AIPCS is a non-unionized charter school that did not participate in the strike and decided to educate its students instead. As a result, AIPCS staff and students started their school day with spray-painted graffiti that said “strike”, gates that had been glued shut, and littered leaflets that said “Chinese Students + High Stakes Tests = High API.” Regarding the leaflets, all students of all ethnic groups perform well at AIPCS. Note that last year, the science scores for black students were higher than those of Asian students.

A man wearing a bright green shirt (the color worn by the striking OEA teachers) was spotted by the school in the early morning by a nearby resident who scared him off.

Here’s a description of the incident from Oakbook:

“Teachers at American Indian Public Charter School in the Laurel District arrived to work Thursday morning to find that someone had spray painted the word ‘strike’ on the school’s sign and on the pavement in front of the school. Someone had also filled the school’s padlocks with glue, and littered the campus with leaflets bearing the equation: ‘Chinese Students + High Stakes Tests = High API.’

“Sopath Mey, the middle school’s principal, said that the disruption to the school’s morning routine was particularly inconvenient Thursday because the school was taking care of 40 extra students, the younger siblings of American Indian students whose parents couldn’t afford to take a day off work during the Oakland teacher’s strike. A neighbor chased away someone suspected of vandalizing the school at around 6 Thursday morning.

“The teachers at AIPCS are not unionized and weren’t striking Thursday. The middle school posts some of the highest test scores in the state. Last year, AIPCS boasted an Academic Performance Index (API) of 977. AIPCS has long drawn the ire of charter school opponents who claim that charter schools sap students and money from the traditional public school system.” http://www.theoakbook.com/MoreDetail.aspx?Aid=3902&CatId=8

There’s more info at Oakland Tribune reporter Katy Murphy’s blog, including kooky comments from OEA members who need to log more staff development hours in rational thought (i.e. “It is possible that the glue and graffiti was put there by somebody hoping to discredit the union.” And the reasonable probability of that scenario is?) http://www.ibabuzz.com/education/2010/04/29/strike-day-vandalism-at-american-indian-school/

And more in the San Francisco Chronicle about the “successful” strike. Here are some excerpts with the link below:

“District officials, faced with an $85 million budget shortfall over the next two years, reiterated once again Thursday that they can’t afford to give the teachers pay raises.

” ‘I think we all agree our teachers need a pay increase,’ said Brad Stam, chief academic officer for the district. ‘But right now, we can’t afford one. We don’t want to bankrupt the district to do it and go back under state control…’”

“At Edna Brewer Middle School on 13th Avenue in the Glenview neighborhood, all 40 teachers were on the picket line, chanting, ‘Scabs go home,’ and pounding drums and cowbells…”

“One emergency substitute was surrounded by strikers and was forced to push through the line of striking teachers to get inside. Of the school’s 700 students, about 40 came to class, said special education teacher Mark Airgood.”

Don’t forget that most public school funding comes from Average Daily Attendance money, so having students stay home from school decreases revenues for Oakland Unified School District, which in turn makes it all the more difficult to issue pay raises to teachers.

“Another 600 Oakland schoolchildren lined up for a $5 double feature of ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ and ‘Oceans’ with free popcorn offered at the Grand Lake Theater. Owner Allen Michaan held a special screening in support of the teachers’ strike.

“He normally doesn’t offer the deal until summer.

” ‘We’re shocked by how many people showed up,’ Michaan said. ‘We weren’t ready for it.’”

At least someone expressed some common sense:

” ‘To ask for money when California is on the brink of collapse is crazy,’ said the middle school worker, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid animosity at his school. ‘We could all use a pay raise, but if you give the teachers a raise, then the district will have to cut jobs.’”

(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/30/MNV61D726D.DTL)

From The New York Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the city’s teachers union have agreed to do away with “rubber rooms” and speed up hearings for teachers accused of wrongdoing or incompetence, ending a disciplinary system that has made both City Hall and the teachers’ union subjects of ridicule.

Steve Ostrin, who has been in a reassignment center for more than five years, said closing them would be a “good thing.”

