Sunday, October 21, 2012

Poverty the Unspoken Fraud of Gates and the other Apostles of Corporate Structured Testing on American Education


Originally Posted 
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Schools Matter
David Berliner  on Inequality, Poverty and the Widening Education Gap
The real education experts, academics who study and research education, teach at universities and colleges and are teachers themselves, produce volumes of peer reviewed articles, write books and give lectures to share their findings, ideas and solutions to improve education. The problem is those who control the purse strings in state education departments, government and at the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, are held hostage by corporate interests who have hijacked our children's pedagogy. With the new Common Core Standards adopted in more than 46 states, testing every kid, in every subject, and mining the data will only exacerbate the dysfunction and lead to the inevitable revolt we are already seeing across the country. Most parents, students and teachers living through this economic depression see scarce resources further dried up and spent on more testing and more data. Austerity in the poorest and neediest schools districts has exposed the harsh reality of three decades of failed education policy that ignores inequality and poverty.

Until the pipeline funneling a steady stream of profits for high stakes standardized testing companies like Pearson and McGraw Hill are brought under control, the education industrial complex will continue to push through harmful education policy.  Teachers who have integrity are either leaving the profession, getting fired or still suffering from the daily demoralization and stress that comes from working under the tyranny of accountability based on meaningless numbers.

Diane Ravitch shared the most recent research paper by David Berliner, author of The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud and the Attack on America's Public Schools. Berliner has been writing about this for decades along with many others. He's talked about the 600 lb. gorilla in the room,
poverty, that has been virtually ignored or used against teachers with the "no excuses" drumbeat from people who know nothing about what these children or their teachers face is the most blighted neighborhoods and cities all across the country.

Effects of Inequality and Poverty vs. Teachers and Schooling on America’s Youth

Background/Context: This paper arises out of frustration with the results of school reforms carried out over the past few decades. These efforts have failed. They need to be abandoned. In their place must come recognition that income inequality causes many social problems, including problems associated with education. Sadly, compared to all other wealthy nations, the USA has the largest income gap between its wealthy and its poor citizens. Correlates associated with the size of the income gap in various nations are well described in Wilkinson & Pickett (2010), whose work is cited throughout this article. They make it clear that the bigger the income gap in a nation or a state, the greater the social problems a nation or a state will encounter. Thus it is argued that the design of better economic and social policies can do more to improve our schools than continued work on educational policy independent of such concerns. Purpose/Objective/Research Question: The research question asked is why so many school reform efforts have produced so little improvement in American schools. The answer offered is that the sources of school failure have been thought to reside inside the schools, resulting in attempts to improve America’s teachers, curriculum, testing programs and administration. It is argued in this paper, however, that the sources of America’s educational problems are outside school, primarily a result of income inequality. Thus it is suggested that targeted economic and social policies have more potential to improve the nations schools than almost anything currently being proposed by either political party at federal, state or local levels.
Research Design: This is an analytic essay on the reasons for the failure of almost all contemporary school reform efforts. It is primarily a report about how inequality affects all of our society, and a review of some research and social policies that might improve our nations’ schools. Conclusions/Recommendations: It is concluded that the best way to improve America’s schools is through jobs that provide families living wages. Other programs are noted that offer some help for students from poor families. But in the end, it is inequality in income and the poverty that accompanies such inequality, that matters most for education. 



What does it take to get politicians and the general public to abandon misleading ideas, such as, “Anyone who tries can pull themselves up by the bootstraps,” or that “Teachers are the most important factor in determining the achievement of our youth”? Many ordinary citizens and politicians believe these statements to be true, even though life and research informs us that such statements are usually not true.


Certainly people do pull themselves up by their bootstraps and teachers really do turn around the lives of some of their students, but these are more often exceptions, and not usually the rule. Similarly, while there are many overweight, hard-drinking, cigarette-smoking senior citizens, no one seriously uses these exceptions to the rule to suggest that it is perfectly all right to eat, drink, and smoke as much as one wants. Public policies about eating, drinking, and smoking are made on the basis of the general case, not the exceptions to those cases. This is not so in education.

For reasons that are hard to fathom, too many people believe that in education the exceptions are the rule. Presidents and politicians of both parties are quick to point out the wonderful but occasional story of a child’s rise from poverty to success and riches. They also often proudly recite the heroic, remarkable, but occasional impact of a teacher or a school on a child. These stories of triumph by individuals who were born poor, or success by educators who changed the lives of their students, are widely believed narratives about our land and people, celebrated in the press, on television, and in the movies. But in fact, these are simply myths that help us feel good to be American. These stories of success reflect real events, and thus they are certainly worth studying and celebrating so we might learn more about how they occur (cf. Casanova, 2010). But the general case is that poor people stay poor and that teachers and schools serving impoverished youth do not often succeed in changing the life chances for their students.

America’s dirty little secret is that a large majority of poor kids attending schools that serve the poor are not going to have successful lives. Reality is not nearly as comforting as myth. Reality does not make us feel good. But the facts are clear. Most children born into the lower social classes will not make it out of that class, even when exposed to heroic educators. A simple statistic illustrates this point: In an age where college degrees are important for determining success in life, only 9% of low-income children will obtain those degrees (Bailey & Dynarski, 2011). And that discouraging figure is based on data from before the recent recession that has hurt family income and resulted in large increases in college tuition. Thus, the current rate of college completion by low-income students is probably lower than suggested by those data. Powerful social forces exist to constrain the lives led by the poor, and our nation pays an enormous price for not trying harder to ameliorate these conditions.

Because of our tendency to expect individuals to overcome their own handicaps, and teachers to save the poor from stressful lives, we design social policies that are sure to fail since they are not based on reality. Our patently false ideas about the origins of success have become drivers of national educational policies. This ensures that our nation spends time and money on improvement programs that do not work consistently enough for most children and their families, while simultaneously wasting the good will of the public (Timar & Maxwell-Jolly, 2012). In the current policy environment we often end up alienating the youth and families we most want to help, while simultaneously burdening teachers with demands for success that are beyond their capabilities.

Detailed in what follows is the role that inequality in wealth, and poverty, play in determining many of the social outcomes that we value for our youth. It is hoped that our nation’s social and educational policies can be made to work better if the myths we live by are understood to be just that, simple myths, and we learn instead to understand reality better.

A WRONGHEADED EDUCATION POLICY

Bi-partisan congressional support in the USA for the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed in 2001, demanded that every child in every public and charter school in the country be tested in grades 3-8 and grade 10. There were severe consequences for schools that did not improve rapidly. The high-stakes accountability program at the center of the policy was designed to get lazy students, teachers, and administrators to work harder. It targeted, in particular, those who attended and worked in schools with high concentrations of poor children. In this way it was believed that the achievement gap between poor students and those who were middle-class or wealthy could be closed, as would the gaps in achievement that exist between black, Hispanic, American Indian, and white students. It has not worked. If there have been gains in achievement they have been slight, mostly in mathematics, but not as easily found in reading (see Amrein & Berliner, 2002; Braun, Chapman, & Vezzu, 2010; Chudowsky, Chudowsky, & Kober, 2009; Lee, 2008; Nichols, Glass, & Berliner, 2006, 2012; Smith, 2007). It may well be that the gains now seen are less than those occurring before the NCLB act was put into place. In fact, the prestigious and non-political National Research Council (2011) says clearly that the NCLB policy is a failure, and all the authors of chapters in a recently edited book offering alternative policies to NCLB reached the same conclusion (Timar and Maxwell-Jolly, 2012). Moreover, a plethora of negative side effects associated with high-stakes testing are now well documented (Nichols and Berliner, 2007; Ravitch, 2010).

By 2008-2009, after at least five years of high-stakes testing in all states, about one-third of all U.S. schools failed to meet their targeted goals under NCLB (Dietz, 2010). Estimates in 2011, by the U.S. Secretary of Education, are that more than 80% of all U.S. public schools will fail to reach their achievement targets in 2012 (Duncan, 2011), and almost every school in the nation will fail by 2014. And this widespread failure is with each state using their own testing instruments, setting their own passing rates, and demanding that their teachers prepare students assiduously. The federal government at the time this paper is being written is now quickly backing off the requirements of the failed NCLB act, and granting waivers from its unreachable goals to those states willing to comply with other “reform” efforts that also will not work. These other inadequate reforms required by the federal government include the forced adoption of the Common Core State Standards, using numerous assessments from pre-kindergarten to high school graduation that are linked to the Common Core, and evaluating teachers on the basis of their students’ test performance.

In addition, and long overdue, as this paper is being written a backlash against high-stakes testing from teachers, administrators, and parents has begun (see “Growing national movement against ‘high stakes’ testing,” 2012). Still, most state legislatures, departments of education, and the federal congress cling to the belief that if only we can get the assessment program right, we will fix what ails America’s schools. They will not give up their belief in what is now acknowledged by the vast majority of educators and parents to be a failed policy.

Still further discouraging news for those who advocate testing as a way to reform schools comes from the PISA assessments (The Program for International Student Assessment). Nations with high-stakes testing have generally gone down in scores from 2000 to 2003, and then again by 2006. Finland, on the other hand, which has no high-stakes testing, and an accountability system that relies on teacher judgment and school level professionalism much more than tests, has shown growth over these three PISA administrations (Sahlberg, 2011).

Finland is often considered the highest-achieving nation in the world. Their enviable position in world rankings of student achievement at age 15 has occurred with a minimum of testing and homework, a minimum of school hours per year, and a minimum of imposition on local schools by the central government (Sahlberg, 2011). Although we are constantly benchmarking American school performance against the Finns, we might be better served by benchmarking our school policies and social programs against theirs. For example, Finland’s social policies result in a rate of children in poverty (those living in families whose income is less than 50% of median income in the nation) that is estimated at well under 5%. In the USA that rate is estimated at well over 20%!

The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, Hispanics and Anglos, the poor and the rich, are hard to erase because the gaps have only a little to do with what goes on in schools, and a lot to do with social and cultural factors that affect student performance (Berliner 2006; 2009). Policymakers in Washington and state capitals throughout the USA keep looking for a magic bullet that can be fired by school “reformers” to effect a cure for low achievement among the poor, English language learners, and among some minorities. It is, of course, mostly wasted effort if the major cause of school problems stems from social conditions beyond the control of the schools. The evidence is that such is the case.

