The World According to Opa

It seems to me that citizens who sincerely care about public education in Texas have too many good choices for governor this year.  Normally, having more than one good option is a good thing, except during elections.  This is because independents and “other party” candidates generally turn out to be spoilers in the process, except as in rare cases like the 1998 Minnesota elections when the outspoken Reform Party candidate, Jesse Ventura, was elected governor there. That’s why I believe in a two-party system.  Unfortunately, the two major parties in the United States tend to polarize over “hot-button” issues like gun-control, taxes, funding for social programs, and abortion.  But that’s a subject for another post.

As a teacher and a member of the ATPE (Association of Texas Professional Educators), I recently read the Fall 2006 ATPE News article, “Educators Hold the Trump Card on Election Day.”  The four candidates for governor responded in this article to association questions on education.  It was a great article, and if you haven’t read it, I do highly recommend it.  But I think it was inappropriately titled. Why?  Well, I’ll try to explain.

The three challengers all responded personally while Governor Perry chose to have a campaign staff member respond, which was most unfortunate, I think.  This alone said something to me, but it probably went over the heads’ of most readers.  I took it to mean that Mr. Perry has effectively written off educators’ votes to his opponents.  He knows he is not likely to carry the teachers’ voting block in Texas.  But he also knows that he probably doesn’t need to.  This block will be pretty much divided between his three opponents, all three of whom said things that spoke to fixing problems consistent with educators’ recommendations and sympathies.  The Governor’s spokes- person responded defensively, taking credit for legislative measures like Senate Bill 1691, which was intended to shore-up unfunded liabilities in the Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS) fund with punitive changes like the rule of 80 and increasing the minimum retirement age.  This bill is expected to decrease the current $13 billion dollar liability, but only to the tune of about $1.5 billion.  However, Mr. Perry, unlike the other three, does have a track record of actually doing something.  The others could only offer campaign promises.  All three challengers spoke against what they consider to be an over-emphasis on “rewards-based” TAKS testing.  The Governor’s spokesperson strongly defended TAKS, as currently employed, which punishes “under-performing” schools regardless of the reasons behind students’ poor performance.  But public opinion has been shown to be pretty much split on the value of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the federal mandate responsible for TAKS.  So, it seems obvious to me that, whether you agree or not with Governor Perry’s assessment of where the problems lie with Texas education and what to do about them, educators do not, in fact, hold the trump card.  Hold on now… hear me out.

In a state like Texas, a state that is solidly in the “red” column nationally, many folks are going to cast votes based on issues other than education, issues like taxes, law enforcement and immigration.  And many teachers in Texas are die-hard Republicans, don’t forget.  They’ll vote for Mr. Perry regardless of how he stands on education issues.  Party loyalty in Texas is a tradition, don’t you know?  Some who are not firmly committed to one of the two major parties (folks who are, for the most part, not Texas-born and Texas-bread), will vote for whomever they like.  These are the beauty-contest voters, voters whose support all of the candidates are trying to win over.  Then there will be some who may have been impressed with what “Grandma” Strayhorn or “Kinky” Friedman have had to say since the primaries earlier this year.  But, since they voted in either of the two primaries, they cannot, by state law, sign petitions or campaign for independents, the candidates who have been attracting most of the media attention to the demise of Mr. Bell’s campaign.  So, my prediction, for what it’s worth is this:  25 percent (perhaps less) for Bell, 15 percent (maybe more) for Grandma, 20 percent (more or less) for Kinky, and 40 percent for Perry.  Congratulations, Mr. Perry.

Oh m’gosh! Y’all don’t suppose that one or both of the inde- pendent candidates this year are actually running campaigns at the behest of the Republican Party, do ya?  Nah…  But just suppose they were.  Wouldn’t that just be a perfectly brilliant political strategy, one that’s right up there with the redistricting done by Republicans here in Texas back in 2003?

So, my conclusion is this:  if Texas educators really want to see a change in the direction public education is headed, they will need to get together and collectively encourage one or both of the independents to step aside, effectively throwing their support to the remaining contender, democrat Chris Bell.  Good as their ideas may seem to be, as I see it, the chances of either winning are extremely remote anyway, despite the growing tide of support for political independents in this state.  But of course, by charter, none of our professional organizations in Texas can suggest that we do this.  So, maybe our best bet is a letter-writing campaign that says, “Teachers, don’t waste your vote on a candidate that is not a true contender this year, no matter how much they may impress you by what they say.  Check the polls before going to your polling place.”