Under the agreement, teachers the city is trying to fire will no longer be sent to the rubber rooms, known as reassignment centers, where the teachers show up every school day, sometimes for years, doing no work and drawing full salaries. Instead, these teachers will be assigned to administrative work or duties outside classrooms in their schools while their cases are pending.

The centers have been a source of embarrassment for both the Bloomberg administration and the United Federation of Teachers, as articles in newspapers and magazines detailed teachers running businesses out of the rubber rooms or dozing off for hours on end.

“Given the amount of press that this subject as gotten, to say that this is a big deal is probably an understatement,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference announcing the agreement.  “This was an absurd an expensive abuse of tenure. We’ve been able to solve what was one of the most divisive issues in our school system.”

Officials said the agreement would also shorten the time it takes for cases to be resolved by allowing more arbitrators to be hired and requiring them to hear cases more frequently. Cases that lasted several years could now be completed in months.

After removing a teacher from the classroom, Education Department officials will have 10 days to file incompetence charges and 60 days for charges of misconduct. Any teacher not formally charged within that time will be sent back to the classroom. In more serious cases in which education officials are trying to suspend a teacher without pay, the department would be required to file charges within three days.

As Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has increased efforts to get rid of teachers the city deems ineffective, the number of teachers in rubber rooms has grown. There are now about 550.

Although the city has invested about $2 million in hiring more lawyers to help principals get rid of teachers, it has managed to fire only three for incompetence in the last two years.

The centers will not close until the fall, officials said, but they pledged to resolve all of the pending cases by the end of the year.

While the agreement may solve the thorny public relations problems for the city and the union, it does nothing to address the more costly absent teacher reserve pool, which consists of teachers who have lost their jobs because of budget cuts or when a school is shut down for poor performance, but have not been accused of incompetence of wrongdoing. Those teachers, who now number about 1,100, do not have permanent classroom jobs but draw full salaries.

Mr. Klein has pushed for the power to lay off reserve teachers, but neither the union nor state legislators has been willing to go along.

The agreement between the union and the city comes amid an increasingly icy relationship between Michael Mulgrew, the union’s president, and Mr. Klein. Despite the rubber room deal, there are no signs that they are any closer to an agreement on a new teachers’ contract.

www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/nyregion/16rubber.html

…Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher.

…There once was a time when teaching (along with nursing) was one of the few jobs not denied to women and minorities. But with social progress, many talented women and minorities chose other and more highly compensated fields. One recent review of the evidence by McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, showed that most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound high-school students. (Finland takes the top 10 percent.)

At the same time, the teachers’ unions have become more and more powerful. In most states, after two or three years, teachers are given lifetime tenure…The percentage of teachers dismissed for poor performance in Chicago between 2005 and 2008 (the most recent figures available) was 0.1 percent. In Akron, Ohio, zero percent. In Toledo, 0.01 percent. In Denver, zero percent. In no other socially significant profession are the workers so insulated from accountability. The responsibility does not just fall on the unions. Many principals don’t even try to weed out the poor performers (or they transfer them to other schools in what’s been dubbed the “dance of the lemons”)…

Over time, inner-city schools, in particular, succumbed to a defeatist mindset. The problem is not the teachers, went the thinking—it’s the parents (or absence of parents); it’s society with all its distractions and pathologies; it’s the kids themselves. Not much can be done, really, except to keep the assembly line moving through “social promotion,” regardless of academic performance, and hope the students graduate (only about 60 percent of blacks and Hispanics finish high school). Or so went the conventional wisdom in school superintendents’ offices from Newark to L.A. By 1992, “there was such a dramatic achievement gap in the United States, far larger than in other countries, between socioeconomic classes and races,” says Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. “It was a scandal of monumental proportions, that there were two distinct school systems in the U.S., one for the middle class and one for the poor.”

