Tag: Ed Schools

AFT’s and NEA’s Soft Bigotry Against Minority Children

America’s public school teaching workforce is mostly-White and nearly all female. Many of them live in suburbia — even when they teach in urban districts. Even when they do live…

America’s public school teaching workforce is mostly-White and nearly all female. Many of them live in suburbia — even when they teach in urban districts. Even when they do live in urban districts, many of them either use school choice clauses in collective bargaining agreements to get first dibs on schools that don’t have Black or Latino children in them, or just send their kids to private schools to avoid the failure mills they themselves work in.

While many teachers are progressive politically, this is not true of everyone in the profession. As seen three years ago in New York City, when teachers angry at the American Federation of Teachers’ Big Apple unit for supporting efforts against police brutality wore t-shirts in support of police, not all are all that concerned with criminal justice reforms that would help improve the lives of the poor and minority children they teach. And unlike the two unions that represent them (often not of their own choosing), those teachers aren’t necessarily loyal to the Democratic National Committee. Even American Federation of Teachers President Rhonda (Randi) Weingarten conceded last year that one in five of its rank-and-file voted for Donald Trump.

Considering these realities, it is little wonder why Steve Bannon, the White Supremacist who helped Trump win the presidency last year and served as his aide before flaming out this past August, wanted (and managed to score) a meeting with Weingarten last March. Nor is it shocking that Weingarten came away rather impressed by  his political acumen. Because she, along with Lily Eskelsen Garcia of the National Education Association, knows all too well that far too many teachers in American public education are racially myopic. And that her union protects them.

Certainly reformers can point to the instances of outright bigotry by teachers and school leaders within the past year. This includes Cammie Rone, who was suspended in September by the Panola district in Mississippi after writing a Facebook rant that demanded that Black people should “move back to Africa” if they are dissatisfied with the legacies of bigotry that still perplex America today. It also includes an as-yet identified teacher at Cliffside Park High School in New Jersey who was caught on Snapchat last month berating her (English-speaking) Latino students, proclaiming that soldiers “are not fighting for your right to speak Spanish.” The incident led to students at the school, which is in a district in which one-third of students are Latino, walking out in protest.

Certainly most teachers aren’t outright bigots. There are myriad teachers who do well by all children every day and deserve our praise as well as respect. But far too many poor and minority children are subjected by far too many instructional professionals to educational abuse and neglect. And it extends beyond those few public instances.

Over the past few months, a litany of studies have once again proven that White teachers are less likely to have high expectations for Black children (and therefore, less likely to provide them high-quality instruction) than their White peers. Just 24 percent of White teachers expected their Black students to finish high school and higher education, according to a 2017 study led by Seth Gershenson of American University and Nicholas Papageorge of Johns Hopkins University. Those low expectations contribute to low educational attainment by poor and minority children.

This racial myopia (and outright bigotry) toward poor and minority children also manifests in the overuse of out-of-school suspensions and other forms of harsh traditional school discipline. As Adam Wright of University of California, Santa Barbara determined in a 2015 study, beliefs among White teachers that Black children are unruly and poorly-behaved explain why they are more-likely to be referred for discipline and suspended than their White peers. Black children taught by Black teachers were 28 percent-to-38 percent less-likely to be suspended than if taught by White teachers.

Not only does Wright’s study bear out three decades of research on overuse of discipline (including those than control for socioeconomic status), it even proves Vanderbilt Professor Daniel J. Reschly’s assertion about the role of teacher beliefs (and misinterpretation of data) in the overidentification of Black and other minority children as special ed cases. Which is why your editor isn’t surprised by today’s news out of California that even with aggressive reforms on the school discipline front there, out-of-school suspensions were meted out to 9.8 percent of Black children, a rate three times higher than that for their White schoolmates.

Certainly the educational abuse of Black children are reflective of failures in school leadership within states and traditional districts. This is a point Dropout Nation continues to make in its Rationing Opportunity and Beyond Ferguson collections. But teachers do the work in classrooms, and as data continues to show, have the greatest impacts on student achievement, especially in areas such as math. More-importantly, because the quality of teaching varies more within schools (from classroom to classroom) than among them, the racial myopia of teachers (and their low expectations for the poor and minority children in their care) are matters that have to be addressed in order to help all children succeed.

This includes overhauling how we recruit teachers, ensuring that they care for every child regardless of background as well as have the subjective-matter competency needed to educate them properly. It also includes giving districts and other school operators the ability to remove those in the classroom who don’t belong there.

Those transformations, however, are opposed by AFT and NEA. For all their talk about opposing the bigotry of the likes of Bannon and Trump — as well as their participation efforts such as the new Education Civil Rights Alliance funded in part by the Ford Foundation — the Big Two unions end up aiding and abetting the kinds of soft and hard bigotries associated with the likes of them.