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Here’s an interesting quote for my teacher and parent friends from an article that was published last week in the on-line version of USNews and World Report…

“According to a new Gallup Poll, 58 percent of Americans believe the five-year-old No Child Left Behind law has either harmed or had no effect on schools, compared with just over a quarter who believe it has helped. And while most people approve of NCLB’s goal of raising standardized test scores, few seem to support its methods. ‘Systematically, the public rejects every strategy in it,’ said Lowell Rose, director of the poll, which is jointly authored by Gallup and the Phi Delta Kappa teachers’ association.”

Click here to read the whole article, which goes on to say that nearly 70 percent of poll respondents believe that no “single test” could “provide a fair picture of whether a school needs improvement.”  But then, I don’t suppose our present admini- strations at state and national levels care too much about what the public thinks.

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The next generation of Americans won’t be better off than their parents, not if we don’t wake up soon to what’s really going on with education.

Wow!  I watched the Oprah Show yesterday afternoon, Monday the 31st of July.  The show’s subject was our nation’s growing crisis in education.  From my own experience as a teacher in a suburban school district of Northern Texas, limited as it may be, I knew that things were bad and getting worse.  But this show was a real eye-opener for me.  I hope Governor Perry and key members of our state’s legislature were paying attention.

On the show yesterday were Bill and Melinda Gates, whose foundation is making big contributions to local school districts to update campus facilities and equipment, as well as a dedicated effort to raise our nation’s level of awareness (click here to read more about this foundation).  According to Mr. Gates, more than a third of young people in high school today will not graduate.  And most of those who do will not be prepared for the riggers of college academics.  His most alarming prediction, for me at least, was that students who drop-out, and even many of those who do graduate from high school, will be doomed to a lifetime of poverty, unable to compete with workers of other nations who will be much better prepared for the high tech jobs of the future in our flattening world of a global economy.

African-American and Latino students in this country are the hardest hit by this shocking trend.  Not because they lack the intelligence to succeed, but more because they lack the expectation of success.  “Students rise to expectations,” said a guest on Oprah’s show. “Likewise, they descend to expectations, their own, those of their parents, and those of society.”  And high-stakes, punitive testing is not making things better.  It’s making things worse.  I’m sorry, Mr. President, but you are wrong about this too.

This quote is from Gary Orfield’s book, Dropouts in America, which was highlighted yesterday on the Oprah Show:  “There is a dropout crisis far beyond the imagination of most Americans, concentrated in urban schools and relegating many thousands of minority children to a life of failure. We urgently need to address this problem as a nation. Our goal in this book is to make the public aware of this issue and make improving high school graduation rates a central part of national education reform. We believe the first step must entail highlighting the severe racial disparities in high school graduation rates that exist at the school and district levels.”

Many politicians, looking for someone or something to blame for this situation, think it’s the fault of teachers or the fault of the public education system itself.  Privatize it, the say, introduce economic incentives to attract and award the good teachers and weed out the bad teachers, and things’ll get better.  But, according to a new study done by the U.S. Education Department and reported in an “All Things Considered” broadcast on National Public Radio the 26th of July, public schools perform favorably with private schools when students’ income and socio-economic status are taken into account (click here to read about this report).  The findings of the study counter a popularly held notion, that private schools outperform public schools.

Much like all the disinformation about global warming that has kept our country immobile and unresponsive to the alarms being sounded by serious scientists over the world, we have allowed our elected representatives to argue over theoretical remedies and half-hearted commitments to improve education too long.  Private and charter schools may be part of the solution because they are unencumbered by many of the legal obligations imposed on public schools.  But we owe our kids better, all of our kids, not just those from wealthy families.

I was thinking of calling this posting “Chicken Little and the Drop- out Crisis,” because I really do believe the sky is falling.  But then I remembered that, in the children’s classic story, the sky wasn’t really falling; it was acorns.  Hmmm… maybe the Chicken Little title was better, ’cause those little acorns falling now are soon going to turn into great big oak trees!  Our prisons in Texas are over- crowded as it is.  Just wait until the frustration level of a whole new wave of dropout minorities hits our streets.  So, folks, it’s a simple case of “pay me now or pay me later.”