In the past two decades, some schools have sprung up that defy and refute what former president George W. Bush memorably called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Generally operating outside of school bureaucracies as charter schools, programs like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) have produced inner-city schools with high graduation rates (85 percent)…

It is difficult to dislodge the educational establishment. In New Orleans, a hurricane was required: since Katrina, New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out. Using nonunion charter schools, New Orleans has been able to measure teacher performance in ways that the teachers’ unions have long and bitterly resisted. Under a new Louisiana law, New Orleans can track which ed schools produce the best teachers, forcing long-needed changes in ed-school curricula. (The school system of Detroit is just as broken as New Orleans’s was before the storm—but stuck with largely the same administrators, the same unions, and the same number of kids, and it has been unable to make any progress.)

Within the same school sit teachers—many making over $72,000 a year—who do not want to take on reform responsibilities without significant pay increases. They have the union’s backing.

Enter School Superintendent Frances Gallo, who is under pressure from Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist to reform Central Falls High School, which is one of the worst performing schools in the state.

About a month ago, Education Commissioner Gist tells Superintendent Gallo that she has to use one of four models to reform Central Falls High School. Gallo chooses the “transformation” model, which allows her to work with existing staff members to improve the school’s abominable performance.

Gallo lays out six conditions. She tells union leaders and staff that if she can’t adopt the “transformation” model by getting their cooperation, she will resort to the “turnaround” model, which means that everyone will be fired and the district will be able to hire 50% or less of the staff back for the next school year.

The six new staff responsibilities Gallo presents are:

25 more minutes added to the school day, some tutoring shifts before and after school, once a week eating lunch with students, undergoing more extensive evaluations, attending teacher planning sessions once a week, and 2 weeks of training during the summer.

Gallo can only offer $30 an hour and only for some of the additional duties, but the union leaders say the teachers should earn $90 an hour and for all of the additional duties.

As a result, the union leaders say no, we do not agree to your six conditions. They, I conjecture, effectively try to strong-arm Gallo and call her bluff.

They find out that Gallo wasn’t bluffing because she fired them all. Every teacher and administrator.

And from this situation a major media story erupts that asks a lot of fundamental education reform questions.

Here’s a transcript on the subject from Anderson Cooper 360, which shows a classic battling of heads between an education reformer and a teacher’s union president:

Anderson Cooper 360, 2/22/10

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1002/22/acd.02.html

COOPER: Really interesting story out of Rhode Island. There are 74 full-time teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. But by June all of them could be out of work; fired for failing to turn around one of the lowest performing schools in the state. Less than half the kids graduate. Only 7 percent are proficient in math. Almost all of the kids live in poverty.

Last week the dozens of teachers who earn at least $72,000 a year received letters recommending their termination. They were sent by the school’s superintendent. The board of trustees votes on the measure tomorrow. It’s not against the law. The fact is it’s one of six options mandated by the federal government to fix struggling schools.

The superintendent says the decision came after the Teachers Union balked at other options that would have required faculty to spend more time with students. The move sparked both outrage and support.

Joining us, two sides: Randi Weingarten, is the president of American Federation of Teachers which represents the teachers at Central Falls High School; and Steve Perry, our education contributor. Appreciate both of you being with us.

Steve, many teachers already put in a lot of time helping students both in and out of the classroom. What’s wrong with asking for a little more money by the teachers for all that extra time?

STEVE PERRY, CNN EDUCATION CONTRIBUTOR: Nothing if the community had it. The community doesn’t have any money. They’re paying $72,000 a year for these individuals to be in a school in which they’re graduating just 50 percent of the students.

And as you said, 93 percent of the children are not performing at proficient at math. They’re asking for more money? They can’t stay after for 25 minutes? It takes you ten minutes to get your coat on.

COOPER: Randi, the teachers rejected the school’s original plan which would have saved all their jobs because they wanted more money for this extra time that they would have had to spend with students. You know, critics like Steve are saying they’re basically putting their salaries ahead of the needs of kids.

RANDI WEINGARTEN, PRESIDENT, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS: Well actually, Steve, from what my understanding is the story is a bit different than that. And I know the teachers would very much like to negotiate this and I know that some of the officials in Rhode Island have called for mediation. We want to keep that school open. We want to keep that school open for kids.