The Big Two continue to support the nation’s university schools of education, which have demonstrably proven ineffective in recruiting teachers both empathetic to all children and competent in their instruction. AFT, in particular, gave $71,410 to Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, the organization that defends the poor practices of ed schools, during its 2017 fiscal year.

The Big Two defend near-lifetime employment in the form of tenure and shoddy teacher dismissal policies that make it difficult for districts to root out laggards (as well as those engaged in criminal and sexual abuse). Their opposition to the efforts of Teach For America (which is now the training center of choice for high-quality Black, Latino, and Native teachers) to diversify teaching, as well as their fights against efforts of charters to develop alternative routes for bringing in teachers (which would be a boon to mid-career professional of African-American descent) also exemplifies their lack of concern for the futures of poor and minority children.

Meanwhile AFT and NEA have been unwilling to ride herd on locals and state affiliates who oppose school discipline reforms that can help poor and minority children. AFT’s failure three years ago to force its Minneapolis local to support an effort by the district to reduce overuse of suspensions is merely one of many instances when the national union’s proclamations for social justice are proven empty in practice.

This soft bigotry perpetuated by AFT and NEA extends beyond teachers. From opposing the expansion of high-quality charter schools and other school choice options, to its opposition to Parent Trigger laws and efforts of Parent Power activists in places such as Connecticut and California, to efforts to eviscerate accountability measures that hold districts and school operators to heel for serving Black and Brown children well, even to their historic disdain for Black families and condoning of Jim Crow discrimination against Black teachers, both unions have proven no better than outright White Supremacists when it comes to addressing the legacies of bigotry in which American public education is the nexus.

By refusing to embrace systemic reforms, AFT and NEA help perpetuate damage to the futures of Black and Brown children, often behaving no differently in consequence than the regime that occupies the executive branch of the federal government. Even worse, by refusing to help root out those teachers harming children, the two unions actually damage the teaching profession itself as well as do disservice to those good and great teachers who care for every child in their classrooms.

Certainly Weingarten is no bigot. This is crystal clear. But given these realities, one has to wonder how different is she in reality from Steve Bannon? Because she and her allies are doing no better than him when it comes to building brighter futures for Black and Brown children.

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The Dropout Nation Podcast: Take It and Shake It


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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss how we should look at American public education as an Etch-A-Sketch and shake up the status quo. More than ever, we must…

Dropout Nation Podcast Cover

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss how we should look at American public education as an Etch-A-Sketch and shake up the status quo. More than ever, we must take the opportunities to overhaul a system that fails at least 150 kids every hour (and millions more every year).

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, the Education Podcast Network and Zune Marketplace.

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Three Questions: Indiana Schools Superintendent Tony Bennett


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Since taking office as Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Instruction two years ago, Tony Bennett has managed to make the kind of meaningful changes in reforming how the Hoosier State recruits…

Since taking office as Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Instruction two years ago, Tony Bennett has managed to make the kind of meaningful changes in reforming how the Hoosier State recruits and trains teachers — including requiring ed schools to screen out laggard aspiring teachers by using the Praxis I exam — that his predecessor, Suellen Reed, never deemed worth doing in her 16 years in office. This, along with his defense of the state’s charter schools from efforts to essentially abolish them, has certainly angered the state’s educational ancien regime. But it has also made him one of the more-fervent school reform-oriented state school chief executives — a role that will become more prominent as Indiana’s governor and state legislature consider a new round of reform initiatives in a state that dearly needs them.

In this Three Questions, Bennett — who will be coming to D.C. next week to speak  on an American Enterprise Institute book panel, offers a few thoughts on reforming American public education on the ground. Read and consider.

What is the one surprising thing you have learned during your tenure as Indiana’s superintendent from public instruction and how has it shaped your work and thinking?

It is surprising to me how infrequently children are the focus of conversations regarding education reform. Too often, the focus is on how change will affect adults in the system and not on how changes will benefit our students.  This inspired me, early on, to make putting kids first our top priority—and I look at everything through that lens.
What is the one thing school reform activists inside the Beltway don’t consider in their policy discussions and proposals and why?

Much of what we’re trying to do in Indiana aligns with federal policymakers’ vision for education reform. But specifically, I’d like it if the policymakers and leaders in D.C. removed as much of the bureaucratic red tape as possible.  I’d like to see them get rid of the superfluous reporting requirements that have nothing to do with educating children and instead pull educators away from focusing on their core mission to teach kids. In this regard, I think the feds have good intentions, but it’s difficult for them to envision how data and reporting requirements handcuff us at the state and local level.

