Locally Owned and Operated: The Logical Fallacy At the Center of Trump’s Education Plans

Throughout Donald Trump’s campaign and in his recent announcements he has come out swinging on education that, "There's no failed policy more in need of change than our government-run education monopoly and you know that's exactly what it is."

There’s just one problem.  Schools are not a monopoly! In fact, they are the last vestige of the old Mom-and-Pop local democracy holding out against Corporate driven Federal takeover! They are not managed by a single entity.

There are well over 14,000 different local school districts across the country, and 80% of them are managed by locally elected school boards, providing every parent in the district with a direct conduit of someone to meet with, complain to, and fire through the next election if they don’t like the service they are getting.  Each school system is directly responsible to the people who own it-- the people in that district.

Each district is different,  in size, demographics, and services- just like the locally owned stores that we once had; the locally owned department stores, where you could get alteration services, often for free; the hardware stores where you could get someone who would not only sell you the part, but explain how to put it on; the medical care where you got follow up calls, free samples if the doctor knew you were laid off, and even the occasional house call.  That’s the kind of service we still have available from our schools in most communities across the country.  

Think about what your child’s teacher does for their classes every day: buying crayons and pencils, supplying newsprint, bandaiding booboos,  and keeping extra changes of children’s clothes in their cabinet, just in case, and waiting with them for you to arrive when they miss the bus. The service our children are getting -- when the district is not impoverished, is a very person to person service.  

Who then, is so dissatisfied with the schools, that they want them leveled, closed, and remade? Those who would like them to be managed by Corporations (profit and non-profit) whose offices are almost always hundreds of miles away; people like Betsy DeVos, who never attended a public school, and whose children never attended a public school, but who along with her husband contributes heavily to private schools, and Alice Walton who owns her own charter chain, as any number of other billionaires do.  Mostly people who want to apply that money districts are spending on local children, to their own pockets instead.

Those 14,000 districts, currently contribute about 46% of the money it takes to education their children.  Another 45% comes from taxes they pay into their state, and only about 8-10% comes from special programs the federal government funds-- Title I funds for extremely poor schools, IDEA funds for students with special learning needs, and a handful of other programs.   

Lately, though the federal government, heavily influenced by outside lobbyists, has pushed localities and states to standardize, withholding chunks of that 10% if localities and states don’t up the standardization of how they treat their students, including standardizing the curriculum through the Common Core (or federally approved substitutes) and standardized measurement through commercial, poorly developed standardized tests-- and lots of them.

All the requirements the Education Reform movement (both Republican and Democrat) have been pushing have one thing in common-- They syphon off those local dollars to distantly managed corporate enterprises and take control away from local districts as to how they manage their schools.  When you look at the numbers on average-- by pulling those dollars collected from the parents at the local level (mostly through property taxes) and at the state level (mostly through state taxes) -- that’s on average about $9,000 per year per student.  We educate 50 million children a year in this country.

Trump published that  he would require localities and states to contribute $12,000 per year, per student for the new Education Secretary to give to private schools or charter school services.  -- That’s correct, Trump would increase the taxes local parents have to pay, and that money would not go to the schools their children attend, but go to the corporate-school only certain students could go to.  

So, the next time Trump says local schools are a government run monopoly, we might just ask, Does he know what a monopoly is?

 

Has Education Reform Turned the Schools of America into Hostile Workplaces?

October is Anti-Bullying month.  
When you use the word bullying, most people think of children and playground bullying, middle school mean girls, or internet shaming high schoolers.  Childhood bullying certainly can scar, even destroy.  Thankfully, renewed awareness has been spreading and inspiring new student programs. Civility and bullying concerns have also been raised due to the cruelty we've seen growing in our politics and entertainment mediums, but there is another serious adult bullying problem in this country.

Some of the most serious and most damaging bullying, or mobbing as European researchers call it, is workplace bullying, and it’s becoming clear that perhaps some of the most serious workplace bullying is occurring in our schools. 