Virtually every scholar of teaching and schooling knows that when the variance in student scores on achievement tests is examined along with the many potential factors that may have contributed to those test scores, school effects account for about 20% of the variation in achievement test scores, and teachers are only a part of that constellation of variables associated with “school.” Other school variables such as peer group effects, quality of principal leadership, school finance, availability of counseling and special education services, number and variety of AP courses, turnover rates of teachers, and so forth, also play an important role in student achievement. Teachers only account for a portion of the “school” effect, and the school effect itself is only modest in its impact on achievement.

On the other hand, out-of-school variables account for about 60% of the variance that can be accounted for in student achievement. In aggregate, such factors as family income; the neighborhood’s sense of collective efficacy, violence rate, and average income; medical and dental care available and used; level of food insecurity; number of moves a family makes over the course of a child’s school years; whether one parent or two parents are raising the child; provision of high-quality early education in the neighborhood; language spoken at home; and so forth, all substantially affect school achievement.

What is it that keeps politicians and others now castigating teachers and public schools from acknowledging this simple social science fact, a fact that is not in dispute: Outside-of-school factors are three times more powerful in affecting student achievement than are the inside-the-school factors (Berliner, 2009)? And why wouldn’t that be so? Do the math! On average, by age 18, children and youth have spent about 10 percent of their lives in what we call schools, while spending around 90 percent of their lives in family and neighborhood. Thus, if families and neighborhoods are dysfunctional or toxic, their chance to influence youth is nine times greater than the schools’! So it seems foolish to continue trying to affect student achievement with the most popular contemporary educational policies, mostly oriented toward teachers and schools, while assiduously ignoring the power of the outside-of-school factors. Perhaps it is more than foolish. If one believes that doing the same thing over and over and getting no results is a reasonable definition of madness, then what we are doing is not merely foolish: it is insane.

HOW INEQUALITY OF INCOME, AND POVERTY AFFECT THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF OUR YOUTH

Few would expect there to be equality of achievement outcomes when inequality of income exists among families. The important question for each nation is the magnitude of the effect that social class has on test scores within countries. In the recent PISA test of reading achievement, socio-economic variables (measured quite differently than is customarily done in the USA) explained about 17% of the variation in scores for the USA (OECD, 2010). But socioeconomic status explained less than 10 percent of the variance in outcomes in counties such as Norway, Japan, Finland, and Canada. Although in some nations a family’s social class had a greater effect on tested achievement, it is also quite clear that in some nations the effects of familial social class on student school achievement are about half of what they are in the USA. Another way to look at this is to note that if a Finnish student’s family moved up one standard deviation in social class on the PISA index, that student’s score would rise 31 points on the PISA test, which has a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100. But if that same happy family circumstance occurred in the USA, the student’s score would rise 42 points, indicating that social status has about 30 percent more of an effect on the test scores among American youth than in Finland.

The PISA data were also looked at for the percent of children in a nation that came from disadvantaged backgrounds and still managed to score quite well on the test. That percent is over 80% in Hong Kong, over 50% in Korea, over 40% in Finland, but not even 30% in the USA. Somehow other nations have designed policies affecting lower social class children and their families that result in a better chance for those youth to excel in school. The USA appears to have social and educational polices and practices that end up limiting the numbers of poor youth who can excel on tests of academic ability.

How does this relation between poverty and achievement play out? If we broke up American public schools into five categories based on the percent of poor children in a school, as in Table 1, it is quite clear that America’s youth score remarkably high if they are in schools where less than 10% of the children are eligible for free and reduced lunch. These data are from the international study of math and science trends completed in 2007. The data presented are fourth-grade mathematics data, but eighth- grade mathematics, and science data at both the fourth and eighth grades,, provide the same pattern (Gonzales, Williams, Jocelyn, Roey, Kastberg, & Brenwa, 2008). If this group of a few million students were a nation, it would have scored the highest in the world on these tests of mathematics and science. Our youth also score quite high if they are in schools where between 10 and 24.9% of the children are poor. These two groups of youth, attending schools where fewer than 25%  percent of the students come from impoverished families, total about 12 million students, and their scores are exceeded by only four nations in the world (Aud, Hussar, Johnson, Kena, Roth, Manning, Wang, & Zhang, J., 2012).

Our youth perform well even if they attend schools where poverty rates of youth are between 25 and 49.9%. And these three groups of students total about 26 million students, over half the U.S. elementary and secondary public school population. It is quite clear that America’s public school students achieve at high levels when they attend schools that are middle- or upper-middle-class in composition. The staff and cultures of those schools, as well as the funding for those schools, appears adequate, overall, to give America all the academic talent it can use.

Table 1. School level of family poverty and TIMSS scores, where the U.S. average was 529 and the international average was 500 (Gonzales et al., 2008)

Percent of Students at a School Whose Families are in Poverty
Less
than
10%
10%
to
24.9%
25%
to
49.9%
50%
to
74.9%
More
than
75%
Score
on
TIMSS

583

553

537

510

479

On the other hand, children and youth attending schools where more than 50% of the children are in poverty – the two categories of schools with the highest percent of children and youth in poverty – do not do nearly as well. In the schools with the poorest students in America, those where over 75% of the student body is eligible for free and reduced lunch, academic performance is not merely low: it is embarrassing. Almost 20% of American children and youth, about 9 million students, attend these schools. The lack of academic skills acquired by these students will surely determine their future lack of success and pose a problem for our nation.

The schools that those students attend are also funded differently than the schools attended by students of wealthier parents. The political power of a neighborhood and local property tax rates have allowed for apartheid-lite systems of schooling to develop in our country. For example, 48% of high poverty schools receive less money in their local school districts than do low poverty schools (Heuer and Stullich, 2011). Logic would suggest that the needs in the high poverty schools were greater, but the extant data show that almost half of the high poverty schools were receiving less money than schools in the same district enrolling families exhibiting less family poverty.

Table 2 presents virtually the same pattern using a different international test, the PISA test of 2009 (Fleischman, Hopstock, Pelczar, & Shelley, 2010). When these 15-year-old American youth attend schools enrolling 10% or fewer of their classmates from poor families, achievement is well above average in reading, and the same pattern holds for science and mathematics. In fact, if this group of American youth were a nation, their reading scores would be the highest in the world! And if we add in the youth who attend schools where poverty levels range between 10 and 24.9% we have a total of about 26 million youth, constituting over half of all American public school children whose average score on the PISA test is exceeded by only two other developed countries. Given all the critiques of public education that exist, this is a remarkable achievement. But the students in schools where poverty rates exceed 75% score lower, much lower than their wealthier age-mates. In fact, their average scores are below every participating OECD country except Mexico.

Table 2. School level of family poverty and PISA scores in reading, where the U.S. average was 500 and the international average was 493 (Fleischman et al., 2010)

Percent of Students at a School Whose Families are in Poverty
Less
than
10%
10%
to
24.9%
25%
to
49.9%
50%
to
74.9%
More
than
75%
Score
on
PISA

551

527

502

471

446

The pattern in these data is duplicated in Australia (Perry & McConney, 2010). And this pattern is replicated in other OECD countries, though not always as dramatically. The pattern seen in our country and many non-OECD nations exists because of a hardening of class lines that, in turn, has been associated with the development of ghettos and hyperghettos to house the poor and minorities (Wacquant, 2002). The hardening of class lines results also in some overwhelmingly wealthy white enclaves. The neighborhood schools that serve these ghettos and hyperghettos are often highly homogenous. Currently, white students attend schools that are between 90% and 100% minority at a rate that is under 1%. But about 40% of both Hispanic and black students attend schools that are 90% to 100% minority (Orfield, 2009). A form of apartheid-lite exists for these students, and to a lesser but still too large an extent for Native Americans as well.

The grouping of poor minorities into schools serving other poor minorities seems frequently to produce social and educational norms that are not conducive for high levels of school achievement. For example, radio station WBEZ in Chicago (WBEZ, 2010) recently reported that of 491 Illinois schools where the students are 90% poor and also 90% minority, only one school, a magnet school enrolling 200 students, was able to demonstrate that 90% of its students met or exceeded basic state standards. In most states “basic” is acceptable, but not a very demanding standard to meet. Still, this school beat the odds that quite realistically can be computed to be about 491 to 1 in Illinois. Schools with the kinds of demographics these schools have rarely achieve high outcomes. Nevertheless, there is a widespread and continuing myth in America that schools that are 90% minority and 90% poor can readily achieve 90% passing rates on state tests if only they had competent educators in those schools (cf. Reeves, 2000). This apparently can happen occasionally, as seems to be the case in Chicago, but like other educational myths, this is a rare phenomenon, not one that is commonplace.

The believers in the possibilities of “90/90/90,” as it is called, are part of a “No Excuses” group of concerned citizens and educators who want to be sure that poverty is not used as an excuse for allowing schools that serve the poor to perform inadequately. But the “No Excuses” and the “90/90/90” advocates can themselves become excuse-makers, allowing vast inequalities in income and high rates of poverty to define our society without questioning the morality and the economic implications of this condition. Ignoring the powerful and causal role of inequality and poverty on so many social outcomes that we value (see below), not merely school achievement, is easily as shameful as having educators use poverty as an excuse to limit what they do to help the students and families that their schools serve.

Our data on school performance and segregation by housing prices ought to be a source of embarrassment for our government, still among the richest in the world and constantly referring to its national commitment to equality of opportunity. Instead of facing the issues connected with poverty and housing policy, federal and state education policies are attempting to test more frequently; raise the quality of entering teachers; evaluate teachers on their test scores and fire the ones that have students who perform poorly; use incentives for students and teachers; allow untrained adults with college degrees to enter the profession; break teachers unions, and so forth. Some of these policies may help to improve education, but it is clear that the real issues are around neighborhood, family, and school poverty rates, predominantly associated with the lack of jobs that pay enough for people to live with some dignity. Correlated with employment and poverty issues are the problems emanating from a lack of health care, dental care, and care for vision; food insecurity; frequent household moves; high levels of single-parent homes; high levels of student absenteeism; family violence; low birth weight children, and so forth.