We agree with you and we agree with Steve. Seven percent math proficiency is totally unacceptable but so is the amount of poverty in that school. What we need to do is we need to make sure we create a place where all kids can achieve in some ways like the place that Mr. Perry has created in Capital Prep.

COOPER: What does that mean?

PERRY: Right. Thank you. One of the things that…

COOPER: Steve, go ahead.

WEINGARTEN: Can I finish? Sorry.

COOPER: Steve, go ahead.

PERRY: One of the — one of the things that’s important, if poverty is this immovable object for that faculty we understand that maybe it’s not their group of students that they can educate. Let’s free the students.

Why would we keep a school open that has already proven that it simply cannot educate the children in the circumstances within which they’re in? We operate a school in a poor community. There are thousands of educators all over the country who have the capacity to educate children where they are. We don’t need to change poverty. We need to change who’s teaching children in poverty.

WEINGARTEN: Well what we actually need to do is we need to do both.

But look, we have thousands of schools, as Mr. Perry said, that work. Let’s look at what it is that makes them work. We have…

COOPER: But doesn’t accountability work? Holding teachers accountable?

WEINGARTEN: Accountability is one aspect of it, but what I’m talking about, Anderson, is think about the schools that work across the country. Think about the schools that parents sometimes spend thousands of dollars to put their kids in.

They have well-prepared teachers. They have smaller classes. They have rich curriculum. What we’re saying about here Central Falls where there’s been five principals in the last six years, where there is one high school in the whole — in the whole little city which has become the focus point of the community, where hundreds of people last week were there supporting the kids and the teachers.

Let’s turn that school around like we have in so many other places.

PERRY: Right. And so here’s what’s important to note. She’s right. Attorney Weingarten is right. That we do need better teachers and the only thing standing in way of that are the teachers unions and seniority rules that won’t allow us to bring people in who are the most qualified and willing to teach in those schools.

If those folks in that one school cannot do it, then let’s free the children. Let’s let charter schools come in. Let’s let individuals who want to participate in the process come in. If the interest is the needs of the children, let’s do it.

She’s also right, let’s give the children what the children would receive in these private schools, the same things that the superintendent was asking for. Stay after school a little while longer. Come to school a little while earlier. Eat with the children once a week.

Are we really giving up our jobs because they’re asking us to eat with children once a week? And finally, over $30 — $30 additional dollars. The community has double-digit poverty. There’s no more money.

It’s unreasonable and irresponsible to ask a community that’s already given to the teeth for more money, especially when the product that they’re receiving is below standard. At some point we have to acknowledge that the children are more important than the adults who have degrees, certification, and 401(k)s. We have to focus on the children.

COOPER: Randi, I want you to be able to respond.

WEINGARTEN: Look, the children are more important, and as I said to you I talked to the superintendent of schools last Thursday and I said, let’s restart these negotiations, let’s not close the only high school in Central Falls.

I have worked across the country and have seen high-poverty schools including, Mr. Perry, the two charter schools that I started in New York City, turned things around for kids. What we need to do is have strategic common sense reforms that I know my members can do for kids in Central Falls. We need a chance to do that.

COOPER: Randi, your critics will say — what is essential is the ability for a superintendent or principal to fire teachers. You seem — teachers’ unions obviously are opposed to that notion of being able to fire teachers.

WEINGARTEN: Look, Anderson, we’re not opposed to the notion of if somebody is not performing to do what management has to do.

COOPER: But it’s incredibly hard to fire a teacher.

PERRY: They only make it harder. I mean it takes at least a year to fire a teacher, at least a year. That’s 120 students in a class, under a teacher’s responsibility. It takes them at least a year. If Ms. Weingarten is saying that she’s in favor –

WEINGARTEN: Mr. Perry, can I — get a word in..

COOPER: Let him finish, then I’ll let you finish.

WEINGARTEN: Ok.

PERRY: If what she’s saying is she’s in favor of children, if you’re in favor of children then your members have to move out of the way. I’d be willing to bet that some 40 percent of the teachers in that school don’t agree with the union leadership. In fact, I bet if they were given the opportunity they would return without any cause. They wouldn’t even require anymore –

COOPER: Randi, I want you respond then we have to go.