In a laborview.org panel Dr. Gary Namie indicated that the largest numbers of workplace bullying targets who call the Workplace Bullying Institute are teachers and health care workers.  Not so surprising since several sources,  report that teaching is the largest profession in America and nursing is the other “caring” profession.

Studies from Brookings Institute and other sources have been reporting both high teacher turnover from school to school and high teacher bleed off from the profession. According to Brookings for every two teachers who leave their job, one of them leaves the profession altogether. 

 According to the BAT AFT Quality of Work Life Survey in 2015 which had over 30,000    respondents:

 30 percent of respondents reported being bullied at work in the past 6 months
 51 percent of Teachers with disabilities reported being bullied at work in the past 6 months 
58 percent of respondents reported their bully being an administrator
40 percent reported their bully being a co worker  
Almost 40% did not report the bullying to HR or other authorities
Of those that did report bullying only 34 percent were satisfied with how the bullying was  resolved

Some of the behaviors reported by teachers in both the survey and other anecdotal reportage from self-identified targets included:

• Name calling, put-downs, and assorted verbal abuse. 
• Malicious Re-Assignment to different grade levels or course loads
• Withholding of needed job information and then holding the teacher accountable for it Isolating the teacher from colleagues by room assignments or by direct requests to colleagues so that colleagues disappear from interaction with the target teacher
• Giving unachievable amounts of work, over loads of problem cases, or larger class sizes than others with no supports
• Being shut out of desirable special projects or projects with stipends or status. 
• Constantly being made to move to a new classroom, work from a cart, or do additional non-teaching duties
• Being called into ambush meetings where the teacher is caught with no witnesses and berated or threatened.
• Labelling the teacher as negative for asking any questions in meetings or in emails
• Overt berating in meetings or in front of colleagues and students. 
• Undermining with parents by not backing in parent-school interactions
• Low evaluation scores without actual prescribed observations or reading standards data supplied.
• Short deadlines for surprise data collection or project assignments.
• Criticism of evidence based practices in favor of newer or different unproven methods
• Agressive physical behavior approaching and occasionally including physical attack.

When teachers or school employees are targeted, they become isolated and alone. Many consider calling out sick often, and develop a dread of entering the school for work. The stress spills over into their family and social lives. Reports from general workplace bullying studies report 70% of bullying targets suffer anxiety. Others experience depression, and even more extreme mental and physical health results.  Stress dream reports about school have become a running genre among teachers on social media. 

Lately, we see article after article about teacher shortages, turnover, and drops in enrollment in teacher training programs. Given that studies show witnesses of bullying suffer similar anxiety to those actually targeted, it’s not surprising that more teachers would be deciding to leave the school environment, even when not the target themselves. A Workplace Bullying Coalition survey showed that 77% of their respondents once targeted would leave their jobs either voluntarily or by being forced out. There were very few good outcomes once the bullying was initiated, even when teachers fight back with reportage, unions, or legal recourse.  According to the Work Place Bullying Institute, targets tend not to be weak or ineffective teachers, but some of the best and brightest; independent, creative thinkers, and positive problem solvers.
  
But how do we know that Education Reform as implemented in the recent past is responsible? It would be difficult to prove cause unequivocally,  but we can say that teacher turnover studies report the major reasons teachers report leaving is because of working conditions, particularly lack of autonomy, and work overloads.  

It does not take much of an intellectual leap to draw the line between punitive evaluation systems and working conditions, or between standardization of instruction & assessment and lack of autonomy, or between work overloads and the massive data collection that has been added to teacher job descriptions through high stakes testing, increased parent reporting to justify the tests, and value added evaluations– all as class sizes have been rising due to the bleed off of general funding due to testing costs and competitive, rather than needs based federal funding .  

From there it does not take a strenuous jump to consider that the stress teachers feel bleeds into their classrooms and the limits standardization places on teachers who are not allowed to meet students’ individual needs has at least a correlation if not causal relationship to lower achievement. 

