Children in the Golden State will get a better education when teacher quality becomes a priority

In perhaps the most in-depth study on the subject to date, three Ivy League economists studied how much the quality of individual teachers matters to their students over the long term. The paper, by Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia, tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years, and using a value added approach, found that teachers who help students raise their standardized test scores have a lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates, greater college matriculation and higher adult earnings. (The authors of the study define “value added” as the average test-score gain for a teacher’s students “…adjusted for differences across classrooms in student characteristics such as prior scores.”)

The only caveat from the authors is that using test scores in teachers’ evaluations could lead to “teaching to the test or cheating.” Nothing new here. Some people, when involved in any kind of competition, will try to gain unfair advantage or cheat outright. Typically, it’s a small part of the population and those who do should lose their jobs and face criminal charges.

The lesson is clear: test scores can give us a great deal of information about who the really good teachers are. But California Governor Jerry Brown, unfazed by the blockbuster study, actually called for less testing in his recent State of the State address.

No, Governor. In fact, we need more testing. In California, English and math are tested yearly starting in second grade. But history and science are tested only every few years. Tests should be given in the four core areas every year. As a former American history teacher, I could never figure out why there was no 6th or 7th grade history test. Why wait for grade 8 and throw in a few questions from the 6th and 7th grade curriculum? Never made any sense to me.

Senior Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Lance Izumi wrote in the Orange County Register last week,

“Brown’s education agenda contains a mishmash of proposals, some of which are steps backward and some that are mildly positive. On the clearly negative end, the governor, who has never been a fan of student testing, wants to reduce the number of tests and increase so-called ‘qualitative assessments.’ Trouble is, the reason tests are important is because they offer objective quantifiable data to measure student progress and the effect of teachers and schools on learning.”

While Jerry Brown’s call for less testing is wrongheaded, it isn’t surprising. Testing as a tool of assessing student progress has been around since Day 1, but using student test scores as a measure of teacher effectiveness has caused a backlash in some quarters. There is subset of teachers who laments that there is “more to teaching than just test scores.” And of course they are right, to a point, but they take their case to an extreme and dismiss testing completely. The ringleaders of the anti-testing zealots are the teachers unions, and their agenda has nothing to do with kids or their education. The California Teachers Association, by far the biggest political spender in the state, is about power and ensuring that the disastrous status quo is not disturbed.

Actually, teachers unions operate under the early 20th Century industrial mentality which stipulates that everyone can stick a widget on a car equally as well. Therefore, all widget stickers are equally good and all widget stickers should make the same amount of money. Substitute education for widget, teachers for widget stickers and students for cars, and you fully understand the teachers union model. Once this antiquated notion is truly grasped, the unions may find themselves in trouble, forced to acknowledge that some teachers are better than others, and that some are so bad that they shouldn’t be in the classroom at all. Once that is accepted as truth, better teachers might demand to be paid more than mediocre ones. And the good ones may not be so compliant if they’re the ones who get laid off instead of an inferior teacher who has been on the job longer. Thus, the whole concept of teachers as interchangeable industrial workers starts to unravel. And what could be worse for a group whose main lot in life is to keep acquiring buckets of money and enormous power being exposed as pushing a model that never should have been applied to the teaching profession in the first place?

The good news is that much of the rest of the country is catching on. Teacher quality has become a major topic of discussion with educators, the media and politicians of late. From Oklahoma to New York to Louisiana to New Jersey, states are getting serious about teacher evaluation, all using the results of standardized test scores as a significant part of the equation.

Good teachers matter a lot, and bad teachers can ruin a child’s future. Test scores are very helpful in identifying those teachers and value added methods are good ways to analyze test scores. But California, essentially governed by CTA, their bought-and-paid-for legislature and their man in the governor’s mansion will be the last state to do anything meaningful in this area. That means that one-tenth of the country’s children will continue to be victimized by a cartel that cares a lot about money and power and not a whit about them.
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Larry Sand began his teaching career in New York in 1971. Since 1984, he has taught elementary school as well as English, math, history and ESL in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he also served as a Title 1 Coordinator. Retired in 2009, he is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues – information teachers will often not get from their school districts or unions.

