanagan warns you, it's a true story from 1993.

It's 1993, and the United States Department of Education is hosting the first of a series of eight National Teacher Forums (a wonderful initiative that disappeared when the Bush administration moved in). As Michigan Teacher of the Year, I am in D.C. representing my state, watching a presentation by four South Carolina state Teachers of the Year on how to create a statewide teacher forum. Three of the four SC TOYs--all earnest, articulate women--are wearing pink suits.

The SC teachers describe the essentials of creating a state forum: Secure outside funding from a business that supports education. Invite honored district TOYs to a day-long event with "business trappings"-- a hotel meeting room, meals and mileage provided, professional attire required. End up with an advocacy product--a pamphlet, white paper or videotape. This, evidently, was the formula for how to get the voices of the most accomplished teachers to the proverbial table, to "dialogue with key leaders and policy-makers" about educational issues.

I am sitting next to the Wisconsin Teacher of the Year. I murmur, "Wonder what their union thinks about the Teacher Forum?" So he asks the presenters.

The pink-suit teachers look at each other, shrugging. "The Association, you mean? I think some of our Forum teachers actually do belong to the association. You know, to get the insurance." But none of the presenters did. Their husbands already had insurance plans.

My take-away from this experience: Some teachers work in a parallel universe, where access to control over their own work and well-being is determined through winning over a succession of principals--a dicey business. If they're deemed outstanding instructors, they get to put on a pink suit and meet in a hotel once a year to "develop leadership" and "provide a voice" on the critical issues that shape their daily practice.

This model of teacher-as-compliant-servant (probably wearing high heels) resonates in the business community, where a malleable, dependable, economical workforce is always desirable. And if their husbands' employment provides benefits, so much the better. Convenient and cost-effective.

This is not the path to building a genuinely professional cadre of highly skilled teachers, however--or to invest in the creative human capital that we need to retrofit our aging approach to public education in America. Teachers need an active, ongoing presence in policy creation. Not a token "seat at the table" where their voice can be co-opted, but real influence over what matters most: classroom teaching.

Flanagan is sweet not to name the ladies who represented the rest of us at this event in Washington.

But she slices us to the quick on the rest, doesn't she? We educators are taught that organizing is ugly -- especially when unions are involved -- and dirty, and its results are such that we can't begin to calculate, so why don't we just stick to doing what we're told? And we do, so many of us, do just that: We fear and obey our principals, who fear and obey their superintendents, who fear and obey their school board members, who fear and obey the loudest and wealthiest parents, who fear and obey their children, who fear and obey hardly anyone. Many of our colleagues have adopted a ga-ga attitude: go along, get along.

Sadly, what that means is that far too many of our really great colleagues, particularly when issues like pay-for-test-scores are being discussed at the State House -- and NOT being discussed at the schoolhouse -- keep their heads down, keep quiet, avoid the spotlight, color inside the lines, make no waves, question no decisions, and hope to get through the next semester/year/two years or more without incident, and maybe make it all the way to retirement eligibility safely and then get out. Does this sound familiar to you?

In her post, Flanagan doesn't say whether or not she has faced similar circumstances in her own education career. She does say this:

If I don't speak up, I have only myself to blame.

Occasionally, I will hear teachers lament that labor tactics--demanding, marching, picketing, adversarial relationships with the public education hierarchy--are "unprofessional." Better we should meet over a chef salad and have a nice, civilized conversation. Perhaps the union label should be replaced by "guild" as we strive for more professional credibility. And so on.

I'm thinking that the Wisconsin Experience--the union politely conceding all the economic bargaining chips, and still getting shafted in a naked, thoroughly undemocratic, demoralizing power grab--might serve as lesson to those who believe that activist teachers are unprofessional. We organize, because without such allied strength, we have even less control over difficult work for which we must accept accountability.

There's more to her post, so read the full text here.

If you're feeling especially subversive today, forward the link to this post to your colleagues. Or print it and post it on the bulletin board in your staff workroom. Or send me a quick note describing the state of affairs where you work. The opposite of suffering in silence is speaking up.

Charleston LWV takes on pay-for-test-scores Tuesday

Charleston has a long, storied history in public education; the first attempt at public education in the state -- funded by local businessmen, naturally, rather than state appropriations -- occurred there and offered instruction to both black and white pupils. Then this war came along and...

But I digress: Word comes from Charleston today that the local League of Women Voters is taking the bull by the horns and asking tough questions about the Haley-Zais plan to pay teachers according to their students' test scores. It sounds like a great place for Charleston County's teachers to spend their Tuesday evening, hearing what state leaders are proposing to do to them, and being heard in return.

Details:

A forum about measuring teacher performance and linking pay to performance will be presented Tuesday by the Charleston League of Women Voters.

The panel discussion, 'Getting the Best Teachers in our Classrooms: A Conversation on Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness' will be 6-8 p.m. at North Charleston City Hall.

Panel members are Dr. Janice Poda, former South Carolina education deputy superintendent and now strategic initiative director for Education Workforce at the Council of Chief State School Officers in Washington, D.C.; Dr. Fran Welch, dean of the College of Charleston's School of Education, Health and Human Performance; Judy Hammett, executive director of Leadership Development with the Berkeley County School District; and Lucy Beckham, principal of Wando High School and the 2010 MetLife/National Association of Secondary School Principals' National Secondary Principal of the Year.

The forum and reception are free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be offered from 5:30 to 6 p.m. in the Buist Room. For more information, call 766-5416.