Another way to look at this is by interrogating data we already have. For example, if national poverty rates really are a causal factor in how youth perform on tests, then Finland, one of highest-achieving nations in the world on PISA tests, with a childhood poverty rate of about 4%, might perform differently were it instead to have the US childhood poverty rate of about 22%. And what might happen if the USA, instead of the appallingly high childhood poverty rates it currently has, had the childhood poverty rate that Finland has? A bit of statistical modeling by Condron (2011) suggests that the Finnish score on mathematics would drop from a world-leading 548 to a much more ordinary (and below the international average) score of 487. Meanwhile, the U.S.’ below-average score of 475 would rise to a score above the international average, a score of 509! A major reduction of poverty for America’s youth might well improve America’s schools more than all other current educational policies now in effect, and all those planned by the President and the Congress.

THE EFFECTS OF POVERTY AND INEQUALITY ON SOCIAL INDICATORS

Poverty can exist without great inequalities, but in societies where inequalities are as great as in ours, poverty may appear to be worse to those who have little, perhaps because all around them are those who have so much more. So relative poverty, that is poverty in the midst of great wealth, rather than poverty per se, may make the negative effects of poverty all the more powerful. This is a problem for the USA because the USA has the greatest level of inequality in income of any wealthy nation in the world (Wilkinson & Pickett 2010). This hurts our nation in many ways. For example, when you create an index composed of a number of factors reflecting the health of a society, including such things as teenage birth rate, infant mortality rate, ability to achieve in life independent of family circumstances, crime rate, mental illness rate, longevity, PISA performance, and so forth, a powerful finding emerges. The level of inequality within a nation—not its wealth—strongly predicts poor performance on this index made up of a multitude of social outcomes! In the USA this finding also holds across our 50 states: Inequality within a state predicts a host of negative outcomes for the people of that state.

Indicator 1. Child Well-Being

As measured by UNESCO, children fare better in Finland, Norway, or Sweden, each of which has a low rate of inequality. But child well-being is in much shorter supply in England and the USA, each of which has high rates of inequality (Wilkinson & Pickett 2010). Schools, of course, suffer when children are not well taken care of. The problems associated with inequality and poverty arrive at school at about 5 years of age, and continue through graduation from high school, except for the approximately 25% of students who do not graduate on time, the majority of whom are poor and/or minority (Aud et al., 2012).

Indicator 2. Mental Health

The prevalence of all types of mental illness is greater in more unequal countries, so the USA with its high rate of inequality has more than double the rate of mental illness to deal with than do Japan, Germany, Spain, and Belgium. The latter countries each have relatively low rates of income inequality (Wilkinson & Pickett 2010). How does this affect schools? The prevalence rate for severe mental illness is about 4% in the general population, but in poor neighborhoods it might be 8%  or more, while in wealthier neighborhoods that rate might be about 2%. Imagine two public schools each with 500 youth enrolled, one in the wealthy suburbs and one in a poor section of an inner city. As in most public schools, administrators and teachers try to deal sympathetically with students’ parents and families. The wealthier school has 10 mentally ill families and their children to deal with, while the school that serves the poorer neighborhood has 40 such families and children to deal with. And as noted, almost 50 percent of these schools get less money than do schools in their district that are serving the wealthier families. Thus inequality and poverty, through problems associated with mental health, can easily overburden the faculty of schools that serve poor youth, making it harder to teach and to learn in such institutions.

Indicator 3. Illegal Drug Use

Illegal drug use is higher in countries with greater inequalities. And the USA is highest in inequality among wealthy nations. So rates of illegal drug use (opiates, cocaine, cannabis, ecstasy, and amphetamines) are dramatically higher than in the northern European countries, where greater equality of income and lower rates of poverty exist (Wilkinson & Pickett 2010). High-quality schooling in communities where illegal drugs are common among youth and their families is hard to accomplish. That is especially true when the commerce in the neighborhood the school serves is heavily dependent on drug sales. This occurs in many urban and rural communities where employment in decent paying jobs is unavailable.

Indicator 4 And Indicator 5. Infant And Maternal Mortality

The tragedy associated with infant mortality occurs much more frequently in more unequal countries than in more equal countries. Thus, the USA has an infant mortality rate that is well over that of other countries that distribute wealth more evenly than we do (Wilkinson & Pickett 2010). Recent data reveal that 40 countries have infant mortality rates lower than we do (Save the Children, 2011). American children are twice as likely as children in Finland, Greece, Iceland, Japan, Luxembourg, Norway, Slovenia, Singapore, or Sweden to die before reaching age 5. A woman in the USA is more than 7 times as likely as a woman in Italy or Ireland to die from pregnancy-related causes. And an American woman’s risk of maternal death is 15-fold that of a woman in Greece (Save the Children, 2011). The average overall American rate is much worse in poor states like Mississippi. And the rate of those tragedies is even higher still for African Americans and other poor people who live in states like Mississippi. Comparisons with other nations make it quite clear that our system of medical care is grossly deficient.

But here is the educational point: Maternal and infant mortality rates, and low birth weights, are strongly correlated. Every low-birth-weight child has oxygen and brain bleeding problems that produce minor or major problems when they show up at school five years later. So inequality and poverty—particularly for African Americans—are affecting schooling though family tragedy associated with childhood deaths, and through low birth weights that predict poor school performance.

Indicator 6. School Dropouts

In the USA if you scale states from those that are more equal in income distribution (for example Utah, New Hampshire, and Iowa) to those that are much more unequal in the distribution of income (for example Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi) a strong trend appears. Dropout rates are much higher in the more unequal states (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010). Poverty and a lack of hope for a good future take their toll on youth in the more unequal states and students drop out of school at high rates. This costs our society a great deal of money through increased need for public assistance by these youth, the loss of tax revenues from their work, and the higher likelihood of their incarceration. Inequality and the poverty that accompanies it take a terrible toll.

Indicator 7. Social Mobility  

Despite the facts, the USA prides itself on being the nation where a person can be anything they want to be. But if that was ever true, and that is debatable, it is now less true than it has been. In reality, social mobility is greater in nations that have greater equality of income than our country does (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010). We now know that the correlation of income between siblings in the Nordic countries is around .20, indicating that only about 4% of the variance in the incomes of siblings could be attributable to joint family influences. But in the U.S., the correlation between the income of siblings is over .40, indicating that about 16% of the variance among incomes of siblings in the U.S. is due to family (Jantti, Osterbacka, Raaum, Ericksson, & Bjorklund, 2002). These data support the thesis that the Nordic countries are much more meritocratic than the U.S.

Family, for good or bad, exerts 4 times the influence on income earned by siblings in the U.S. than in the Nordic countries. Sibling income also provides evidence that class lines in the U.S. are harder to overcome today than previously. Sibling incomes have grown quite a bit closer in the U.S. over the last few decades, indicating that family resources (having them or not having them) play an increasing role in a child’s success in life. Data informs us that only 6% of the children born into families in the lowest 20% of income (often about $25,000 a year or less) ever get into the top 20% in income (about $100,000 or more per year). Now, in the USA, our parents are a greater determiner of our income in life than either our weight or our height. That is, your parents’ station in life determines your station in life to a much greater degree than we ever thought. Despite our myths, it turns out that among the wealthy nations of the world, except for Great Britain, we have the lowest level of income mobility – that is, the highest rate of generational equality of income (Noah, 2012). Income heritability is greater and economic mobility therefore lower in the United States than in Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain, and France. “Almost (arguably every) comparably developed nation for which we have data offers greater income mobility than the United States” (Noah, 2012, p. 35). Yet we are the nation with the most deeply ingrained myths about how we are a self-made people!

Indicator 8. School Achievement  

At least one reason for this lack of movement in generational income is the increasingly unequal schooling provided to our nation’s middle- and lower-class children. Sean Reardon (2011) has built a common metric for test data from the 1940s through to the mid-2000s. He convincingly shows that the gap in scores between youth whose families are in the 90th percentile in income, and youth whose families are in the 10th percentile in income, is now dramatically greater than it was. In the 1940s the gap between rich and poor youth (youth from families in the 90th percentile versus youth from families in the 10th percentile in income) was about .6 of a standard deviation on achievement tests. This is a large difference, but still, the curves of achievement for poorer and richer youth overlap a great deal. Many poor students score higher than many rich students, and many rich students score lower than many poor students. But in recent times—the 2000s—the gap between youth from the 90th and youth from the 10th percentile families has grown wider. Now the difference between children from these two kinds of families is about 1.25 standard deviations, with much less overlap between the two groups of young Americans. Since we live in a world where income and income stability are highly correlated with education, these data mean that more of the better-off children will succeed and more of the less-well-off youth will fail to make a good living. The rich are getting richer (in educational terms, which translates into annual salary), and the poor are getting poorer (in both educational opportunities and in the income that accompanies educational achievement). Our nation cannot stand as we know it for much longer if we allow this inequality in opportunity to continue.

Indicator 9. Teenage Birth Rate

Despite the fact that the birth rate for teens in the United States is going down, we still have the highest teenage birth rate in the industrialized world. That is surely related to the strong relationship between income inequality in a society and teen pregnancy rates (Wilkinson & Pickett 2010). The USA has, by far, the highest level of inequality among wealthy nations. So, not surprisingly, the USA also has by far the highest rate of teenage pregnancy. Poverty, the result of great inequality, plays a role in this, as demonstrated with some California data (Males, 2010). In Marin County, one of the wealthiest counties in America, with a poverty rate for whites in 2008 of about 4%, the teenage birth rate per 1,000 women ages 15-19 was 2.2. In Tulare County, one of the poorest counties in the USA, Hispanic teens had a poverty rate of about 41% in 2008, while the teenage birth rate was 77.2 per 1,000 women ages 15-19. While that difference is astounding, among Tulare County black teens, with a similar poverty rate, the teenage birth rate was about 102 per 1,000 women between 15 and 19 years of age. Inequality and poverty are strongly associated with rate of teenage pregnancies.