“CTEN” was formed in 2006 because a wide range of information from the more global concerns of education policy, education leadership, and education reform, to information having a more personal application, such as professional liability insurance, options of relationships to teachers’ unions, and the effect of unionism on teacher pay, comes to teachers from entities that have a specific agenda. Sand’s comments and op-eds have appeared in City Journal, Associated Press, Newsweek, Townhall Magazine, Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and other publications. This past May, after his weekly blog proved to be very popular, he began writing a monthly article for City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s policy publication. He has appeared on numerous broadcast news programs and talk radio shows in Southern California and nationally.

Sand has participated in panel discussions and events focusing on education reform efforts and the impact of teachers’ unions on public education. In March 2010, Sand participated in a debate hosted by the non-profit Intelligence Squared, an organization that regularly hosts Oxford-style debates, which was nationally broadcast on Bloomberg TV and NPR, as well as covered by Newsweek. Sand and his teammates – Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution and former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, opposed the proposition – Don’t Blame Teachers Unions For Our Failing Schools. The pro-union team included Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. In August 2010, he was on a panel at the Where’s the Outrage? Conference in San Francisco, where he spoke about how charter school operators can best deal with teachers’ unions. This past January he was on panels in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Mateo in support of National School Choice week. Additionally, CTEN has hosted two informational events this year – one addressing the secret agenda that is prevalent in many schools these days and the other concerning itself with California’s new Parent Trigger law. The latter event was covered by both the English and Spanish language press.

Sand has also worked with other organizations to present accurate information about the relationship between teachers and their unions, most recently assisting in the production of a video for the Center for Union Facts in which a group of teachers speak truthfully about the teachers’ unions. At this time, he is conferring with and being an advisor to education policy experts who are crafting major education reform legislation.

CTEN maintains an active and strong new media presence, reaching out to teachers and those interested in education reform across the USA, and around the world, with its popular Facebook page, whose members include teachers, writers, think tankers, and political activists. Since 2006, CTEN has experienced dramatic growth.

“Gov. Bobby Jindal took aim at one of the state’s largest teachers unions today for failing to take action against its executive director, one week after his controversial comments about school choice…

Michael Walker-Jones, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Educators, was quoted … as saying some low-income parents are not qualified to decide where their children should go to school, a comment the union later claimed was taken out of context. But in his address today to more than 800 business and political leaders at the 2012 Louisiana Education Summit, Jindal said the comments show a top-down, arrogant mentality.

‘I am amazed he is still representing the organization a week later,’ Jindal says. ‘I think the union should distance themselves from him. … These remarks reveal contempt for parenting.’…”

See the rest at: Business Report.

Busting LAUSD and every other school district in the state for negligence should help kids, but it’s anyone’s guess as to when. In the meantime, giving families more educational options would be a great help, but don’t hold your breath, California.

With National School Choice Week underway, we see many positive things happening across the country. In states like New Jersey and Louisiana, governors are taking the lead in proposing ways to break the devastating monopoly that government run schools – their educrat leaders, corrupt and/or inept school boards and the powerful teachers unions — have held for far too long.

As an example of Big Education gone bad, I write in City Journal about a crime that has been perpetrated on the children of California for 40 years and the lawsuit that addresses it:

For nearly 40 years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has broken the law—and nobody seemed to notice. Now a group of parents and students are taking the district to court. On November 1, a half-dozen anonymous families working with EdVoice, a reform advocacy group in Sacramento, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against the LAUSD, district superintendent John Deasy, and United Teachers Los Angeles. The lawsuit in essence accuses the district and the union of a gross dereliction of duty. According to the parents’ complaint, the district and the union have violated the children’s “fundamental right to basic educational equality and opportunity” by failing to comply with a section of the California Education Code known as the Stull Act. Under the 1971 law, a school district must include student achievement as part of a teacher’s evaluation. Los Angeles Unified has never done so: the teachers union wouldn’t allow it. To continue reading “A 40-Year Shame,” go to http://www.city-journal.org/2012/cjc0119ls.html

However the above case is decided, there will undoubtedly be lawsuits, union pushback, teacher dissatisfaction and who-knows-what-else as the various special interests scramble to do what is best for themselves. And as always, children’s needs are left out of the equation.