Because of socio-economic factors beyond educators’ control, an equal education for all is simply not possible.  We’re fooling our- selves if we think it is.  And “equal” in this sense does not mean “the same”.  A quality education, however, appropriate for each student’s different gifts, abilities and interests, is well within our capabilities to provide.  Other, less prosperous countries are doing it, so can we.  To this end, we simply need legislators to help schools find the needed resources, then get out of the way and let teachers teach. 

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We are about to begin an expensive experiment here in Texas, an experiment that will eventually prove that business-style economic incentives for teachers, which are tied to students’ performance on TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) tests, create more problems than they solve.  Governor Rick Perry, a politician who, as far I can determine, has never spent a day in a classroom as a teacher, has long advocated merit pay for teachers.  Now it’s a done-deal.  He is convinced, according to a Dallas Morning News article dated June 12, 2006, that this merit-pay program will push Texas to the forefront of national educational standards.  But, if only teachers in Texas could vote in the upcoming gubernatorial election, I personally doubt that he could be reelected.

On June 29th, according to a posting in Chron.com, Governor Perry poured praises on Texas educators in front of a statewide teachers’ group, The Texas Classroom Teachers’ Association, reminding them that it was he who signed into law their upcoming $2,000 across-the-board pay raise.

Thank you very much, Mr. Perry, but I’m quite sure that we teachers in Texas are still being paid less than the national average (The Cost of Underpaying Texas Teachers).  Despite this fact, Governor Perry said during the news conference, “When it comes to teacher compensation, I am of the belief that you can never pay a good teacher enough because of a lifelong impact that he or she has upon children.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do more,” Perry said, drawing applause from the Texas Classroom Teachers Association.  But he was treated with complete silence from the group when he defended the state’s standardized student testing program and took a swipe at Democratic opponent Chris Bell for advocating reducing the role for testing in public schools.

Bell has said that he wants to end high-stakes testing in Texas and “teaching to the test” in schools.  He has said that he wants the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test to be used, but for diagnostic purposes.  I have been hearing most of my fellow teachers saying that they agree with candidate Bell.

“The high-stakes nature of the TAKS test is corrupting our curriculum and driving teachers from the profession.  Teachers don’t like being treated like glorified test monitors and then being paid accordingly,” said Bell’s spokesman, Jason Stanford. “And that’s why Rick Perry heard crickets today at the teacher conference.”

In my humble opinion, merit pay in Texas will be even less popular with teachers than has been No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  I don’t doubt that merit pay will improve test scores in some instances, but I fail to see how it will do much to improve learning.  The two are not the same thing.  Josef Albers, a famous German immigrant teacher and artist once said, “Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.”  More time spent drilling students on likely TAKS test questions means less time spent asking the right questions and helping students learn how to think.
                                                       
Still to be determined on a district-by-district basis, is just how the merit-pay money will be rewarded.  Teachers and educational administrators all know that coming up with equitable formulas for this will be difficult if not impossible.  That’s why Austin is leaving this part of the program for districts to figure out.  Disgruntled, past-over educators will have no recourse beyond local school boards for complaints.

To illustrate why merit-pay award schemes will all fail the fairness test, consider my situation.  I teach World Geography to high-school freshmen, a social studies subject that is quite comprehensive.  It includes some earth science, some biology, some climatology, some history, some government, some economics, some language, some art, etc., etc.  But the social studies TAKS is not administered until students’ junior year.  It covers all social studies subjects, each taught at different grade levels, but with an emphasis on U.S. history.

Now, let’s say student Johnny Q’s social studies TAKS results turn out to be stellar.  Great!  But to whom to we give the credit?  To whom do we give the reward, his 11th grade history teacher, me, or his 3d grade teacher who made the greatest, albeit unmeasurable contribution by working above and beyond the call inspiring Johnny to enjoy reading?  We teachers all know that the TAKS is primarily a reading test.  So, in theory at least, how well Johnny did was the cumulative effect of a variable string of teachers and classroom environments, to say nothing of home and community environments, that none of Johnny’s teachers involved had the least bit of control over. 

All plans for distribution of merit-pay dollars devised by districts must comply with guidelines developed by state Education Commissioner, Shirley Neeley, who also will approve each application for an incentive pay grant.  Districts are not required to participate, but few are expected not to.  It’s big money.