But poverty has relationships with other characteristics of families, and among them is a higher rate for impoverished youth to experience abuse, domestic violence, and family strife during their childhood (Berliner, 2009). Girls who experience such events in childhood are much more likely to become pregnant as teenagers, and that risk increases with the number of adverse childhood experiences she has. This kind of family dysfunction in childhood has enduring and unfavorable health consequences for women during the adolescent years, childbearing years, and beyond. And this all ends up as social problems, because teenage pregnancy is not only hard on the mother, it is hard on the child, and it is also hard on the school that tries to serve them.

Indicator 10. Rates Of Imprisonment  

Imprisonment rates are higher in countries with more unequal income distribution (Wilkinson & Pickett 2010). The USA, with its high rate of inequality, also has, by far, the highest rate of imprisonment among the wealthy countries, but also appears to have more prisoners per capita than almost every other country in the world. We punish harshly, and the poor and poor minorities are punished a lot more, and for longer times, than are their white and wealthier fellow citizens. Michelle Alexander (2010) vividly describes the new “Jim Crow” laws that incarcerate poor black youth at much higher rates than wealthy white students, even when the laws that were broken were identical. Human Rights Watch (2000, 2002) identifies the USA as unique in its desire to punish, and particularly to punish by social class. Their data show that in many states whites are more likely to violate drug laws than people of color, yet black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates 20 to 50 times greater than those of white men. They found, as well, that Hispanics, Native Americans, and other people of color who are poor, are incarcerated at rates far higher than their representation in the population.

For example, a decade ago in Connecticut, for every 11 white males incarcerated, there were 254 black men and 125 Hispanics, suggesting a strong bias in sentencing (Human Rights Watch, 2002). While some of these males were family men, and their imprisonment hurt their family, many of the poor and minority people incarcerated were women, and their imprisonment was much more likely to hurt their children’s chances for success. In 15 states, black women were incarcerated at rates between 10 and 35 times greater than those of white women, while in eight states, Latinas were incarcerated at rates between 4 and 7 times greater than those of white women. And if we hope that youthful offenders would be helped by sentencing to prison, we must wonder why six states incarcerated black youth under age 18 in adult facilities at rates between 12 and 25 times greater than those of white youth. Similarly, in four states, Hispanic youth under age 18 were incarcerated in adult facilities at rates between 7 and 17 times greater than those of white youth. In these states, particularly, rehabilitation and education seem not to be the goal of the state. Rather, the goal seems to be the development of a permanent criminal class for black and Latino youth. It is not far-fetched to point out that in a nation with a large and growing private prison system, a permanent prison class ensures permanent profits!

As tragic as the biases seen in the ways U.S. law is administered in many states are, the after effects for incarceration may even be worse! That is because, once released, former prisoners find it difficult or impossible to secure jobs, education, housing, and public assistance. And in many states, they cannot vote or serve on juries. Alexander (2010) rightly calls this situation as a permanent second-class citizen a new form of segregation. For the men and women who hope to build better lives after incarceration, and especially for the children and youth in their families, family life after paying back society for their crimes seems much more difficult than it should be.

POLICIES FOR IMPROVING EDUCATION AND INCOME EQUALITY

It is hard to argue against school reformers who want more rigorous course work, higher standards of student performance, the removal of poor teachers, greater accountability from teachers and schools, higher standards for teacher education, and so forth. I stand with them all! But in various forms and in various places, all of that has been tried and the system has improved little—if at all. The current menu of reforms simply may not help education improve as long as we refuse to notice that public education is working fine for many of America’s families and youth, and that there is a common characteristic among families for whom the public schools are failing. That characteristic is poverty brought about through, and exacerbated by, great inequality in wealth. The good news is that this can be fixed.

First, of course, is through jobs that pay decently so people have the dignity of work and can provide for their children. To do that we need a fair wage, or a living wage, rather than a minimum wage. This would ensure that all workers could support themselves and their families at a reasonable level. The current minimum wage is set at $7.25 an hour, and would net a full-time worker under $15,000 per year. That is not much in our present economic system. The U.S. government sets the poverty level at $22,050 for a family of four in most states. But for a family to live decently on $22,050 is almost impossible. At this writing, fair wages/living wages might well require more like $12.00 an hour in many communities. That would certainly raise the price for goods and services, but it would also greatly stimulate local economies and quite likely save in the costs for school and the justice system in the long run.  

Our nation also needs higher taxes. You cannot have a commons, that is, you cannot have teachers and counselors, librarians and school nurses, coaches for athletics and mentors in technology, without resources to pay them. Nor can you have police and fire services, parks and forest service personnel, bridges and roads, transportation systems, medical care, service to the elderly and the disabled, and so forth, without taxes to pay for jobs in these areas. Schools, parks, health care, public support of transportation, police and fire protection, et cetera, are either basic rights that citizens in a democracy enjoy, or not. If the former, then government needs to employ directly or through private enterprise the people to provide those services. Either of those two strategies, government jobs or government support for private jobs that help to preserve the commons, requires revenue.

Despite the distortions in the press and the vociferous complaints by many of its citizens, the facts are clear: The USA has an extremely low tax rate compared to any of the OECD countries, the wealthier countries of the world. Only two countries pay a lower rate of taxes relative to Gross Domestic Product, while 29 countries pay more in taxes, and countries like Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Norway, and Sweden, pay about 75% more in taxes than we do to support civic life (Citizens for Tax Justice, 2011). This provides the citizens of those countries such things as free preschools medical, dental and vision care; support for unemployed or single women; no food insecurity among the poor; free college if you pass the entrance examination; and so forth.

Beyond the low tax rate, the USA also has many highly profitable corporations that pay less than nothing in taxes. That is, they not only pay no taxes, they get rebates! Table 3 shows that much more tax revenue should be obtainable from U.S. corporations if we would elect politicians who understand that the commons will disappear if corporations are not contributing to its maintenance.

Table 3. Corporate profits, taxes paid, and rebates obtained between 2008-2010 (McIntyre, Gardner, Wilkins, & Phillips, 2011)

Corporation
Name
Profits
Taxes
Paid
Rebates
Obtained
General Electric
$10,460,000,000
ZERO
$4,737,000,000
Verizon
$32,518,000,000
ZERO
$951,000,000
Boeing
$9,735,000,000
ZERO
$178,000,000
Wells Fargo
$49,370,000,000
ZERO
$681,000,000
Honeywell International
$4,903,000,000
ZERO
$34,000,000


Increased tax revenues could provide more public sector jobs to help both our nation and our schools do better. Some of the money raised for the betterment of the commons could be used for high-quality early childhood education for the children of poor families. Replicable research teaches us a near-certain method to reduce the population of poor youth that end up in jail. That is reliably accomplished by providing poor children with access to high-quality early childhood education. Nobel Laureate economist James Heckman studied the Perry Preschool program, in which children from poverty homes attended a high-quality preschool. The effects of that program in adulthood are remarkable.

A high-quality preschool, of course, requires “up-front” tax dollars to be spent, but ultimately saves society billions of dollars. Heckman and colleagues (Heckman, Seong, Pinto, Savelyev, & Yavitz, 2010) showed a 7% to 10% per year return on investment based on increased school and career achievement of the youth who were in the program, as well as reduced costs in remedial education, health care, and avoidance of the criminal justice system. Similarly the Chicago Child Parent Center Study (Reynolds, Temple, Robertson, & Mann, 2001) was estimated to return about $48,000 in benefits to the public, per child, from a half-day public school preschool for at-risk children. In the Chicago study, the participants, at age 20, were more likely to have finished high school—and were less likely to have been held back, need remedial help, or to have been arrested. The estimated return on investment was about $7.00 for every dollar invested. In the current investment environment these are among the highest returns one can get. Sadly, however, America would rather ignore its poor youth and then punish them rather than invest in them, despite the large cost savings to society in the long run!

Another policy proven to improve the achievement of poor youth is to provide small classes for them in the early grades. There is ample proof that this also saves society thousands of dollars in the long run, though it requires extra funding in the short run. Biddle & Berliner (2003) reviewed the famous randomized study of small class size in Tennessee, the Milwaukee STAR study, some reanalyses by economists of original research on class size, a meta-analysis, and reviews of classroom processes associated with lower class size, and found that class sizes of 15 or 17 in the early grades have long-term effects on the life chances of youth who come from poverty homes and neighborhoods. Instead of firing teachers and raising class sizes, as we have done over the last few years because of the Great Recession, we should instead be adding teachers in the early grades to schools that serve the poor. Using those teachers to reduce class size for the poor will result in less special education need, greater high school completion rates, greater college attendance rates, less incarceration, and a more just society, at lower costs, over the long run.

Another policy with almost certain impact is the provision of summer educational opportunities that are both academic and cultural for poor youth (Cooper, Nye, Charlton, Lindsay, & Greathouse, 1996). Youth of the middle class often gain in measured achievement over their summer school holiday. This is a function of the cultural and study opportunities that their parents arrange. Youth from the lower classes have fewer such opportunities and so, as a group, they either do not gain in achievement, or lose ground over the summer. Small investments of dollars can fix that, leading to better school achievement. This is why we need more money invested in the commons now, so our nation will be a more equitable one in the future.

Another educational reform policy, like imprisonment, is based on a punishment-oriented way of thinking, not a humane and research-based way of thinking. This is the policy to retain children in grade who are not performing at the level deemed appropriate. As this paper is being written, about a dozen states have put new and highly coercive policies into effect, particularly to punish third graders not yet reading at the level desired. Although records are not very accurate, reasonable estimates are that our nation is currently failing to promote almost 500,000 students a year in grades 1-8. Thus, from kindergarten through eighth grade it is likely that about 10% of all public school students are left back at least once, a total of about 5 million children and youth. Research informs us that this policy is wrong for the overwhelming majority of the youth who we do leave back. Research is quite clear that on average, students left back do not improve as much as do students who are allowed to advance to a higher grade with their age mates. Furthermore, retention policies throughout the nation are biased against both boys and poor minority youth. Moreover, the retained students are likely to drop out of school at higher rates than do their academic peers who were advanced to the next grade.