Sadly, workplace bullying breaks trust between all the stakeholders in an organization.  The bullying teachers suffer is mirrored in the pressures placed on administrators whose jobs are threatened with denial of accreditation of their schools and ineffective ratings and job loss for them if they do not demand and deliver the standardization and data collection from their teachers.  With their jobs at risk, administrators are caught in a costly double bind that is creating a similar failure in job satisfaction and attrition in administrator ranks.  Superintendents’ average tenure these days is well under 5 years.– hardly long enough to get a successful initiative and stabilized system well established. And the low morale created by so much alienation in a building does little to create a positive and affirming energy for parents and community members who enter the building.

Ironically, the changes most districts have proposed to relieve teacher attrition have little or nothing to do with the reasons teachers give for leaving.  Added cash for those who meet demands and expectations, contrived “leadership opportunities” for those willing to push standardization, coaches and mentors to make sure teachers are meeting the demands of Reform.  None answer the desire teachers are expressing for a return to autonomy and the chance to practice the skills of their profession for the benefit of their students. 

It is rare to witness a meltdown due to workplace bullying across an entire field of endeavor – not just in a single school, a single region, or a state, but nationwide across many organizations and an entire profession. 

After 20 years of ever tightening Education Reform, it may be the single achievement of Corporate Reform that it has turned school, one of the most positive places in society, into possibly the most toxic hostile workplaces in the country. 

Week 1 Testing

TESTING WEEK 1- How the Teachers really feel.

Many of us have heard that Teachers are Stressed, that the Joy of Learning has left our schools, that our Children are experiencing heavy anxiety, even mental and physical health distress over the high stakes testing that has taken over our schools, but seldom do we see and hear the reality of that in real time.  This is what teachers say to one another after a round of high stakes testing.

Below is an actual conversation from social media from Week 1 of testing. The names and photos have been stripped out to protect those for whom this was a spontaneous conversation among a community of caring friends.  Otherwise the conversation is presented as it was spoken by the 30 speakers. They are from a variety of schools, a variety of locales, and a variety of states.

It shows not only the deep care the Teachers have for their students, but the ongoing relationships and mutual support colleagues, parents, former students and children are giving one another to bear up under the strain of a system driven badly awry.

Please Read, Take Pause, and Consider.

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Teacher 1 Post feeling angry.

15 hrs ·Springvale· 

I HATE this time of year. I find myself unable to focus on my family because of the SOL pressure and stress. It's not so much "my scores" as a teacher that bug me (which I do worry about). More- it's for my Seniors who are tested and restested and RETESTED in hopes they will pass enough standardized tests to graduate. And my Juniors who have been consistently told by the state that they "FAIL" and "Do Not Meet" the standard. Many of both groups have never passed an SOL and feel helpless. They fear they won't graduate. I spent a large part of my last block today talking to my students about being more than a test (which they ARE). Now, coming home, I am feeling guilty for using my class time so unwisely. Our kids deserve a better system. Sorry for my rant. We as a nation desperately need to invest in our children and fix the educational system.

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Teacher 2  The elementary kids are taking it too and they're stressing over it and they're just like 9-10. It’s so sad to watch them and try to make them understand as long as you do your best it’s okay

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Teacher 1 Reply    Breaks my heart.

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Friend 3 Comment   You used your time very wisely; tending to your student's mental well being. Do not feel guilty for caring. Thank you for caring.

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Teacher 1 Reply Thanks,  Friend 3. ❤❤❤

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Teacher 4 Comment I hear ya!!! I'm living the same hell!

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Friend 3 Reply I do not know you, but my words are for you too?

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Teacher 1 Reply  Terrible. Hang in there!

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Teacher 5 Comment It's nothing short of child abuse and I feel complicit. On my best days I tell kids that the tests don't define them. Other days I find myself badgering them to produce. Very saddening

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Teacher 1 Reply Completely agree. Saddening and maddening.

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Teacher 6 Comment You are an amazing teacher. You just followed your gut today. I am sure they benefitted from that convo.

