Democratic Party’s Divide on Education Policy gets
Worse
Jeff Bryant
Political pundits who try to tamp down talk of divisions within the Democratic
Party must not be paying any attention to education policy.
For quite some time, close
observers of the nation’s education policy have been calling attention to the
fault lines between education progressives in the Democratic Party and Third
Way-style centrists, such as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Democrats
for Education Reform, who lean toward a market-based, econometric philosophy
for public education governance.
As Furman University education professor Paul
Thomas recently wrote for Alternet, “While the Obama administration has
cultivated the appearance of hope and change, its education policies are
essentially slightly revised or greatly intensified versions of accountability reform begun under Ronald Reagan.”
But the Democratic Party’s divergence from real
progressive values for governing our schools mostly went unnoticed in major
media outlets until recently when a few light bulbs went off among political
observers. Writing for Slate, Matt Yglesias noticed, “Education reform, not
‘populism’ divides Democrats.” Then, Connor Williams of the New America
Foundation saw the light and explained for The New Republic, “In 2016, Democrats have good
reason to run against Obama’s education record.”
Now, Jonathan Chait has penned a piece for New York Magazine, “Teachers Unions Turn Against
Democrats,” in which he postulates that a “backlash” to President Obama’s
education policies, energized by education historian Diane Ravitch, could lead
to an alliance between teachers unions and, gulp, Republicans.
For sure, the divide on education policy within the
Democratic Party has grown into a Rubicon, and now Democratic candidates and
their operatives and supporters need to decide which side makes the most sense
to ally with.
The President’s Great Day Goes Sour
The divisions over education policy were all too
apparent recently when President Obama joined Secretary Duncan to introduce an
ambitious new plan to place more highly qualified teachers in front of students
who need those teachers the most.
As education reporter Lyndsey Layton of The Washington Post wrote, “The Education Department
is directing every state and the District to devise a plan by April 2015 to get
more good teachers into their high-poverty schools.”
“This is a really important exercise for the nation
to undertake,” Secretary Duncan said.
The White House had already lined up Beltway groups
such as The Education Trust to ballyhoo the effort. There
would be a press gathering, of course. And to highlight the initiative, Duncan
and the president had scheduled lunch with a group of teachers. A grand day for
sure.
But at the photo-op luncheon, it seemed the
teachers hadn’t gotten the memo. Instead of gabbing about the new teacher
equity plan, they apparently talked mostly about “frustration at the lack of
resources at their schools and the regularly changing demands of their jobs,”
according to Layton.
McClatchy reported the conversation similarly,
referring to a North Carolina teacher in attendance who, “Told Duncan that
teachers are frustrated because they’re being asked ‘to do something great with
minimal resources.’”
And when reporters gathered, the question that was
top of mind was not about the President’s new initiative at all. Instead,
journalists wanted to know how the administration felt about the nation’s
largest teachers’ union calling for Secretary Duncan’s resignation.
Delegates of the National Education Association,
meeting in Denver at their annual convention, had just passed a resolution citing the teachers’ objections
to the “department’s failed education agenda” and calling for Duncan to resign.
Duncan had initially “brushed off,” according to a
report from Politico, the NEA resolution. But the issue is
undoubtedly nagging him.
As education journalist Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post wrote,
“Duncan can try to downplay the vote … But the NEA vote is a new sign of
growing disenchantment with Duncan’s policies from the unions and well beyond
them, as parents, principals, superintendents and others protest the Duncan
agenda.”
How did the frustrations felt by everyday teachers
and the growing resentment their organizations have with Secretary Duncan rule
the day?
Frustration Rules The Day
The President’s desire to see the nation’s more
experienced and educated teachers distributed in schools is a important for
sure. Schools that serve poor, minority kids tend not to get the ones with the
deepest resumes. As a recent article from The Huffington Post explained
▪
The more affluent the district, the
more likely teachers are to have received a master’s degree or higher.
▪
Affluent districts tend to employ
teachers with more experience.
▪
The more white the school, the more
likely teachers are to be certified in the subjects they teach.