Of course mere advancement in grade does not solve the problem of poor academic performance by some of our nation’s youth. But there is a better solution to that problem at no more cost than retention. Children not performing up to the expectations held for their age group can receive tutoring, both after school and in summer. On average, the cost to a school district is somewhere about $10,000 per child per year to educate in grades K-8. That $10,000 is the fiscal commitment made by a district or a state when it chooses to leave a child back to receive an additional year of schooling. That same amount of money could be better used for small group and personal tutoring programs over a few years to help the struggling student to perform better. This is precisely the method used by wealthy parents of slow students to get their children to achieve well in school. As Dewey reminded us many years ago, what the best and wisest parents want for their children should be what we want for all children. Thus, that same kind of opportunity to catch up in school should not be denied to youth who come from poorer families. And for the record, Finland, whose school system is so exceptional, shuns retention in grade. It retains only about 2% of its students, not 10%, using special education teachers to work with students who fall significantly behind their age mates, ensuring that for most slow students there are chances to catch up with their classmates, without punishing them.

Other policies that would help the poor and reduce the inequities we see in society include reducing teacher “churn” in schools. Lower-class children experience more of that, and it substantially harms their academic performance (Ronfeldt, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2011). Policies to help experienced teachers stay in schools with poorer students also need to be developed. New teachers rarely can match a veteran of five or more years in accomplishing all the objectives teachers are required to meet in contemporary schools.

A two-year visiting nurse service to new mothers who are poor costs over $11,000 per family serviced. But results 10 years later show that in comparison to matched families, both the mothers and the children who were visited were significantly better off in many ways, and the cost to the local community was $12,000 less for these children and families over those 10 years. Even greater benefits to the community are expected in the future (Olds,, Kitzman, Cole, Hanks, Arcoleo, Anson, Luckey, Knudtson, Henderson, Bondey, and Stevenson, 2010). In essence, there is really no cost at all for a humane and effective program like this, but humaneness, even when cost effective, seems noticeably lacking in many of our communities.

Related to the visiting nurse study is the high likelihood of success by providing wrap-around services for youth in schools that serve poor families. Medical, dental, vision, nutrition, and psychological counseling, if not accessible by the families in a community, need to be provided so the children of the poor have a better chance of leaving poverty in adulthood. These programs have become increasingly of interest since both the social sciences and the neurosciences have now verified, through studies of brain functioning and cognitive processing, that the stress associated with extreme poverty reduces a child’s ability to think well. Stress and academic problem solving ability, and stress and working memory, correlate negatively. Thus, the cognitive skills of many poor youth are diminished, making life much harder for them and their teachers. The greater the physical and psychological stress experienced during childhood, the higher the likelihood that a child will not do well in school or in life. Noted earlier, however, is that the American media loves the story of the child from awful surroundings—war, famine, family violence, drug use, crime, and so forth—who grows to become a respected pillar of the community. But that is the exception, not the rule! Educational and social policies need to be made on the basis of the general rule, not on the occasional exception, dramatic and noble as that exception may be.

Adult programs also need to be part of schools so the school is part of its community: health clinics, job training, exercise rooms, community political meetings, technology access and training, libraries, and so forth—often help schools to help poor families. It is not good for children, their adult caretakers, or a school district if the public schools are seen as remote, alien, foreign, hostile, or anything other than a community resource. What seems evident is that America simply cannot test its way out of its educational problems. Our country has tried that and those policies and practices have failed. It is long past the time for other policies and practices to be tried, and as noted, some fine candidates exist.

CONCLUSION

During the great convergence in income, from World War Two until about 1979, American wealth was more evenly spread and the economy hummed.  With the great divergence in income, beginning in about 1979, and accelerating after that, American wealth became concentrated and many factors negatively affected the rate of employment. The result has been that despite our nation’s great wealth, inequality in income in the USA is the greatest in the Western World. Sequelae to high levels of inequality are high levels of poverty. Certainly poverty should never be an excuse for schools to do little, but poverty is a powerful explanation for why they cannot do much!

Although school policies that help the poor are appropriate to recommend (preschool, summer programs, health care, and so forth), it is likely that those programs would be less needed or would have more powerful results were we to concentrate on getting people decent jobs and reducing inequality in income. Jobs allow families, single or otherwise, to take care of themselves and offer their children a more promising future. Too many people without jobs do bad things to themselves and to others. Literally, unemployment kills: The death rates for working men and women increase significantly as unemployment increases (Garcy & Vagero, 2012). The death of adult caretakers obviously affects families, particularly children, in profound ways. Government promotion of decent paying jobs, and a low unemployment rate, is a goal around which both Conservatives and Liberals who care about the American education system ought to unite. That is the single best school reform strategy I can find.

But more than that, it is part of my thinking about rights we should expect as citizens of our country, in order that our country thrives. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt articulated these rights as he addressed the nation, shortly before he died (Roosevelt, 1944). His experience with both the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and the second world war led him to offer Americans a second bill of rights that would help promote what was originally offered to Americans a century and half before—the right of our citizens to pursue happiness. Roosevelt said that Americans have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without

economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. [It is now self-evident that the American people have] the right to a useful and remunerative job … the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education.  

I think we need to fight as hard for our second bill of rights as we did for our first. Among the many reasons that might be so is that the performance of our students in our schools cannot be thought about without also thinking of the social and economic policies that characterize our nation. Besides the school policies noted above, and the need for decent jobs, if we had a housing policy that let poor and middle-income children mix in schools, that might be better than many other school improvement strategies designed specially to help the poor. This is a policy that works for Singapore, a nation with great inequalities in wealth and greater equalization of achievement outcomes between its richer and poorer students. If we had a bussing policy based on income, not race, so that no school had more than about 40% low-income children, it might well improve the schools’ performances more than other policies we have tried. This is the strategy implemented by Wake County, North Carolina, and it has improved the achievement of the poor in Raleigh, North Carolina, the county’s major city, without subtracting from the achievements of its wealthier students (Grant, 2009). My point is that citizens calling for school reform without thinking about economic and social reforms are probably being foolish. The likelihood of affecting school achievement positively is more likely to be found in economic and social reforms, in the second bill of rights, than it is in NCLB, the common core of standards, early childhood and many assessments after that, value-added assessments, and the like. More than educational policies are needed to improve education.

I think everyone in the USA, of any political party, understands that poverty hurts families and affects student performance at the schools their children attend. But the bigger problem for our political leaders and citizens to recognize is that inequality hurts everyone in society, the wealthy and the poor alike. History teaches us that when income inequalities are large, they are tolerated by the poor for only so long. Then there is an eruption, and it is often bloody! Both logic and research suggest that economic policies that reduce income inequality throughout the United States are quite likely to improve education a lot, but even more than that, such policies might once again establish this nation as a beacon on a hill, and not merely a light that shines for some, but not for all of our citizens.

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Reardon, S. F. (2011). The widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor: new evidence and possible explanations. In R. Murnane & G. Duncan (Eds.), Whither opportunity? Rising inequality, schools and children’s life chances. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

Reeves, D. B. (2000). Accountability in action. Lanham, MD: Advanced Learning Press.

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Ronfeldt, M., Lankford, H., Loeb, S., & Wyckoff, J. (2011). How teacher turnover harms student achievement (Working paper 17176). Retrieved from National Bureau of Economic Research website: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17176

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Timar, T. B., & Maxwell-Jolly, J. (Eds.). (2012). Narrowing the achievement gap: perspectives and strategies for challenging times. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

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Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2010). The Spirit Level: why greater equality makes societies stronger. London: Penguin.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

CTA the Worst Union in America!




In Response to Troy Senik’s Article: Worst Union in America

Originally Posted on May 21, 2012 by admin

CTA spent over $200 million on politics in the decade prior to 2010. What should be an outrage to CTA members is that it was ONLY $200 million! That is a little more than 10% of their huge budget, where is the other 90% going?

Of course, it goes to a bloated CTA and NEA organization that has hundreds of very well-paid employees. It certainly does not go towards CTA labor negotiators or attorneys. Local CTA associations rely on teachers to do the heavy lifting on bargaining and negotiations teams, getting CTA negotiators only when absolutely necessary. Discipline cases and school site problems are handled primarily by teachers (stewards) instead of CTA attorneys (they only have 11 CTA attorneys on staff and actually say on their website that they would be too busy if CTA members were allowed to call them directly with questions…!).

California teachers pay about $1,000/year in union dues and 80% goes to CTA and NEA. Of the rest that stays local, a huge chunk goes to CTA and NEA anyway, in the form of conference and training fees for CTA and NEA events.

Teachers do have an alternative. They can decertify from CTA and be independent teacher associations. http://caindependentteachers.com/

Police, fire and many other public sector employees in California often do not belong to a big union, but rather pay much more modest dues to their local association, which uses those dues to hire labor attorneys and negotiators to handle the association’s needs. There are certainly problems with California’s economy and budget woes, but public employees did not cause the recession. Public employee associations that work collaboratively with the City, County or District they work for can and have been able to keep public services working despite the economy and the state government’s ineptitude.

CTA, though, is simply sucking money from teachers without giving much in return, other than helping perpetuate a broken system statewide.
   
Read the Article below or click here http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_california-teachers-association.html

TROY SENIK
The Worst Union in America
How the California Teachers Association betrayed the schools and crippled the state
In 1962, as tensions ran high between school districts and unions across the country, members of the National Education Association gathered in Denver for the organization’s 100th annual convention. Among the speakers was Arthur F. Corey, executive director of the California Teachers Association (CTA). “The strike as a weapon for teachers is inappropriate, unprofessional, illegal, outmoded, and ineffective,” Corey told the crowd. “You can’t go out on an illegal strike one day and expect to go back to your classroom and teach good citizenship the next.”
  