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Teacher 1 reply Thanks. ☺

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Teacher 1 Reply I hope so.

Teacher 7 Comment  It is ridiculous! Even as a Kindergarten teacher there is stress over all of the testing! Our testing is about 2 months long, DAILY! Luckily, we don't let the kids know we are testing them, so THEY don't feel the stress, but it is terrible the amount of testing and pressure we put on these kids! Very frustrating!

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Teacher 1  This makes me so sad. What a waste of everyone's time... At ALL levels.

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Friend 8 Your students are blessed to have a teacher with such passion. ❤

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Teacher 1  I'm blessed with my students. They are amazing. Luckily, I will have the Juniors I have this year in Gov't again next year. Today I pledged to help them to pass these tests and walk across the stage next year. They broke my heart.

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Teacher 9 Comment Nicely said and true

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Teacher 9 Comment You are an amazing teacher

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Educator 10 Comment There is a reason why I always asked for you to be my students' case manager, and what you did today is a big one. They needed to hear it more than they needed to prep.

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Teacher 1   Miss you at XXX  Educator 10 !!! We were a great team!

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Educator 10  I miss you guys too!!

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Teacher 11 Comment That talk was way more valuable than yet another session of SOL prep.

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Teacher 1  The US History test is the 25th.... We'll see!

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Teacher 11 Reply 🍷

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Former student 12 You are the reason i graduated. You spent extra time with me and even helped me with all my other subjects. I was very lucky to have you as my teacher or i would have been repeating 11th and 12th grade. My own counselor told me i was going to fail and not graduate, but you were the only teacher that took the time and encouraged me you were there every time i needed you and picked me up when i would be having bad days! Its teachers like you that make a difference in a kid’s life, me being one of them. I wish every teacher could be like you. Those kids will remember that talk for the rest of their lives! Now put your chin up and teach on!!!!!!!

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Friend 3 Now what a testimony!

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Teacher 1 ❤❤❤   Former Student 11 thanks for the love and for making me cry. That means a lot. Love ya!

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Parent 13 Everything that Student 11 said is absolutely true! As her Mom I praise God for putting you in her life at a time when she was hanging on by a thread. Your involvement made all the difference, not only that she graduated, but as an adult she has become an amazing person and great Mom! I am sending prayers for you during these challenging days and weeks. You are making a difference!

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Teacher 1 I am honored to have been a part of her history and have so enjoyed seeing the amazing person she has become as well! Thanks so much for thr support.... Please send the prayers to the kids sitting in those seats today! They need them!!! ❤❤❤

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Parent 13 You bet!

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Former teacher Friend 14 Kids know when you are sincere & on their side... So glad I retired when the pressure got so much more... It was there but not to the extent that it is now... I was a pilot school when those tests were being developed & didn't really count so we could use them as intended, diagnostics... The system is definitely in need of fixing! Bless u for all you do! 🙅

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Teacher 15 My heart ached for about 6 juniors who didn't pass the reading... Not even the quick retake score... I knew that they would not be willing to work today. We sat and ate Oreos.

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Teacher 1  I almost cried in front of them. Pretty sure it's the same kids.

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Teacher 1  But there was an inspirational moment when the Senior in the class was called out to be told that he passed the Algebra 1 Test and was one step closer to graduation!

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Teacher 16 COMPLETELY agree with your entire post!! It is unfair and unjust. You are clearly an outstanding HS teacher having a heart like this for your students💗 I work in an elementary school now, but was in HS, and the pressures are still there. A group of us were discussing this very subject today. I hope that now, since SOL opt outs will NOT be held against the school or teacher (as we are understanding) at our age, that more parents will jump on THAT band wagon and opt out their children. Eventually, with more and more children opting out, the testing will become an insufficient way to evaluate our education system 🙏Might be far away, but I'm hopeful that change will come. However for now, love your kids through this tortuous process. You've prepared, you've given all you can, and now you love them and be there to help them with the emotional aspect of this horrendous situation. So proud to know that loving teachers that want the VERY BEST for their kids are still roaming the halls of our public school systems!!! You and others like you are making profound differences in these kids lives!! Don't stop!!!💞

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Teacher 1  Thanks so much Teacher 15 I need to learn more about opt outs! I am hopeful for change too!!!