One way to transcend big government-union school domination would be to develop a system of universal school choice, including vouchers and tax credits. To that end, Alan Bonsteel and I passionately make the case for choice in an op-ed published in the Los Angeles Daily News this past Friday.

As we honor National School Choice week beginning Sunday, one fact stands out: 2012 marks the year when there can be no turning back in school choice reforms.

Last July, The Wall Street Journal dubbed 2011 “The Year of School Choice” because of legislation that had been passed all over our nation. For example, North Carolina and Tennessee eliminated caps on charter schools. Maine passed its first charter school law. Twelve states either adopted new voucher programs or expanded existing ones. After first turning its back on the popular D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, Congress reconstituted funding for it. To continue reading “School Choice Reforms are More Vital Than Ever,” go to http://www.dailynews.com/opinions/ci_19779002

While it would undoubtedly be a boon to education and save taxpayers money, school choice at this time is an extremely tough political sell in the Golden State. The entrenched special interests in California are in control and to make the needed changes will entail a long, bloody struggle. As such, taxpayers and parents must take the lead and force change via the initiative process.

In a future post, I will examine what options families in California do have if they want to remove their children from failing schools.
______
Larry Sand began his teaching career in New York in 1971. Since 1984, he has taught elementary school as well as English, math, history and ESL in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he also served as a Title 1 Coordinator. Retired in 2009, he is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues – information teachers will often not get from their school districts or unions.

“CTEN” was formed in 2006 because a wide range of information from the more global concerns of education policy, education leadership, and education reform, to information having a more personal application, such as professional liability insurance, options of relationships to teachers’ unions, and the effect of unionism on teacher pay, comes to teachers from entities that have a specific agenda. Sand’s comments and op-eds have appeared in City Journal, Associated Press, Newsweek, Townhall Magazine, Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and other publications. This past May, after his weekly blog proved to be very popular, he began writing a monthly article for City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s policy publication. He has appeared on numerous broadcast news programs and talk radio shows in Southern California and nationally.

Sand has participated in panel discussions and events focusing on education reform efforts and the impact of teachers’ unions on public education. In March 2010, Sand participated in a debate hosted by the non-profit Intelligence Squared, an organization that regularly hosts Oxford-style debates, which was nationally broadcast on Bloomberg TV and NPR, as well as covered by Newsweek. Sand and his teammates – Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution and former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, opposed the proposition – Don’t Blame Teachers Unions For Our Failing Schools. The pro-union team included Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. In August 2010, he was on a panel at the Where’s the Outrage? Conference in San Francisco, where he spoke about how charter school operators can best deal with teachers’ unions. This past January he was on panels in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Mateo in support of National School Choice week. Additionally, CTEN has hosted two informational events this year – one addressing the secret agenda that is prevalent in many schools these days and the other concerning itself with California’s new Parent Trigger law. The latter event was covered by both the English and Spanish language press.

Sand has also worked with other organizations to present accurate information about the relationship between teachers and their unions, most recently assisting in the production of a video for the Center for Union Facts in which a group of teachers speak truthfully about the teachers’ unions. At this time, he is conferring with and being an advisor to education policy experts who are crafting major education reform legislation.

CTEN maintains an active and strong new media presence, reaching out to teachers and those interested in education reform across the USA, and around the world, with its popular Facebook page, whose members include teachers, writers, think tankers, and political activists. Since 2006, CTEN has experienced dramatic growth.

Once again Indiana Democrats are playing the fleebagger game. Because they don’t have enough votes in the Indiana Statehouse, Hoosier Democrats are abandoning their rightful duties and fleeing the Capitol over Indiana’s right-to-work bill currently under consideration in Indianapolis.

Indiana Senate Bill 269 and House Bill 1001 would make it illegal to require workers in Indiana to join a union as a condition of being allowed to have a job. Allowing workers a choice seems like an inherently American idea, doesn’t it?

After all, how could anyone tell you that you must belong to a union or you’re not allowed to have your job? That sort of forced association seems so contrary to the American character. But forcing people to join unions just so that they can have a job is precisely what Indiana Democrats are fighting to protect.