ILLUSTRATIONS BY SEAN DELONAS
Fast-forward nearly 50 years to May 2011, when the CTA—now the single most powerful special interest in California—organized a “State of Emergency” week to agitate for higher taxes in one of the most overtaxed states in the nation. A CTA document suggested dozens of ways for teachers to protest, including following state legislators incessantly, attempting to close major transportation arteries, and boycotting companies, such as Microsoft, that backed education reform. The week’s centerpiece was an occupation of the state capitol by hundreds of teachers and student sympathizers from the Cal State University system, who clogged the building’s hallways and refused to leave. Police arrested nearly 100 demonstrators for trespassing, including then–CTA president David Sanchez. The protesting teachers had left their jobs behind, even though their students were undergoing important statewide tests that week. With the passage of 50 years, the CTA’s notions of “good citizenship” had vanished.

So had high-quality public education in California. Seen as a national leader in the classroom during the 1950s and 1960s, the country’s largest state is today a laggard, competing with the likes of Mississippi and Washington, D.C., at the bottom of national rankings. The Golden State’s education tailspin has been blamed on everything from class sizes to the property-tax restrictions enforced by Proposition 13 to an influx of Spanish-speaking students. But no portrait of the system’s downfall would be complete without a depiction of the CTA, a political behemoth that blocks meaningful education reform, protects failing and even criminal educators, and inflates teacher pay and benefits to unsustainable levels.

The CTA began its transformation in September 1975, when Governor Jerry Brown signed the Rodda Act, which allowed California teachers to bargain collectively. Within 18 months, 600 of the 1,000 local CTA chapters moved to collective bargaining. As the union’s power grew, its ranks nearly doubled, from 170,000 in the late 1970s to approximately 325,000 today. By following the union’s directions and voting in blocs in low-turnout school-board elections, teachers were able to handpick their own supervisors—a system that private-sector unionized workers would envy. Further, the organization that had once forsworn the strike began taking to the picket lines. Today, the CTA boasts that it has launched more than 170 strikes in the years since Rodda’s passage.

The CTA’s most important resource, however, isn’t a pool of workers ready to strike; it’s a fat bank account fed by mandatory dues that can run more than $1,000 per member. In 2009, the union’s income was more than $186 million, all of it tax-exempt. The CTA doesn’t need its members’ consent to spend this money on politicking, whether that’s making campaign contributions or running advocacy campaigns to obstruct reform. According to figures from the California Fair Political Practices Commission (a public institution) in 2010, the CTA had spent more than $210 million over the previous decade on political campaigning—more than any other donor in the state. In fact, the CTA outspent the pharmaceutical industry, the oil industry, and the tobacco industrycombined.

All this money has helped the union rack up an imposing number of victories. The first major win came in 1988, with the passage of Proposition 98. That initiative compelled California to spend more than 40 percent of its annual budget on education in grades K–12 and community college. The spending quota eliminated schools’ incentive to get value out of every dollar: since funding was locked in, there was no need to make things run cost-effectively. Thanks to union influence on local school boards, much of the extra money—about $450 million a year—went straight into teachers’ salaries. Prop. 98’s malign effects weren’t limited to education, however: by essentially making public school funding an entitlement rather than a matter of discretionary spending, it hastened California’s erosion of fiscal discipline. In recent years, estimates of mandatory spending’s share of the state’s budget have run as high as 85 percent, making it highly difficult for the legislature to confront the severe budget crises of the past decade.

In 1991, the CTA took to the ramparts again to combat Proposition 174, a ballot initiative that would have made California a national leader in school choice by giving families universal access to school vouchers. When initiative supporters began circulating the petitions necessary to get it onto the ballot, some CTA members tried to intimidate petition signers physically. The union also encouraged people to sign the petition multiple times in order to throw the process into chaos. “There are some proposals so evil that they should never go before the voters,” explained D. A. Weber, the CTA’s president. One of the consultants who organized the petitions testified in a court declaration at the time that people with union ties had offered him $400,000 to refrain from distributing them. Another claimed that a CTA member had tried to run him off the road after a debate on school choice.

Weber and his followers weren’t successful in keeping the proposition off the ballot, but they did manage to delay it for two years, giving themselves time to organize a counteroffensive. They ran ads, recalls Ken Khachigian, the former White House speechwriter who headed the Yes on 174 campaign, “claiming that a witches’ coven would be eligible for the voucher funds and [could] set up a school of its own.” They threatened to field challengers against political candidates who supported school choice. They bullied members of the business community who contributed money to the pro-voucher effort. When In-N-Out Burger donated $25,000 to support Prop. 174, for instance, the CTA threatened to press schools to drop contracts with the company.

In 1993, Prop. 174 finally came to a statewide vote. The union had persuaded March Fong Eu, the CTA-endorsed secretary of state, to alter the proposition’s heading on the ballot from PARENTAL CHOICE to EDUCATION VOUCHERS—a change in wording that cost Prop. 174 ten points in the polls, according to Myron Lieberman in his book The Teacher Unions. The initiative, which had originally enjoyed 2–1 support among California voters, managed to garner only a little over 30 percent of the vote. Prop. 174’s backers had been outspent by a factor of eight, with the CTA alone dropping $12.5 million on the opposition campaign.


As the CTA’s power grew, it learned that it could extract policy concessions simply by employing its aggressive PR machine. In 1996, with the state’s budget in surplus, the CTA spent $1 million on an ad campaign touting the virtues of reduced class sizes in kindergarten through third grade. Feeling the heat from the campaign, Republican governor Pete Wilson signed a measure providing subsidies to schools with classes of 20 children or fewer. The program was a disaster: it failed to improve educational outcomes, and the need to hire many new teachers quickly, to handle all the smaller classes, reduced the quality of teachers throughout the state. The program cost California nearly $2 billion per year at its high-water mark, becoming the most expensive education-reform initiative in the state’s history. But it worked out well for the CTA, whose ranks and coffers were swelled by all those new teachers.

The union’s steady supply of cash allowed it to continue its quest for political dominance unabated. In 1998, it spent nearly $7 million to defeat Proposition 8—which would have used student performance as a criterion for teacher reviews and would have required educators to pass credentialing examinations in their disciplines—and more than $2 million in a failed attempt to block Proposition 227, which eliminated bilingual education in public schools. In 2002, the union spent $26 million to defeat Proposition 38, another school voucher proposal. And in 2005, with a special election called by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger looming, the CTA came up with a colossal $58 million—even going so far as to mortgage its Sacramento headquarters—to defeat initiatives that would have capped the growth of state spending, made it easier to fire underperforming teachers, and ensured “paycheck protection,” which compels unions to get their members’ consent before using dues for political purposes. (A new paycheck-protection measure will appear on the November 2012 ballot.)

Cannily, the CTA also funds a wide array of liberal causes unrelated to education, with the goal of spreading around enough cash to prevent dissent from the Left. Among these causes: implementing a single-payer health-care system in California, blocking photo-identification requirements for voters, and limiting restraints on the government’s power of eminent domain. The CTA was the single biggest financial opponent of another Proposition 8, the controversial 2008 proposal to ban gay marriage, ponying up $1.3 million to fight an initiative that eventually won 52.2 percent of the vote. The union has also become the biggest donor to the California Democratic Party. From 2003 to 2012, the CTA spent nearly $102 million on political contributions; 0.08 percent of that money went to Republicans.

At the same time that the union was becoming the largest financial force in California politics, it was developing an equally powerful ground game, stifling reform efforts at the local level. Consider the case of Locke High School in the poverty-stricken Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Founded in response to the area’s 1967 riots, Locke was intended to provide a quality education to the neighborhood’s almost universally minority students. For years, it failed: in 2006, with a student body that was 65 percent Hispanic and 35 percent African-American, the school sent just 5 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges, and the dropout rate was nearly 51 percent.

Shortly before Locke reached this nadir, the school hired a reform-minded principal, Frank Wells, who was determined to revive the school’s fortunes. Just a few days after he arrived, a group of rival gangs got into a dust-up; Wells expelled 80 of the students involved. In the new atmosphere of discipline, Locke dropped “from first in the number of campus crime reports in LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] to thirteenth,” writes Donna Foote in Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America. Test scores and college acceptance also began to rise, Foote reports.

But trouble arose with the union when Wells began requiring Locke teachers to present weekly lesson plans. The local CTA affiliate—United Teachers Los Angeles—filed a grievance against him and was soon urging his removal. The last straw was Wells’s effort to convert Locke into an independent charter school, where teachers would operate under severely restricted union contracts. In May 2007, the district removed Wells from his job. He was escorted from his office by three police officers and an associate superintendent of schools, all on the basis of union allegations that he had let teachers use classroom time to sign a petition to turn Locke into a charter. Wells called the allegations “a total fabrication,” and the signature gatherers backed him up. The LAUSD reassigned him to a district office, where he was paid $600 a day to sit in a cubicle and do nothing.

Luckily for Locke students, the union’s rearguard action came too late. In 2007, the Los Angeles Board of Education voted 5–2 to hand Locke High School to Green Dot, a charter school operator. Four years later, as the final class of Locke students who had attended the school prior to its transformation received their diplomas, the school’s graduation rate was 68 percent, and over 56 percent of Locke graduates were headed for higher education.


One of the most noticeable changes at Locke has ramifications statewide: when Green Dot took over, it required all teachers to reapply for their jobs. It hired back only about one-third of them. That approach is unimaginable in the rest of the state’s public schools, where a teaching job is essentially a lifetime sinecure. A tiny 0.03 percent of California teachers are dismissed after three or more years on the job. In the past decade, the LAUSD—home to 33,000 teachers—has dismissed only four. Even when teachers are fired, it’s seldom because of their classroom performance: a 2009 exposé by theLos Angeles Times found that only 20 percent of successful dismissals in the state had anything to do with teaching ability. Most terminations involved teachers behaving either obscenely or criminally. The National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based education-reform organization, gave California a D-minus on its teacher-firing policies in its 2010 national report card.

Responsibility for this sorry situation goes largely to the CTA, which has won concessions that make firing a teacher so difficult that educators can usually keep their jobs for any offense that doesn’t cross into outright criminality. With the cost of the proceedings regularly running near half a million dollars, many districts choose to shuffle problem employees around rather than try to fire them.

