Obey or Quit-The Bullying Mentality In Education

Obey or Quit-The Bullying In Education originally written and published by dianerav http://dianeravitch.net/2013/01/12/obey-or-quit/ A teacher sent me this post, which has generated lots of discussion on Facebook. She said that the discussion on this blog shows a widespread bullying of teachers by administrators, who are in turn being bullied to produce "results." Everyone is under pressure to meet demands created by politicians, economists, and statisticians who never spent a day in a school classroom after their high school graduation. Here goes: "Paul's Story" Yesterday I received an emergency phone call from an experienced teacher in a Bronx school who received his first ever "U" on an observation report. Emotionally overwrought with fear and anger, it took all I could do to calm him down and get him to figure out how he could resolve this issue and continue to teach and at the same time maintain his principles while having to deal with his principal. She, as authoritarian personality as they come, simply follows NYC DOE/Teachers College orders in FORCING her underlings to follow the lockstep TC workshop model lesson plan. Because he veered and used different materials and interacted differently with his kids than the plan permits he was given a "U". It was quite evident after seeing her 20-page write-up that there was something more here. Her discussions of the 2 pre-observation were filled with evidence of her obviously one-track mind.  Do it this way. I will not accept any of your alternatives. Her most consistent and often repeated criticism is that he did not use everything the Model presenter from TC demonstrated in the 3 short demonstrations he attended. It's as if everything that came before NYCDOE/TC's workshop version of teaching was anathema in this new pious world of top down education. By the way...it is a terrible way to teach if used as the one and only lesson plan every single day.  But that is probably why he received this "U" in the first place. You see, he is not passive. He is not one to just follow orders. He speaks up and out. He argues. He was being punished for that more than his not following the lesson plan. He expressed to me that he was ready to give up, to get out, to simply go to the rubber room, or be made into an ATR (absent teacher reserve). That is the new leadership's plan. Veterans: If you don't follow the rules you have two choices. Retire or be exiled. This way "The Big Talking Heads" of education can take in their fresh young faces and train them to be, as my friend said, Star Wars "Clones" obeying the orders of the dark side.

Labor Recruiting Firm must pay $4.5 million to exploited teachers

Firm must pay $4.5 million to exploited teachers in precedent-setting case

A jury ordered a labor recruiting firm and its owner Monday to pay $4.5 million to 350 Filipino teachers they lured to teach in Louisiana public schools and forced into exploitive contracts after arriving in the United States through the federal guest worker program.

Universal Placement International of Los Angeles and its owner and president, Lourdes Navarro, were ordered to pay the damages following a two-week trial in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles.

“The jury sent a clear message that exploitive and abusive business practices involving federal guest workers will not be tolerated,” said SPLC Legal Director Mary Bauer. “This decision puts unscrupulous recruitment agencies on notice that human beings – regardless of citizenship status – cannot be forced into contracts that require them to pay illegal fees.”

The verdict came in a federal class action lawsuit, Nunag Tanedo v. East Baton Rouge Parish School Board, brought on behalf of the teachers in August 2010. The teachers are represented by the SPLC, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP.

The teachers began arriving in the United States in 2007 as part of the H-1B guest-worker program administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. H-1B visas permit foreign nationals with special skills to work in the United States for up to six years. Most teachers paid the placement service about $16,000 – several times the average household income in the Philippines – to obtain their jobs.

Nearly all the teachers had to borrow money to pay the recruiting fees. Sounds like a private school loan most young Americans endure to get the chance to be a teacher. The recruiters referred the teachers to private lenders who charged 3 to 5 percent interest per month. Teachers were forced to pay these exorbitant fees because they had already made substantial investments that would not be returned. The recruiters confiscated their passports and visas until they paid.

“This groundbreaking verdict affirms the principle that all teachers working in our public schools must be treated fairly, regardless of what country they may come from,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten. “The outrageous abuses provide dramatic examples of the extreme exploitation that can occur, even here in the United States, when there is no proper oversight of the professional recruitment industry. The practices involved in this case – labor contracts signed under duress and other arrangements reminiscent of indentured servitude – are things that should have no place in 21st-century America.”

Sorry Randi, but this is the way all teachers will be treated in the near future. Please don't think that this is a foreign labor affliction. OH wait you should know that. At least the AFT and the Southern Poverty Law Center went to bat for these unfortunate folks. This aid wouldn't have occurred if the NEA or the CTA were involved. It would be a fair bet they would have denied the occurrence. Just as they ignore similar treatment to members right now within their own ranks.