WEINGARTEN: As I said, the teachers want to negotiate. We have been shut out of that by the superintendent. We’re willing 24/7 to do it.

The bottom line is this. It’s not union contracts. Look at the best state achievement in the United States. Maryland — wall to wall union contracts. The issue is, how do we make sure we get the well- prepared teachers to have the smaller class sizes, the safe environment that kids need so we help every single child in Central Falls?

COOPER: Ok. Randi Weingarten, appreciate your time; Steve Perry as well.

If you’re as fascinated by the news story as I am, here’s another article link (with an excerpt) to satisfy your curiosity:

http://www.projo.com/news/content/central_falls_trustees_vote_02-24-10_EOHI83C_v59.3c21342.html

Every Central Falls teacher fired, labor outraged
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
By Jennifer D. Jordan

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I.

The state’s tiniest, poorest city has become the center of a national battle over dramatic school reform. On the one side, federal and state education officials say they must take painful and dramatic steps to transform the nation’s lowest-performing schools. On the other side, teachers unions say such efforts undermine hard-won protections in their contracts.

“This is hard work and these are tough decisions, but students only have one chance for an education,” Education Secretary Duncan said, “and when schools continue to struggle we have a collective obligation to take action.”

Duncan is requiring states, for the first time, to identify their lowest 5 percent of schools — those that have chronically poor performance and low graduation rates — and fix them using one of four methods: school closure; takeover by a charter or school-management organization; transformation which requires a longer school day, among other changes; and “turnaround” which requires the entire teaching staff be fired and no more than 50 percent rehired in the fall.

State Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist moved swiftly on this new requirement, identifying on Jan. 11 six of the “persistently lowest-performing” schools: Central Falls High School, which has very low test scores and a graduation rate of 48 percent, and five schools in Providence. Gist also started the clock on the changes, telling the districts they had until March 17 to decide which of the models they wanted to use. Her actions make Rhode Island one of the first states to publicly release a list of affected schools and put into motion the new federal mandate.

Gallo and the teachers initially agreed they wanted the transformation model, which would protect the teachers’ jobs.

But talks broke down when the two sides could not agree on what transformation entailed…

L.A. Weekly took the bull by the horns with the fiery expose, “LAUSD’s Dance of the Lemons: Why firing the desk-sleepers, burnouts, hotheads and other failed teachers is all but impossible”. Kudos to Beth Barrett for researching and writing this excellent and shocking piece. http://www.laweekly.com/content/printVersion/854792

LAUSD is so large that it “educates” one-tenth of all the students in California. In light of the information revealed by L.A. Weekly, it’s frightening to think that 10% of California’s children are shuffling through such a low-performing, inefficient school district.

LAUSD is known for its “dance of the lemons”, which refers to the practice of transferring bad teachers secretively to other schools in the district, paying incompetent teachers to leave the system, and repeatedly placing teachers in retraining programs despite evidence that they do not show signs of improvement.

The dance of the lemons stems from the school district’s inability to fire lousy, tenured teachers due to union rules and bureaucratic red tape. Because of the incredible cost and time involved in trying to get rid of incompetent teachers, administrators have resorted to shuffling the lemons around or paying them to rot somewhere else.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

“…The Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing such teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.

“During our investigation, in which we obtained hundreds of documents using the California Public Records Act, we also discovered that 32 underperforming teachers were initially recommended for firing, but then secretly paid $50,000 by the district, on average, to leave without a fight. Moreover, 66 unnamed teachers are being continually recycled through a costly mentoring and retraining program but failing to improve, and another 400 anonymous teachers have been ordered to attend the retraining.

“…Documents show only one instance in the past 10 years in which an LAUSD teacher accepted his firing and left without a fight or big payment.