Even outright offenses are no guarantee of removal, thanks to CTA influence. When a fired teacher appeals his case beyond the school board, it goes to the Commission on Professional Competence—two of whose three members are also teachers, one of them chosen by the educator whose case is being heard. The CTA has stacked this process as well by bargaining to require evidentiary standards equal to those used in civil-court procedures and coaching the teachers on the panels. One veteran school-district lawyer calls the appeals process “one of the most complicated civil legal matters anywhere.” As the Times noted, “The district wanted to fire a high school teacher who kept a stash of pornography, marijuana and vials with cocaine residue at school, but [the Commission on Professional Competence] balked, suggesting that firing was too harsh.” The commission was also the reason that, as the newspaper continued, the district was “unsuccessful in firing a male middle school teacher spotted lying on top of a female colleague in the metal shop”; the district had failed to “prove that the two were having sex.”

Another regulatory body dominated by CTA influence is the state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), the institution responsible for removing the credentials of misbehaving teachers. A report released in 2011 by California state auditor Elaine Howle found that the commission had a backlog of approximately 12,600 cases, with responses sometimes taking as long as three years. Because the CTC—which was created by an act sponsored by the CTA—is made up of members appointed by the governor, the CTA is able to bring its political pressure to bear on determining the commission’s makeup. In September 2011, for instance, one of Governor Jerry Brown’s appointments to the CTC was Kathy Harris, who had previously been a CTA lobbyist to the body.

The CTA’s most recent crusade for job security made clear that the union was prepared to jeopardize the financial future of California’s schools. Last June, it vigorously pushed (and Governor Brown hastily signed) Assembly Bill 114, which prevented any teacher layoffs or program cuts in the coming fiscal year and removed the requirement that school districts present balanced budget plans. The bill also forced public schools to prepare budget estimates that didn’t take into account the state’s downturn in revenues—meaning that schools could budget for activities even though there wasn’t money to pay for them. Since then, state officials have forecast that revenues for the 2012 fiscal year will be $3.2 billion lower than they were when the schools were making their budgets. Eventually, accommodations to reality will have to be made—at which time the CTA will, of course, use them to plead hardship.

Such pleas seem impudent coming from the highest-paid teachers in the nation, with an average annual salary of $68,000. For a bit of perspective, if two California teachers get married (not an unusual occurrence) and each makes the average salary, their combined annual income would be $136,000, nearly $80,000 more than what the state’s median household pulls down. That’s for an average annual workload of 180 days, only two-thirds of the average total in the private sector. Don’t forget retirement benefits: after 30 years, a California teacher may retire with a pension equal to about 75 percent of his working salary. That pension averages more than $51,000 a year—more than working teachers earn in more than half the states in the nation. And that’s just an average; from 2005 to 2011, the number of education employees pulling down more than $100,000 a year in pensions skyrocketed from 700 to 5,400.

With the state’s economy in tumult, however, prospects for the teachers’ retirement fund look grim. CalSTRS is now officially estimated to have about $56 billion in liabilities and about 30 years left before it runs dry, though many outside analysts think that those numbers are too optimistic. A report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office in November 2011 estimated that restoring full funding to CalSTRS would require finding an extra $3.9 billion a year for at least 30 years.

If California is to generate the economic growth necessary to mitigate its coming fiscal reckoning, it will need to retain its historical role as a leading site for innovation and entrepreneurship. But that won’t be possible if its next generation of would-be entrepreneurs attends one of the Golden State’s many mediocre or failing schools. And what little economic dynamism is left in California will be impeded if the union gets its way and the state increases its already weighty tax burden.

Meaningful change probably won’t come from elected officials, at least for now. The CTA’s size, financial resources, and influence with the state’s regnant Democratic Party are enough to kill most pieces of hostile legislation. For years, school reformers fantasized about a transformative figure who could shift the balance of power from the union through force of charisma and personality, taking his case directly to the people. Yet when that figure seemed to emerge in Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, even he proved unable to alter the status quo, with his 2005 ballot initiatives to reform tenure, school financing, and political spending by unions all going down to decisive defeat. It’s unlikely that salvation will come from Governor Brown, either. The man who originally opened the door for the CTA’s collective bargaining has remained a steadfast ally of the union, firing four pro-reform members of the state board of education in his first few days in office and appointing a new group that included Patricia Ann Rucker, the CTA’s top lobbyist. Brown also avoided including any changes to CalSTRS in his October announcement of proposed pension reforms, probably because he had learned Schwarzenegger’s lesson that irking the CTA can lead to the demise of a broader agenda.

Parents, however, are starting to revolt against CTA orthodoxy. Unlike elected officials, parents—who want nothing more than a good education for their kids—are hard for the union to demonize. In early 2010, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit called Parent Revolution shocked California’s pundit class by getting the state legislature to pass the nation’s first “parent trigger” law, which lets parents at failing schools force districts to undertake certain reforms, including converting schools into independent charters. The law caps the number of schools eligible for reform at 75, but if early results are successful, it will become hard for Californians to avoid comparing thriving charter schools with failing traditional ones.

The CTA is fighting back, of course. In 2010, when 61 percent of parents at McKinley Elementary School in the blighted L.A. neighborhood of Compton opted to pull the trigger, the CTA claimed that “parents were never given the full picture . . . [or] informed of the great progress already being made”—despite the fact that McKinley’s performance was ranked beneath nearly all other inner-city schools in the state. Several Hispanic parents in the district also said that members of the union had threatened to report them to immigration authorities if they signed the petition. Eventually, the Compton Unified school board—heavily lobbied by the CTA—dismissed the petition signatures, with no discussion, as “insufficient” on a handful of technicalities, such as missing dates and typos. Though the union’s power had proved too much for the McKinley parents, an enterprising charter school operator opened two new campuses in the neighborhood anyway.

Institutions like Locke High School, Green Dot, Parent Revolution, and the Compton charters are glimmers of hope for California’s public school system. Despite their inferior resources, they have fought the CTA not by participating in direct political conflict but by undermining the union’s moral standing. These organizations reframe the education question in starkly humanitarian terms: In the California public school system, are anyone’s interests more important than the students’? It was a question that the CTA itself might have asked back when teachers entered the classroom to “teach good citizenship.”

Troy Senik is a senior fellow at the Center for Individual Freedom and an editor at Ricochet.com.


Sunday, September 23, 2012

ADDENDEM TO "AN OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR JERRY BROWN"

State panel OKs demotion; fatal crash involved judge


By Onell R. Soto
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
September 21, 2002

(NOTATIONS IN ITALICS ARE PURELY THE OPINION OF THE POSTER)
Judge H. James Ahler, 54, of Escondido, hit and killed a pedestrian in Escondido within an hour of drinking three glasses of wine a year ago,  (BULLSHIT, AHLER IS 6'2 AND ABOUT 260 LB.S. THERE IS PHYSIOLOGICAL WAY THAT A MAN THAT SIZE COULD HAVE REACHED PT. 15 PERCENT BLOOD ALCOHOL, TWICE THE STATE LIMIT ON THREE GLASSES OF WINE. SOUNDS LIKE ANOTHER AHLER LIE: MY OPINION. AT .15 PERCENT MOST DRUNKS ARE SEEING DOUBLE AND SLURRING THERE WORDS. yet THE DA SAID ALCOHOL HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH AHLER HITTING AND KILLING THAT PEDESTRIAN. I REITERATE... BULLSHIT) according to the decision by the California State Personnel Board.

After the fatal Sept. 18, 2001, crash, he served ONE night in jail, pleaded  guilty to "misdemeanor drunken driving," paid $1,200 in fines and had to  attend counseling and ONE session in which victims described the impact of drunken driving on their lives and those of their loved ones, court records show. Ahler has been an administrative law judge with the Office of Administrative Hearings in San Diego since 1994, typically hearing  similar cases in which professionals have their licenses suspensions or revoked

BUT HOW AHLER  SUFFERED HE CLAIMS!
 Because of his conviction, Ahler – who had been promoted in June  2001 from a position paying $102,614 annually to a higher rank as an  administrative law judge specialist, which pays $107,641 – was demoted. HE HAS SINCE MADE UP THAT SALARY DIFFERENCE MANY TIMES OVER - UNLIKE the "discipline" shoveled out to MOST OF AHLER'S VICTIMS OTHER WISE KNOWN AS  "DEFENDANTS" when FORCED INTO AHLER'S KANGAROO COURT. 

WWHATEVER  THE AGENCY WANTS.  PAID FOR BY HUGE LAW FIRMS FOR THESE "Agencys" i.e. Government or school district employees. 

But H. JAMES AHLER KEPT HIS JOB!  How many paychecks a month does Alher get? (Or perhaps he's paid in cash for his services to these agencies and their attorneys?) Ahler told officers when he was arrested that he drank three glasses of  wine within an hour of the crash, according to documents from the  personnel board, which hears appeals from state employees who feel they've been wrongly disciplined.



In Vista Superior Court, Ahler admitted his blood-alcohol level at the time of the crash was .15 of a percent, nearly twice the .08 of a percent at which California motorists are presumed to be too drunk to drive.



Compare "Dickless" James Ahler's own behavior with the average "discipline" afforded most drunks who kill another human while driving intoxicated! Don't take my word look this up yourself. But don't bother asking Sacramento! No one seems to want to talk about Ahler's Behavior. This includes the AG's office, Jerry Brown's office, the supervising ALJ appointed by Brown.

Ahler was not charged with killing 67-year-old Charles Ames of Escondido because his drinking didn't contribute to the death, said prosecutor Evan Miller. He admitted to being drunk while driving but that drunken driving didn't contribute? WOW, I want to be President of a local bar, no pun intended, association.



Miller said Ames (the pedestrian), whose own blood-alcohol level was reported to be .28, crossed against a red light in a dark corner wearing dark clothing. None of a half-dozen witnesses to the crash saw him before impact, he said. (Sorry but that  sort of surprise on the road happens 2-3 times in the experiences of most drivers ,SOBER drivers and in similar circumstances almost NEVER end up in a COLLLISION LET ALONE A FATALITY involving a pedestrian at an intersection. Most are lit anyway.)  How the hell were there six witnesses at four A.M. anyway? Were they all
NNorth County San Diego attorneys?



