Hillary’s “Teacher” Promise Offers More Privatization, Federal Tinkering

Hillary led off Wednesday’s debate promising “a good teacher for children in every zipcode”. This sounds great, but anytime they say “every”, it means costly upheaval to policies and classrooms in all 50 states. Following a succession of flawed “fixes” to high stakes testing, standardization and mass-privatization, yet another round of tinkering, now focused on teachers as opposed to testing.

It’s hard to explain education issues in the heat of a crazy election, but if people knew how corporate influence in the USDOE and state DOEs affected their kids and their pocket books in recent years, they would be shaken. Hopefully people know who Diane Ravitch is, but the key to the revolt against education “reform” in NY has been Carol Burris who rallied over 1,5oo top administrators as far back as 2011 to try to prevent the costly failed experiments. Carol empowered teacher groups like NY BATs and parent coalitions like NYSAPE to distribute opt-out letters — everyday families did the rest by the hundreds of thousands.

WORD-OF-MOUTH: The effort has been largely grassroots as the mainstream education media buries the story (save for the Washington Post columnist Valerie Strauss). The NY Times, Daily News seem to link their op-eds to advertiser preferences, but the NY Post actually uses the failure of testing to discredit Democrats like Andrew Cuomo.

DISINFORMATION: These media would have us believe union leaders have led the backlash, but they are actually held in abeyance — in truth, the rank and file in the state has led this, and NYC teachers are running candidates in the UFT Spring elections for the first time in years behind Jia Lee, an opt-out leader.

NY has been a national flashpoint because Governor Cuomo made NY’s test stakes higher than any other state. Most people have no idea that the UFT, the mega-union representing NYC supplied the governor with a draconian “matrix” used to evaluate teachers, based 50% on a secret “growth” formulas that were discredited in a state Supreme Court lawsuit last summer.

All counted, 20% of parents refused the tests, sending shockwaves through Washington DC, making the words Common Core toxic and dooming the federal mandate for the contested teacher evaluation system.

HILLARY’S CODE WORDS: Hillary’s campaign rhetoric refers to teacher recruitment, oversight and improvement, the latest reforms of corporate lobbies like Center for American Progress who will occupy the USDOE as soon as Hillary wins (if they are not already running it now).

The claim that Hillary will somehow conjure an army of superhuman teachers is interesting because the groundwork is already laid, passed in the ESSA law last December. The slippery language leaves details out, but CAP is ready, offering to dispatch paid staffers to help officials write policy and handle public communications. This is called “infrastructure”, also including articles in super-friendly media like US News & World Report.

HERE COME THE TESTS: The Common Core tests, which have not been mentioned in campaigns, are mere weeks away, approaching at the height of election frenzy. So the first candidate to speak could stake out the issue, but Hillary has avoided it because it would make jaws drop to find out that her top education advisor, Ann O’Leary, was centrally involved in the passage of NCLB which imposed federal testing on every US school back in 2001.

HYPOCRISY UNBOUND: Hillary also said she wanted to end the “revolving door”, yet her campaign’s chairman John Podesta is something of a worst offender. His advocacy for Race to the Top made children as young as third grade have inappropriate, unpopular tests forced on them.

These “reformers”, in conjunction with union leadership, are already working on the next pivot, retooling every aspect of the way teachers are recruited, trained, certified, mentored and “indoctrinated”. Podesta said in his 2012 speech to Jeb Bush that the key to pushing privatization in schools lies in new, younger teachers who don’t know how it was before.

THE BERNIE ENIGMA: Strangely, Bernie is as quiet about testing and the ESSA law as Hillary. Why? He knows something the public does not. As a key member of the Senate HELP committee, Senator Sanders personally negotiated some of the intimate details of the ESSA law, sponsoring an amendment to provide alternatives to bubble tests that may wind up unrecognizable after the corporate lobbying and final implementation.

Actually, we’re not sure about how the education bill was crafted. In a blow to transparency, Bernie’s not talking, but it may ironically be because the alternative assessment pilot he co-sponsored was compromised by corporate reformers, possibly even those connected to Hillary through the CAP milieu.

Maine BAT Emily Talmedge’s latest post may provide clues - the ESSA law was heavily influenced by reform groups, working both sides of the aisle. They “worked closely” to require experts in “innovative assessment implementation” or “competency education” which sounds a lot like them inviting themselves to have a place at the table.

KnowledgeWorks and its partners, iNACOL, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and America Forward, worked closely with committee staff as well as Senators Angus King (I-ME), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Susan Collins (R-ME), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) to strengthen the proposal in preparation for the Senate floor. Our primary goal was to design a workable program that would enable states to produce the next generation of high quality assessments.

Puzzlingly, the reformers keep making this “alternative” sound like another statewide, standardized method of assessment, as opposed to granting local schools autonomy and flexibility to assess as they see fit.

Aside from other concerns with ESSA, it’s the ones linked with Hillary’s campaign promise that worry me most, the so-called “TeachStrong” initiatives that look to “reimagine and elevate” teaching, meaning more mass-scale tinkering.

The problem of struggling students in US schools is primarily attributable to rampant structural inequity and socioeconomic status, but your tax dollars will instead be spent to reinvent teachers. As we saw with costly efforts to improve testing and then standards and then accountability, this is more busy work that won’t improve the achievement gap, but will breed more compliant teachers and further enrich an army of distant consultants who don’t work with children.