In addition to paying upfront fees, the teachers were forced to sign away an additional 10 percent of the salaries they would earn during their second year of teaching. Teachers who resisted signing the contracts were threatened with being sent home and losing the thousands of dollars they had already paid. The court declared those contracts illegal and unenforceable. “We are very pleased with the verdict in this case and proud to have stood by these brave teachers as they finally obtained justice,” said Dennis Auerbach, lead attorney on the case from Covington and Burling. The theft of thousands of dollars in earnings by California school districts from unsuspecting teachers is much the same. Only difference these folks had some top notch legal help. CTA pays its attorneys a BONUS to settle a case, even at the educators expense or ultimate firing. A percentage of the difference from the super secret maximum dollars in Billable Hours. Hell, as a victim, oops client, you can't even look at the billable hours charged. Speaking of QUALITY representation, when I asked my CTA "fraud" about my Weingarten, lybarger rights as well as due process per the the CTC, I was told, "some things have to be given away to grease the wheels and get things moving!" I had no say nor was I asked.

Family social ECONOMIC background matters, SO MEASURE IT BETTER!

A few months ago, the Census Bureau released data based on a relatively new, more sophisticated measure of poverty.   The old measure had been in place since the 1960’s and did not account for the realities of today’s living expenses.  The new measure considers housing, medical, and child care costs and does a much better job adjusting for support received through federal assistance programs.   In areas with high costs of living like California and Hawaii, the new measure classified substantially more residents as poor, while the reverse was often true in areas with lower costs of living. 

This new measure is by no means perfect, and it certainly does not do anything directly to help poor families in the U.S.  But this measure may allow policy analysts to better assess the needs of American families and the relative effectiveness of safety net programs.  The change is solely on paper, but it is an important change nonetheless.

The K-12 education sector is long overdue for improvements in how it routinely measures the social background of children.  More often than not, a student’s participation in the free and reduced school lunch program and his or her LEP status are the only available indicators of family background.  Although additional indicators are sometimes collected for research or special programs and assessments, free/reduced lunch and LEP tend to be the only measures that are available for all schools in regular enrollment data.

Free/reduced lunch is a lousy indicator of socioeconomic status for a couple of reasons.  First, it classifies all students into just one of three categories (free lunch, reduced lunch, no lunch support), losing valuable detail in the process.  With this approach, a family of four making $28,000 per year will be indistinguishable from a family of four making $14,000 per year, as both would be classified as free lunch.  Second, free/reduced lunch is based on income primarily, and income by itself is not a very good indicator of social class.  In Class and Schools, Richard Rothstein points out how the use of income via free/reduced lunch as the primary measure of socioeconomic status can lead to the misrepresentation of some schools’ populations.   One school that was nationally recognized as being both high poverty and high performing was actually a public school where many Harvard and MIT graduate students sent their children.  True, graduate students don’t make much money, but few sociologists would regard this group as a high needs population. 

Social scientists have used hundreds if not thousands of different indicators to measure class and socioeconomic status, and the measures will often vary depending on available data.   However, a handful of variables emerge more often than the rest, due to both availability and their quality as predictors of outcomes in the social sector.  If I had to pick a single variable to add alongside family income, parental educational attainment would be a good choice.  A common way of representing SES in richer datasets is to combine information on income, parent education, and occupational status or occupational prestige (e.g.).  While converting occupational status into a number can be tricky, it’s a bit more straightforward for parental education levels. In many cases, measures of parent education are even reduced to maternal educational attainment due to the prevalence of single-parent households.  Thinking back to the Boston public school that enrolls the children of Harvard and MIT Ph.D. students, it is easy to see how a combination of income and parental education levels would give you a much more accurate sense of the average socioeconomic status of some families. 

I am not a lawyer, and I don’t know what legal justification the feds or states would need to collect additional personal information from parents; but, from a researcher’s perspective, the case is easy to make.  The link between social background and academic achievement is well established, but the debate over the extent to which these links should influence educational policy continues.  Achievement gaps between racial and socioeconomic groups remain large, and school segregation along these lines may be getting worse.  Meanwhile, wage, wealth, and income inequality in the U.S. continues to worsen, as it has been doing since the mid 1970’s.  In this context, there is substantial need for better measures of students’ social background, particularly given the shortcomings of current measures. 

Moreover, the weaknesses of free/reduced lunch as a socioeconomic indicator are not just an inconvenience for researchers these days.  For better or worse, many states and districts are now using statistical models to influence the retention, tenure, and promotion decisions of teachers.  Better background variables on students may help improve these models.  With all of these factors in mind, one could make the case that looking beyond free/reduced lunch is not only in the best interest of federal and state departments of education but also that it is their responsibility to do so.