What are the most-critical next steps that Indiana will need to take in order to improve the quality of teachers in classrooms? What are the challenges?

Our agenda is four-pronged: 1. Increase flexibility so that school corporations can meet the needs of their students. 2. Increase options for all students. 3. Increase accountability. 4. Recognize and reward great teachers.  Key in achieving these will be making sure teacher and leader evaluations are multi-faceted and fair—and can consider student achievement growth, which is currently prohibited by state law.   We must also work to ensure pay and promotion are based on factors other than seniority and degrees held. We need to make sure every parent has access to high-quality educational options for their child. Finally, we must act with fierce urgency to make all these changes now to benefit students—especially in our chronically underperforming school buildings.

The biggest challenges we face is opposing adult interests that seek to maintain the ineffective status quo.

How do you think charter schools will further reshape Indiana’s education landscape? What steps will you take to ensure that charters are of high-quality?

Charters are a powerful piece in our efforts to increase high-quality educational options for all students.  We have to provide a more hospitable environment for charters to develop.  And I believe charters should be held to the same high standards to which we hold traditional public schools.  If they aren’t demonstrating student growth and quality education, they should be closed.

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Two Thoughts on Education This Week: On Teacher Quality Reform


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The End of Ed Schools — and Professional Development?: When it comes to training teachers and improving their skills, this is clear:  The nation spends a lot on it ($7…

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The End of Ed Schools — and Professional Development?: When it comes to training teachers and improving their skills, this is clear:  The nation spends a lot on it ($7 billion alone on training aspiring teachers); there are a lot of ed schools involved in handling this work (1,200 of them); professional development can be profitable for the players who provide it (including consultants like “culture of poverty” promulgator Ruby Payne, and ed schools); and the results are atrocious. Forget the low quality of instruction in our nation’s schools and a dropout crisis which saps the futures of 1.3 million kids every year: Teachers, administrators  and policymakers alike don’t even think the training is of any value.

The critical reason is that teacher training and professional development is garbage in, garbage out and garbage in-between. Former Teachers College President Arthur Levine pointed out in a 2006 study that 54 percent of the nation’s teachers are taught at colleges with low admission requirements. Once aspiring teachers are admitted, they’re not likely to get the training they need to get the job done. As the National Council on Teacher Quality noted in its recent study, just one in five of the 53 ed schools it surveyed in Illinois adequately trained their students in reading instruction, and only five schools had strong, rigorous undergraduate elementary school instruction. Many ed school professors think they don’t have an obligation to actually ensure that teachers have strong subject knowledge competency or skill in instructional methods (much less actually have entrepreneurial drive, strong leadership ability and care for all kids); they would rather focus on theories of learning that involve some vague notions about schools as democracies instead of teaching teachers how to teach. The fact that Jason Kamras’, John Taylor Gattos and Jaime Escalantes emerge from the muck and mire is more a testament to their fortitude than to the ed schools from which they graduated.

Meanwhile the professional development is well, abysmal. Just 132 of 1,200 professional development programs surveyed by the U.S. Department of Education focused on reading, math and science; only nine actually met federal What Works Clearinghouse standards for quality and outcomes. Meanwhile there is little evidence that site-based professional development teams — in which teams of teachers meet to brainstorm and learn from one another — works either. Which makes sense: If America’s teacher corps is largely mediocre, then all you have happening is laggard teachers learning from other laggards. Meanwhile the one area of professional development that doesn’t really get called that — graduate and post-graduate training by ed schools — essentially functions as a way for teachers to take advantage of degree-based pay scales. If the ed school did a poor job of training teachers at the undergrad level, then it won’t do such a hot job in post-grad.

So should we save ed schools or professional development. The organization that is supposed to ensure that teacher training is of high quality, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, declared this week in its report that ed schools must move to a “clinical practice” model that emphasizes mentoring by experienced teachers. As reported by Education Week in its special report on professional development, there are new and novel efforts going on to improve post-graduate teacher training. This is all nice. But it may be too little too late.

For example, the NCATE study suggests that ed schools should work with traditional school districts — especially urban systems — to develop training programs that actually match their needs. Ed schools have called for this for years to no avail. Some have already begun to move on from ed schools, working with outfits such as Urban Teacher Residency United and The New Teacher Project to form their own training programs. Suburban and rural districts, who struggle with the same issues, could begin doing so as well. Just imagine if consortia of districts or even, say, states such as California, Nevada and Arizona teamed up with a Teach For America to do mass-scale teacher training? One could also imagine groups of high-quality teachers developing apprenticeship programs of their own independent of teachers unions, districts and ed schools, taking aspiring teachers under their wing and having them work in classrooms; this throwback to the old guild concept would certainly work better than the high-cost system in place today. Such efforts, along with private-sector run teacher training courses, could be the wave of the future.