That news outlet’s education reporter Joy Resmovits wrote in her report on the Obama
initiative, “Students in high-poverty schools, a national survey has shown, are twice as likely
to have their most important classes taught by teachers without proper
certification. And federal data shows that minority students’ teachers on average have
less experience than the teachers of their wealthier peers.”
What’s interesting though is that, as The Post’s
Layton pointed out, the President’s initiative “doesn’t address the thorny
problem of how to identify an effective teacher.” That challenge has been
relegated to new teacher evaluation systems that Secretary Duncan has advocated
for but teachers abhor.
Those evaluations rely, to varying extents, on how
students score on standardized tests. As education historian Diane Ravitch asked when looking over the
President’s new teacher equity plan, “Will the Obama administration ever figure
out that test scores reflect socioeconomic conditions more than teachers? They
might look at research or even the recent report of the American Statistical Association, which
attributed 1-14% of score variation to teachers.”
Further, although the new teacher equity plan
enforces requirements for states to put experienced and highly qualified
teachers in schools serving high numbers of poor and minority students, the
Obama administration has steered millions of federal dollars to Teach for America. TFA
is an organization that places new teacher recruits from elite colleges and
universities into some of the poorest schools in America – after only five
weeks of training.
And Secretary Duncan and his supporters claim they
want to see more experienced, better educated teachers serving in schools
serving poor, black and brown kids. Yet they hail actions, like the recent legal ruling in
the Vergara v California case, that undermine the job
security of more experienced teachers.
If the President and his supporters really wanted
to do more to help ensure more of the nation’s best teachers ended up in front
of students who need them the most, they would have embraced guidelines put
forth by the Opportunity to Learn campaign last year. OTL’s plan, Excellent Teachers For Each And Every Child: A Guide for State
Policy, addressed the many factors that influence teaching quality and
equitable distribution, such as learning conditions, school environment, and
instructional resources. [Disclosure: OTL is a partner of the Education
Opportunity Network and the Campaign for America's Future.]
Yet instead, Duncan has continued to blaze an
education policy path that talks out of both sides of its mouth – pronouncing
great beliefs in the value of experienced teachers but doing everything
possible to undermine them with unfair evaluations, competition from
less-credentialed recruits, and attacks on their job protections.
The frustrations teachers feel from these policies
– while they grapple with the budget cuts imposed by conservative state
governments – have been building for some time. And now they’re boiling over.
Should Democrats care?
Democrats Will Have To Choose
The list of education related legislation pending
in Congress is not extensive and may not make any headway in a blocked up,
unproductive House and Senate. So now the White House is relying on executive
actions, such as its teacher equity initiative, to circumvent congressional
gridlock.
But it’s hard to believe that executive actions
will have much effect on the ground when the people on the ground, in this case
classroom teachers, are not at all supportive.
The fact of the matter is that this presidential
administration and some of its most ardent backers have never really gotten
education at all.
Amy Dean asked in a recent piece for Truth Out, “Why
does the Obama administration keep getting it wrong on education policy?” In
her interview with Leo Casey of the American Federation of Teachers, she asked,
“The priorities of the Obama administration’s Department of Education seem
little changed from the failures of the Bush administration … What sort of
policies should we be pushing for?”
In response, Casey outlined a more positive, more
progressive way forward, “We need to look at a different way to do
accountability that would not be focused on standardized tests, but that would
really look at good measures of learning. It would focus not on punishing and
negative sanctions, but on improving what’s going on in schools and classrooms.
All of that is eminently doable on a national level and with a Democratic
administration that is not so enthralled to the market model of reform.”
As my colleague Robert Borosage has argued, the divisions on
economic policy among Democrats are “fundamental … grounded on very different
perspectives that lead in significantly different directions.”
In the education arena, those fundamental
differences have been stewing in the pot for a long time. What teachers and their
unions have done now is to finally serve them up to the table.
Now, it’s mostly a matter of seeing who will be the
first Democrats to understand those differences and use them as wedge issues to
influence the increasingly angry electorate
And when the November election looms on the
horizon, and you’re a candidate looking for volunteers to knock on doors and
make phone calls, organizations like The Education Trust are nowhere to be
found. Your local teachers on the other hand?
http://ourfuture.org/20140709/democratic-partys-divide-on-education-policy-gets-worse
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