“…According to confidential settlement agreements obtained by the Weekly under the California Public Records Act, the school district goes to great lengths to avoid the formal steps for firing teachers. Not only has LAUSD paid 32 tenured teachers more than $1.5 million to leave, but the LAUSD school board, which says it is reform-minded, allows these teachers to leave with clean records, and with no hint that they took a payout under pressure. The deals are so hush-hush, in fact, that the Weekly has discovered that one teacher, Que Mars, who taught math at Chester W. Nimitz Middle School, is still listed in LAUSD’s substitute-teacher pool after taking a $40,000 check — to stop teaching in L.A.

“…Hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of other L.A. teachers hand out busy-work, show movies during most class periods, sleep, don’t show up on Fridays, or consistently churn out kids who score well below the rest of the school in core subjects like math, science, reading and English.

“California Charter Schools Association’s Young and other education analysts say the obstacles to identifying and ousting these teachers stem from the 1970s, when popular but not particularly competent teachers were named as principals while top teachers with deep academic backgrounds got fired for failing to toe the line. In the backlash that followed, critics say, new laws and regulations made it increasingly hard to fire a California teacher.”

It is an offense to common sense and equal rights to allow “the dance of the lemons” to occur. Think of the untold number of students whose education is hijacked by terrible teachers, bureaucratic inefficiency, cowardly district officials, and union control. Could you imagine something like this, on this scale, happening at a private corporation?

Think how different LAUSD would be if it could hire and fire at will. LAUSD would still have its problems, but getting rid of an entrenched corps of incompetent teachers and the network of programs and lawyers surrounding it would be a good first step toward reform.

Here are more excerpts from L.A. Weekly about the “retraining” that goes on in LAUSD:

“…When a teacher gets a below-standard Stull evaluation — named after a lawmaker who in 1971 authored California legislation requiring checks of educators’ work — that teacher participates in a rehab program called Peer Assistance and Review, as did Burio and Loftin. The program, engineered by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa when he was a state assemblyman in 2000, is supposed to improve schools by pairing failing teachers with mentors — often retired teachers with many years of experience.

“By some accounts, PAR is a miserable failure. Under the confidential program — a secrecy feature that teachers unions insisted on — not even school principals can find out if their subpar teachers are improving. District officials admit to the Weekly that only about one-third of teachers pass the training.

“Moreover, as happened with Burio at San Pedro High, principals must keep these substandard teachers in the classroom during the retraining. There are no particular consequences if a teacher does not improve.

“…School principals, Hughes says, know that if they negatively review an L.A. teacher’s abilities, ‘just about everyone who gets a below-standard Stull grieves it’ — and the principal gets caught in a lengthy, often bitter process. Records show that of 16,235 LAUSD teachers evaluated in 2008, 1,321 were considered below standard in classroom ability. Only a small fraction of those 1,321 received a formal, negative Stull rating. In some cases, the principals simply did not want to get in a nasty fight.

“…Superintendent Cortines says he recently banned the repetitive transfer of ‘lemons.’ But there is no way to verify if Cortines’ ban is working, or if it was even implemented, because the practice unfolds entirely in secret. Nobody, including parents, can currently find out if a newly arrived teacher was sent to a school under a forced transfer.

“…LAUSD is not as aggressive as New York City, whose school district employs eight attorneys solely to remove bad teachers, and places underperforming teachers in the district’s infamous ‘rubber rooms’— offices away from children, where they earn full salary to do nothing during their job disputes.

“…President Barack Obama has begun pushing for tougher evaluations of teachers, tied to their classroom test scores, and for direct comparison of teachers with their colleagues along the same hallway. As those and other reforms aimed at teacher quality begin to find acceptance in other parts of the nation, however, it seems a stretch to imagine LAUSD, the district so big it educates one in 10 California children, joining in.

“‘The power of the union [and] the California Teachers Association in this state has definitely tipped the balance in favor of protecting the incompetent teacher,’ says Collins. Somehow, she says, ‘Parents and students need to know they have a voice.’”

Do they really have a voice? And if they do, can they be heard? It reminds me of a chapter name I came across recently in the book The Long Tail called “The ants have megaphones. What are they saying?”