Now, Republicans control the Indiana Senate by a 37 to 13 margin and the House 60 to 40, so the Democrats don’t have the power to rule with impunity over their pet issues. So, instead of understanding that the bulk of the people voted for the GOP agenda and doing what they can with what they have, Indiana Democrats have decided to run away.

House Speaker Brian Bosma (R, Indianapolis) warned Democrats that if they don’t come back to do the jobs for which they were elected, they will be charged a $1,000-per-day fine.

Brian Simka of Media Trackers notes that Indy Dems are even trying a ploy that goes against Indiana law in a desperate attempt to beat back the new rules that would allow workers to choose if they want to join a union or not.

“On Tuesday,” Simka says, “[Democrats] said the reason for their afternoon walkout was to protest Republican opposition to an amendment they would offer to place right-to-work legislation to a statewide referendum vote.”

So, what’s the big deal with that? Well, Indiana has no “referendum” process. The only thing that comes close to a referendum that would go before the voters in Indiana is a constitutional amendment. No common legislation has ever been put before voters as a referendum in the Hoosier state.

“There is simply no constitutional provision requiring or even allowing a referendum to take place. Such extra-constitutional legislating does not appear to bother House Democrats who, led by Minority Leader Pat Bauer, have consistently resorted to walkouts as a means of blocking legislative business,” Simka said.

So Indiana Democrats are at it again, violating President Obama’s most cherished axiom: “I won.” In Indiana, Republicans won, just as Obama said he won and that win meant he should be allowed to do whatever he wants to do. But Democrats in Indiana aren’t taking a cue from their president because, once again, they are running away from their jobs, leaving their duties unattended, and refusing to stand for their principles in front of Hoosiers.

]]> http://theunionlabelblog.com/2012/01/20/indiana-democrats-fleebagging-again-abandoning-their-jobs/feed/ 2 http://theunionlabelblog.com/2012/01/15/muskegon-health-care-workers-get-out-of-seiu/ http://theunionlabelblog.com/2012/01/15/muskegon-health-care-workers-get-out-of-seiu/#comments Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:00:11 +0000 Warner Todd Huston http://unions.patriotactionnetwork.com/?p=3748 -By Jack Spencer

Employees at the Mercy Health Partners Hackley Campus in Muskegon recently voted themselves out of the Service Employees International Union by a 65-9 margin. Three members voted for nonunion status.

The specific branch of the SEIU involved is Healthcare Michigan. The vote was taken last week. The employee group will now transition over to the National Union of Healthcare Workers.

The loss of the Hackley employees, coupled with the loss of the employees at the Luther Manor skilled nursing facility in Saginaw in a September election, means SEIU Healthcare Michigan is even more dependent on dues from a “forced unionization” of home healthcare workers. That forced unionization took place out of the view of public scrutiny under Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

Meanwhile, the Hackley workers said they were glad to be rid of the SEIU…

Read the rest at www.michigancapitolconfidential.com

Remember back in the days of the debate over Obamacare when unions were the biggest voices screaming in support of the legislation? Many labor union bosses said that nationalized healthcare was exactly what they wanted. Further they said it was what was good for the country. Yet now we learn that Obama has given waivers to some 550,000 union members so that they don;t have to suffer under Obamacare.

Paul Connor reports that a classic Friday evening document dump from the White House shows that unions employing up to 543,812 members have received waivers fro the Obama administration.

Fridays are often the one day of the week when government agencies satisfy transparency rules and release documents that show what they’ve been up to. They release them on Friday in the early evening because they understand that reporters are already headed home for the weekend and TV news departments have already programed their evening newscasts. These agencies also understand that news agencies don’t often cover heavy news on weekends. Further, by the time Monday rolls around the document will be “old news” and many of them will simply escape attention.

But all these waivers really do make one ask a central question. If Obamacare is so great, why all the waivers? Why any waivers? More specifically, if Obamacare is such a well-accepted panacea for all that ails us, why are the unions who pushed so hard for Obamacare trying to get out from under it all?

It’s yet one more example of left-wingers making rules for the rest of us that they don’t want to suffer under themselves and then getting the politicians they bought and paid for to make sure that everyone but they have to suffer under those rules.

Rules are for you people, not liberals.