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Friend 17  Teacher 1 you are a very special teacher. I watched you grow from an TA to an amazing, creative and caring teacher. The time you took with the students was just what they needed. Hopefully they will pass the tests. It is a difficult time of year. I thank you and all teachers! ❤️

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Teacher 1  Now more tears! Thanks for the pep talk! I just want the best for these kids. ❤❤❤

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Friend 17   Teacher 1  They are lucky. They have one of the best!! ❤️

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Former Teacher 18 Amen. Keep speaking self esteem to your students. It might be the only positive influence they will hear.

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Teacher 19-Dear Teacher 1, I love you. You are a first-class teacher serving your students in such profound ways. They will forever be thankful for your efforts and care. Rest well tonight ~~ may the angels be with you. heart emoticon

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Teacher 1  Thanks   Teacher 18!

Teacher 20 Preach! I literally cried multiple times today because of this. They see themselves as loser, but I know just how amazing they are.

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Teacher 1  Yes. So many of them are overcoming or have overcome so much so far in their lives. They are FAR from being losers!

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Parent 21 Thank you. As a parent, your post makes me sad and hopeful all at the same time. I'm hopeful that because of teachers like you, these kids know they're worthy and that together we can change this system.

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Teacher 1  Yes! We MUST change the system!

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Teacher 22 VGLA them all.

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Parent 23 What Parent 20 said is TRUE! Some people just do not care.

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Teacher 1  That makes me so sad!

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Teacher 24 – Comfort emoticon- I’m with you.

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Teacher 1  ❤ I know you know.

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Teacher 24 My heart is with you and our beloved  XXX students. Hard to believe policymakers are still forcing this. My goal once retired is going to be to break the back of this G*dd#mn testing machine.

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Teacher 25 You are and always will be a great teacher. The passionate ones always suffer more because they care more

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Teacher 1  

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Parent 26  XXXXXX is in 5th and the pressure is unbelievable!! As a parent we have not spent too much time focusing on it but just doing the daily work and reviewing! We don't want to stress him out because we feel he gets enough if that at school! We pump him up  We don't want to stress him out because we feel he gets enough if that at school! We pump him up with support, get him bed early and make a kick a$$ breakfast! We just hope and pray he's ready! I can imagine at your level and as a teacher how you all are under the pressure for scores and passing! Prayers and hugs to you!!! You are doing a great job!!!

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Teacher 1 You are doing all the right things. He is so lucky to have supportive parents! Good luck in this testing season and thanks for the kind words and support!!!

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Parent 27 WOW, what a gift you gave your students today  ❤️. I have a 23yr old that had a near mental breakdown every May with SOL's, AP's, and other school commitments. To this day, she continues to have an emotionally hard time in the month of May! As a parent of a kindergartner and 1st grader, I am well aware of the option to 'OPT OUT' of the elementary SOL's (and I believe middle school too?). If either of my two start to stress out, we WILL OPT OUT! Not worth the emotional trauma.

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Teacher 24 XXX - If you are considering call XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX  she is the go to person for Opt Out.

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Friend 28 It certainly is a sad state of affairs - sure would be nice to see the county align teaching practice with their beliefs. Until then hang in there, you make a huge difference to your students! 💗

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Former Student 29 Aghghgh, virtual HUG! I WISH I had more teachers like you! So many things in life will fail these kids, knowing that there is someone who teaches them that they are worth something more than any number on a test or paycheck or evaluation or rank - that is invaluable!

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Former Student 30 Hugs to all involved but leave it to my favorite teacher to stand up for the students. I know XXXX had to take one at least 6 times because she hated the subject and she had a horrible teacher one year. The stress was crazy.

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