Students and their families in failing school districts might speak out, but they are drowned out by the voices of teachers, teachers unions, school district personnel, politicians, and lawmakers—the people who really have the power when it comes to education reform. And some of those people need to stop supporting the status quo and start thinking about the future, which is looking bleak for the majority of children in California.

“Sharlonda Buckman, CEO of the Detroit Parent Network, called for jailing and civil lawsuits against anyone in the city’s educational system that is not doing his or her share to help properly educate children.

‘Somebody needs to go to jail,’ she said in a tearful address to 500 parents gathered Saturday for the organization’s annual breakfast forum. ‘Somebody needs to pay for this. Somebody needs to go to jail, and it shouldn’t be the kids.’

Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb told the crowd the test scores weren’t the result of children who were incompetent or parents who didn’t care. He blamed the scores on the district not doing its job.

‘This is an abysmal failure,’ Bobb said. ‘It is not the fault of our kids individually, and it is not the fault of our kids collectively. It is not the kids’ fault. It is the adults’ fault. It is a failure of leadership.’

The scores were so low that DPS parent Tonya Allen said she thinks students could have stayed home and done just as badly on the tests.”

Though the test score news is very disappointing, it is great to read about parents who are so tired of the excuses offered up by school districts that they are motivated to take matters into their own hands.

Of course a potential teacher union strike led by the Vote No and Prepare to Strike Committee is looming. Teachers are considering abandoning the classroom if their new contract contains the following terms: In order to eliminate the $219 million deficit, teachers give $500 a month from their paychecks to the district so that the district can use the money now and return it to them when the teachers retire.

Sharlonda Buckman said about this: “If they strike, I hope we start a homeschool movement,” she said in a fiery rebuke. “If you want to walk out on us now, when we have all of our kids failing…you can’t do it.”

What an ugly mess. I hope the Detroit parents keep up their fury and keep demanding a better education for their children. I also hope the teachers start listening.

The Detroit News article can be found here: http://www.detnews.com/article/20091212/schools/912120373/detroit-parents-want-dps-teachers–officials-jailed-over-low-test-scores

Bill SBX5 1 would have given children attending the lowest-performing schools in the state the opportunity to transfer to good schools. It also would have provided a system for rewarding educators who consistently improved student scores. It was struck down and replaced by a watered-down, union-supported bill sponsored by Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica), the education committee’s chairwoman.

The new bill, ABX5 8, eliminates the school choice option and increases regulations of charter schools. It does, however, get rid of the cap on charter schools, as SBX51 would also have done. That’s one of the few similarities between the bills. Governor Schwarzenegger states that if the Brownley bill reaches his desk he will veto it. There is fear and frustration that by striking down SBX51, California will not be competitive enough in its reforms to qualify for Race to the Top funds.

Here’s a typical statement from the California Teachers Association (CTA), a union: “Education reform shouldn’t be a race; it deserves serious attention that will actually help kids and improve student achievement. Proposed reforms need thoughtful discussion with all stakeholders, including parents, teachers and community members. They should not be sprung on the public just hours before last-minute hearings if any meaningful input is really going to take place.” -CTA President David Sanchez

Is the slow, ongoing path to failure preferable to a competitive race to success?

One article I read reported that CTA developed a strategy this summer to fight Race to the Top legislation and set aside up to $950,000 for it. Making sure the Romero bill wouldn’t pass was part of that strategy.

Brian Nestande (R-Sacramento) stated in a press release: “President Obama offered us the chance to promote excellence and secure needed funding for our schools, but instead Assembly Democrats chose to embrace the status-quo.”

Transitioning from West Coast unions to East Coast unions, the title of a Boston Globe article pretty much speaks for itself: “Teachers’ test-linked bonuses overruled: Arbitrator decides high-scores reward violates contract”.

Boston public schools intended to pay math teachers at the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science and two other schools participating in the program bonuses for high scores on Advanced Placement exams. Math teachers would have received $100 for each high score achieved by their students. It was part of an Exxon Mobil-funded grant program. The program was seen as an incentive for teachers to teach Advanced Placement classes, which require much work and preparation.