Sure, as NCTQ President Kate Walsh points out, ed schools train more than 90 percent of all new teachers. But at this point, there are only a few ed schools — notably Teachers College — that deserve the name.  If the rest were shut down and replaced with alternative certification programs, American public education wouldn’t be any worse for wear. In fact, we may actually get better teachers and better schools. As for the professional development? What is needed is something better than the status quo.

Why House Republicans May Not Be So Good for the NEA and AFT After All: Soon-to-be House Education and Labor Committee Chairman John Kline’s opposition to the accountability elements of the No Child Left Behind Act have certainly garnered headlines. But one aspect of his agenda that hasn’t given much attention is his general opposition to near-lifetime employment for teachers in the form of tenure. While Kline is certainly arguing for a return to local control, he is also supportive of President Barack Obama’s efforts to reform teacher quality. So one could expect one part of Obama’s blueprint for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act — requiring the use of student test scores and other data in teacher evaluations — to actually pass the House in the form of a separate bill. This step would begin clearing the way for states to move in the direction that Colorado has taken and end teacher tenure altogether.

This does create a conundrum for congressional Republicans such as Kline, which have railed against expansive federal policy especially in education. But as I have pointed out last month in The American Spectator, Republicans have been rather flexible in their opposition to strong federal education policy. From launching the committee that wrote the pioneering school reform report A Nation at Risk, to creating the now-defunct D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, to the passage of No Child itself, Republicans are no more interested in small government except when it suits. This is also true now: Kline likely opposes AYP because it exposes the failings of suburban districts such as the ones in his congressional district. Requiring the use of test scores in teacher evaluations, on the other hand, only hits teachers and their NEA and AFT representatives (the latter of which will not like the idea of losing bodies, the very source of their revenue).

More importantly, Kline and other congressional Republicans will get pressure from reform-minded GOP governors, who appreciate the cover No Child and other federal laws give them cover for taking on reforms of their liking. Teacher quality is already on the mind of one possible (but unlikely) presidential aspirant, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels; Kline will listen and behave accordingly. At the same time, weakening the NEA and AFT is something that would play well to movement conservatives and others who generally oppose unions — and also find favor with centrist Democrat and progressive reformers who have equal disdain for the unions.

There are also other aspects of the NEA and AFT agenda — including items that have little to do with education policy — that will be affected by a House Republican majority. The Employee Free Choice Act, whose consideration had stalled under House Democrat leadership, will whither and die under GOP control. Also unlikely to be considered: Any efforts to spur a federal bailout of woefully insolvent public defined-benefit pensions — including even more-underfunded pensions for teachers. There could end up being an investigation of union-managed health insurance funds such as the now-insolvent fund managed by the NEA’s Indiana affiliate, opening up a new can of worms. And don’t expect another Edujobs-style effort to stem teacher layoffs; Kline opposed the $10 billion effort the last time around and considering his more-powerful position, the Obama administration won’t even bother.

Essentially the NEA and AFT may be somewhat happy with the presence of Kline — and that’s only if he can somehow weaken AYP.

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This Is Dropout Nation: This Week’s Quotes


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“One of the big problem in this industry is the whole human capital chain… can be improved… A great teacher in a dysfunctional school or a great school in a…

“One of the big problem in this industry is the whole human capital chain… can be improved… A great teacher in a dysfunctional school or a great school in a dysfunctional district isn’t going to affect the change we need. We need to change the whole system.” — Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff, Joanne Weiss, on improving how education recruits, develops and deploys talent.

“Made in America still means something… [But] we need to educate every child so that we can maintain the quality of life we have.” — U.S. Trade Representative (and former Dallas Mayor) Ron Kirk at the National Urban League Conference’s business dinner.

“What does [high-quality education] mean at the end of the day? We need to do a real better job of explaining what a high-quality education should look like.” — Byron Garrett, CEO of National PTA, on empowering parents, during a panel discussion about innovation in charter schools.

“We have not just written off kids in special education, but by association, teachers in special education. It’s a travesty.” — Kate Walsh of the National Council on Teacher Quality, discussing the low quality of teacher training at ed schools.

“States have been setting the bar artificially low, everywhere, for the past decade. This isn’t news… Standards aren’t the problem. Low standards are the problem.” — Derrell Bradford of New Jersey’s  E3 on the chatter about low cut scores in New York State.

“Parents can’t wait. They see pockets of educational excellence and ask why it can’t be everywhere—when their children have only one chance for an education.” U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan before the National Urban League’s conference, on why old-school civil rights activists can’t keep offering their old paradigm for improving education.

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