Defense lawyer Daniel Cronin said Ahler was "not responsible for the death." )
"The pedestrian ran out in front of him,"Cronin said. "It would have happened if he was stone cold sober." (AND NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO THE ROAD, TRAFFIC LIGHTS OR HIS VEHICLES SPEED.)


Ahler challenged the demotion, which took place during the standard probationary period relating to the June 2001 promotion (SO INSTEAD OF REMORSE, ALJ H.JAMES AHLER IMMEDIATELY STARTED TO WHINE AND BITCH IN PUBLIC ABOUT NOT GETTING A $102 DOLLAR A WEEK RAISE)



In his defense, Ahler argued that his supervisors should have simply written a letter disapproving his actions, not taken away his promotion.  He said that, except for the conviction, he continues to do his job well.


Lawyer Everett Bobbitt, who represented Ahler before the personnel board, said the demotion was too harsh, especially because Ahler continues handling complicated cases and deserves the higher rank.

"It's really not a demotion. They're just taking money away," Bobbitt said. "The work hasn't changed at all." But an administrative law judge with the State Personnel Board ruled Ahler violated his duty as a judge by driving drunk. (Yep, he's still doing a piss poor job  that his reputation demands)

"Such conduct does not comply with the law, does not promote public confidence in the integrity of the judiciary and demeans the judicial office," Judge William A. Snyder wrote two weeks ago, paraphrasing the Canons of Judicial Ethics in his decision upholding Ahler's 
demotion.
Snyder said some of the people coming before Ahler might question his impartiality. He noted that Ahler and his colleagues decide whether OR NOT TO FIRE AND DESTROY THE LIVES OF AHLERS JUCICIAL VICTIMS IN MUCH THE WAY HE KILLED THAT PEDESTRIAN - WITH IMPUNITY.

WHY DOES JERRY BROWN AND KAMELA HARRIS ENDORSE THIS FOOL'S BEHAVIORS BOTH ON AND OFF THE BENCH... PROBABLY BECAUSE THEY DON'T WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE HE AND HIS BEHAVIOR ON THE BENCH EXIST AT ALL. IGNORE IT AND IT WILL GO-AWAY. 

H. JAMES AHLER IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE HIS PRESENCE WITH OAH IS THE FAULT OF THE GOVERNOR AND  ATTORNEY GENERAL KAMELA HARRIS. AHLER WILL BE THEIR RESPECTIVE LEGACYS IN MY MIND WHEN I THINK OF JUDCIAL MISDEEDS

.http://schoolcounselingvideocast.blogspot.com/2012/09/blog-post_14.html

Saturday, September 22, 2012

OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR JERRY BROWN - FIRE JUDGE H. JAMES AHLER


August 12, 2012

Honorable Governor Jerry Brown,
Honorable Kamala Harris, Attorney General of California
Honorable Linda Cabatic, OAH supervising ALJ
PRA coordinator
Full Disclosure, Chief News Editor
CNN Regional News Editor

Let me ask what I am sure is and has been known in Sacramento for a decade. What circumstances has allowed a man convicted of killing a pedestrian while driving intoxicated, (by State standards), to remain as an Administrative Law Judge until now? To my knowledge, he was never disciplined for the manslaughter of the pedestrian in Vista, CA where he sits at the head of the North County Bar Association. 

In my opinion, he unofficially sits as paid "in-house Judge" for the likes of a private law firm, Friedman, Fagan and FulFrost. This firm represents almost 420 school districts. Ahler has the well-deserved reputation as executioner over the lives and careers of hundreds of educators. Almost all of these educators are denied the legal due process demanded by law, contract, the CTC and California Ed Code standards for disciplining educators. 

Ahler appears oblivious. Yet H. James Ahler's victim's family is denied closure or justice because Ahler appears to have skated under the radar by virtue of his office and connections made while in that office, according to The San Diego Tribune. Governor Brown, how can someone convicted of a misdemeanor for killing a man walking home while Ahler was about on a drunken stupor - BEHIND THE WHEEL - ever sit in judgment of anyone’s employment?

I have started investigating Judge Ahler’s association with large law firms representing (Government funded) public schools and against educators all at the top of their districts pay scale. Ironic? I am sure I will have a considerable amount more to ask once the investigation is concluded. However Governor Brown Sir, the question remains. How does a man like Ahler sit as lawfully employed Judge in any venue in California under your watch?

Under your watch Sir, you appointed Linda Cabatic to replace the former OAH supervising judge. I am sure you saw the need for change of the quasi-constitutional and quasi ethical tribunal. Despite your efforts, nothing of substance has changed and Administrative Law Judges like James Ahler sit in judgment and in Ahler's case specifically; while having escaped fair judgment himself. Ahler is an example why the OAH is universally seen as the new extension to Public School District’s hiring and firing process and their ability to cull highly paid Educators from the payroll. In turn more educators are having to sue their districts in Civil court to find a remedy. Ultimately, this ends up costing the local tax payers hundreds of thousands of dollars in unnecessary attorney’s fees and judgments every year.

 No Educator enters this process expecting any semblance of 'justice,' especially when agency attorneys can depend on the strategy of a last minute motion to remove a presiding ALJ and without notifying the defendant, pull Ahler in. 

Ahler himself has been suspended for his overt acts to control the outcome of OA hearings in favor of the agency (e.g. OAH hearing Maura Larkins, San Diego.) As Governor, why would you allow the likes of H. James Ahler to represent the OAH of our State? Yet, Ahler remains a dirty little secret of California's legal system. Ahler represents a significant stain on your administration and bane to the CTC's efforts to keep good educators. I hope you will order an investigation of H. James.

FDN’s video “The Cost of Courage.” Richard I Fine's fight against judical corruption, Los Angeles and California.

Thank you for your personal attention to this matter.
Sincerely,



This is the fight of our professional careers. Are You In or Out?

What's taking so long? This is the fight of our professional careers. Are You In or Out? "Hell has a special level for those who sit by idly during times of great crisis."
Robert Kennedy

The Art of SETTING LIMITS, Its not as easy as it looks.

Art of Setting Limits Setting limits is one of the most powerful tools that professionals have to promote positive behavior change for their clients, students, residents, patients, etc. Knowing there are limits on their behavior helps the individuals in your charge to feel safe. It also helps them learn to make appropriate choices.


There are many ways to go about setting limits, but staff members who use these techniques must keep three things in mind:
Setting a limit is not the same as issuing an ultimatum.
Limits aren’t threats—If you don’t attend group, your weekend privileges will be suspended.

Limits offer choices with consequences—If you attend group and follow the other steps in your plan, you’ll be able to attend all of the special activities this weekend. If you don’t attend group, then you’ll have to stay behind. It’s your decision.
The purpose of limits is to teach, not to punish.
Through limits, people begin to understand that their actions, positive or negative, result in predictable consequences. By giving such choices and consequences, staff members provide a structure for good decision making.
Setting limits is more about listening than talking.
Taking the time to really listen to those in your charge will help you better understand their thoughts and feelings. By listening, you will learn more about what’s important to them, and that will help you set more meaningful limits.
Download The Art of Setting Limits

SYSTEMATIC USE OF CHILD LABOR


CHILD DOMESTIC HELP
by Amanda Kloer

Published February 21, 2010 @ 09:00AM PT
category: Child Labor
Wanted: Domestic worker. Must be willing to cook, clean, work with garbage, and do all other chores as assigned. No contract available, payment based on employer's mood or current financial situation. No days off. Violence, rape, and sexual harassment may be part of the job.

Would you take that job? No way. But for thousands of child domestic workers in Indonesia, this ad doesn't just describe their job, it describes their life.

A recent CARE International survey of over 200 child domestic workers in Indonesia found that 90% of them didn't have a contract with their employer, and thus no way to legally guarantee them a fair wage (or any wage at all) for their work. 65% of them had never had a day off in their whole employment, and 12% had experienced violence. Child domestic workers remain one of the most vulnerable populations to human trafficking and exploitation. And while work and life may look a little grim for the kids who answered CARE's survey, it's likely that the most abused and exploited domestic workers didn't even have the opportunity to take the survey.

In part, child domestic workers have it so much harder than adults because the people who hire children are more likely looking for someone easy to exploit. Think about it -- if you wanted to hire a domestic worker, wouldn't you choose an adult with a stronger body and more life experience to lift and haul and cook than a kid? If you could get them both for the same price, of course you would. But what if the kid was cheaper, free even, because you knew she wouldn't try and leave if you stopped paying her. Or even if you threatened her with death.



Congress Aims to Improve Laws for Runaway, Prostituted Kids

by Amanda Kloer

categories: Child Prostitution, Pimping

Published February 20, 2010 @ 09:00AM PT

The prospects for healthcare reform may be chillier than DC weather, but Democrats in the House and Senate are turning their attention to another warmer but still significant national issue: the increasing number of runaway and throwaway youth who are being forced into prostitution. In response to the growing concerns that desperate, runaway teens will be forced into prostitution in a sluggish economy, Congress is pushing several bills to improve how runaway kids are tracked by the police, fund crucial social services, and prevent teens from being caught in sex trafficking. Here's the gist of what the new legislation is trying to accomplish:

Shelter: Lack of shelter is one of the biggest vulnerabilities of runaway and homeless youth. Pimps will often use an offer of shelter as an entree to a relationship with a child or a straight up trade for sex. In the past couple years, at least 10 states have made legislative efforts to increase the number of shelters, extend shelter options, and change state reporting requirements so that youth shelters have enough time to win trust and provide services before they need to report the runaways to the police. Much of the new federal legislation would make similar increases in the availability and flexibility of shelter options.

Police Reporting: Right now, police are supposed to enter all missing persons into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database within two hours of receiving the case. In reality, that reporting doesn't always get done, making it almost impossible for law enforcement to search for missing kids across districts. This hole is a big problem in finding child prostitution victims and their pimps, since pimps will often transport girls from state to state. The new bill would strengthen reporting requirements, as well as facilitate communication between the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the National Runaway Switchboard

We Must Never Forget These Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen and Women

We Must Never Forget These Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen and Women
Nor the Fool Politicians that used so many American GIs' lives as fodder for the fight over an english noun - "Communism"