The Boston Globe reports that the program was dismantled when “the arbitrator ruled that Boston officials failed to negotiate the bonuses and other aspects of the program with the union before entering into an agreement on Feb. 28, 2008…”

The Globe further states: “While the unions support the idea of more AP courses, the groups oppose bonuses for individual teachers, arguing they go against the spirit of teamwork among faculty.”

AP participation had soared in the schools participating in the program.

Ahh, the future of education…it’s looking like the slogan will be: sign on the union line.

Bloomberg is looking to the New York legislature to require all the state’s districts to implement “data-driven systems” by which to evaluate teachers and administrators. This seems like common sense, but sometimes there’s no place for common sense in politics–just money, lobbying, agendas, and jobs.

Bloomberg would like New York teacher layoffs to be tied to performance, not seniority (as is the current status quo). In other words, the lowest-performing teachers would be cut regardless of how long or short a time they’d been in the system. The way it works now is the teachers newest to the system get the ax first. They could be outstanding movers and shakers while their unmotivated, just-in-it-for-the-paycheck peers get to keep their jobs just because they’ve been there longer.

I really have a hard time stomaching the idea of first in, first out. It should be: in with the good, out with the bad. I believe k-12 public education needs to adopt more of a private sector approach to hiring and firing. Imagine a corporation that couldn’t fire unproductive employees; those employees knew they had locked-in job security and therefore didn’t have to work hard. Conversely, new employees knew no matter how hard they worked and how well they performed, if someone needed to be cut it would be them. Where would the motivation be? Would that corporation thrive? This is the model used by the k-12 public education system in America. I’ll leave it to you to judge the product.

The amount of money wasted on lousy teachers with too much job protection is astonishing. New York City pays over $100 million dollars on teachers who are not currently employed. Many of those teachers lost their jobs when their schools were shut down for low academic performance. Teachers who lost their NYC jobs and were not able to find other ones in the system got to keep their salaries even though they weren’t working! Bloomberg wants the new teacher contracts to stipulate a one-year limit on reserve pool teachers.

The humorous illustration below by Marcellus Hall, letters to the editor, and the original New York Times piece can be found at: www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/education/26teachers.html

It appears there is a glimmer of hope for the school reform movement in California.

The California Senate approved Senate Bill X5 1 last week, which repeals the state’s cap on charter schools and provides students at low-performing schools with the choice to attend better schools. It also “encourages school districts to reward teachers who consistently improve student scores.” That quote from the Sacramento Bee (http://www.sacbee.com/education/story/2306978.html) is a bit vague. I’m not sure what form the “encouragement” would come in. I haven’t had a chance to look into the details of Senate Bill X5 1, but I am excited by the bill’s overarching goals and aims.

The impetus for Senate Bill X5 1 is California’s desire to receive part of the competitive Race to the Top education funds, which amount to $4.35 billion total. The bill still has to clear California’s Assembly, and guess who’s fighting it? Shocking surprise: the union. Sandra Jackson of the California Teachers Association said, “We feel right now it’s unnecessary and being rushed through.” Like I said before, I don’t know all the details on this bill, but Jackson’s statement sounds like typical union rhetoric. California cannot afford to keep its youth undereducated year after year so that locked-in educators–no matter how good or bad they are–can keep receiving salaries. The upholding of the status quo is ruining the chances of millions of children. We are dumbing them down in the name of politics and paychecks, and it is a disgraceful and disheartening practice that needs to stop. It’s time for real, unfettered reform in California and the nation.

Last week Nicolas D. Kristof wrote a widely popular column–so popular in fact that the New York Times eventually cut off comments–on both the importance of high-quality teachers in the classroom and the ways in which teachers’ unions stymie effective education reform. For a look at “rubber rooms” and union strangleholds and a call to action to Democrats, check out his article (linked below).

Kristof writes: “Good schools constitute a far more potent weapon against poverty than welfare, food stamps or housing subsidies. Yet, cowed by teachers’ unions, Democrats have too often resisted reform and stood by as generations of disadvantaged children have been cemented into an underclass by third-rate schools.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/opinion/15kristof.html?em