Merit pay for teachers will have another effect too, an effect that our legislators don’t seem to care about.  Surely it has been brought to their attention; teachers’ groups have been providing Austin with every argument at their disposal for the past eleven years or more to combat the growing support for this idea.  When teachers begin to compete with one another for merit-pay awards to supplement their meager wages, cooperation between teachers will wane, especially between the seasoned, more experienced teachers and the younger ones.  How tragic!

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Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  These words, from Emma Lazarus’ famous poem, “The New Colossus,” were written in 1883 and engraved on a plaque that was placed at the base of the Statue of Liberty.  To this day, her poem influences the way we think about freedom and exile, about our nation and about the people in it.  We are indeed a nation of immigrants, increasingly and problematically so.

As a teacher of World Geography in Texas, I generally have a cross-section of races and ethnicities in my classroom.  About a third of my students are typically white-Anglo, a third are African American, and a third are Hispanic — mostly first- and second-generation immigrants from Mexico.  Many of this last third of students have poor English skills, while a few have none, speaking and reading no English whatsoever.  Providing for their special needs in education is increasingly a challenge for school districts in Texas.  But, we do the best we can.  Generally, I pair a bi-lingual student of the same ethnicity with students who can neither understand a word I say nor read a word from our textbook.  They act as interpreters.

Quite surprisingly to me, most of my students are tolerant and respectful of one another’s cultural inheritance.  And that’s a good thing.

One of my young Hispanic men last year was something of a militant.  He was very active and involved in organizing other students to boycott classes and join in on the public demon- strations that were held in our area against immigration reform.  But he was an engaging young man too, contributing an intelligent, informed perspective to our classroom discussions on matters that he cared deeply about.  He was also the class clown.  Every class has one.

One day, when we were talking about Manifest Destiny – how the United States grew to span the entire continent “from sea to shining sea,” this young man raised his hand.  “Mr. Garry,” he asked, “Do you know that Texas was once part of Mexico, and that the United States took it from us?”

“Actually,” I said, “history books, even those written and printed in Mexico, acknowledge that ‘Tejas’ was lost, not to the United States, but to ‘The Republic of Texas’ following the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836.  Mexico’s president at that time, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, signed it over to the people of Texas as part of the terms of surrender offered to him.  Texas became an independent republic, even though the people wanted to be part of the United States.  Texas did not join the union until 1845 because of the slave issue.”

“Yeah,” he said, “well… we’re taking it back.”

At this, the classroom burst into laughter.  I too had to smile because, even though what this student said wasn’t terribly funny, he spoke a very obvious truth, one that hasn’t occurred to most American citizens, and we seem powerless to do anything about it.  Our nation is indeed rapidly becoming part of Mexico.  Remember all the Mexican flags carried during the first couple of demon- stration marches.  It wasn’t until demonstration organizers started telling people to leave their flags at home that we started seeing American flags carried, ostensibly to suggest immigrants’ allegiance to this country.

On another occasion, we were studying Mexico.  One of the key concepts for students to understand in this lesson was the process of urbanization, the growth of cities.  With the economy of Mexico rapidly shifting away from agriculture to mining, manufacturing, and services, the people of Mexico are migrating en-mass from rural areas to the urban areas.  In fact, according to our textbook, most Mexicans today live in the largest city in the world (in terms of population), Mexico City.  Reviewing my students on what they should have learned from their viewing of an education video and reading, I asked the class, “Where do most Mexicans live, students?”

Without bothering to raise his hand, my class clown blurted out, “Los Angeles!”

Some Americans are very angry about the problems that so many illegal immigrants are causing, I’ve heard that there are as many as 15 million, but does anybody really know?  Crime rates are up, insurance rates are up, healthcare costs are up, and more and more young Hispanics are dropping out of school to swell the ranks of citizens who can’t find decent jobs.  Some, like many of my students, feel like the immigration issue is “much ado about nothing,” that illegals are actually good for the economy, so we should leave them alone.  Most, I suspect, are like me, in a quandary.  But I agree with our President on this one, we do very badly need meaningful, comprehensive, and enforceable immigration reform.  And it’s the responsibility of Congress to act on this great need.  This is much more important, in my mind, than debating issues like the constitutional amendment on marriage or flag-burning.  These issues just pander to special-interest constituents for reelection purposes, and tabling the debate on immigration until after the November election just proves how spineless and self-centered our lawmakers in Washington are.

If you’re in agreement with me on this, I invite you to checkout one or more of the following websites: Americans for Limited Government, Clean Up Washington, or Citizen.

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