Requiem for A Great School System

Donald Trump & the conservatives’ response to coronovirus has been deadly for many things; people, families, mom and pop businesses, concerts, movies, the theatre.  But of all the things dying, the one I am mourning this morning is our education system, and though the bigger U.S. education system from PreK-Grad school now needs hospitalization-

There have been 6 Covid cases in schools
since this photo earlier this week.

Today we are about to take a relatively famous and spectacular  school system off life support. Fairfax County Public Schools is the 10th largest school system in the country, serving a sprawling and hugely diverse population that runs from inner urban style communities through the suburbs to still mixed farm and mini-mansions exoburbs. The wealth of it’s cultural diversity and benefits is legendary, rivaled only by a handful of the largest and most densely populated cities. 

Fairfax County Public Schools has been the jewel in the crown of Virginia’s status as first in attractiveness to businesses.  At least three governors of Virginia have related stories of negotiating with CEOs to come to Virginia, and all three expressed pride that the deal maker companies came for is Virginia’s schools. 

After today, that is unlikely to be the reality. We are losing more than most Fairfax residents can possibly imagine. 

Fairfax County Public Schools has long had a stunningly skilled teaching force and staff that could do miracles and has had almost unlimited dedication to the welfare and learning of their students. With 70% of teachers holding master’s degrees and many multiple certifications, they still taught even though lower education requirements and higher pay was available to them. 

As immigrant populations came to the county, it was the school staffs that enabled them to reach mainstream functioning at almost lightspeed; taking students who spoke no English to 96% pass rates on the barrier English SOL in 3-5 years of instruction, and delivering math scores that monolithic and wealthy communities envied.

The instructional force in FCPS has offered and produced award winning numbers on advanced level courses in every field, from math to civics, theatre and robotics, not just in the star school TJ, but in almost every pyramid in the county, consistently bringing home the kinds of opportunities and launches for their students that only the most privileged of families dream of for their children. 

The ratio of students, poor, working class, middle class, and wealthy who have made it to highly competitive universities has been more than impressive.  

Today that work force is being dismissed en masse unless they are willing to come in to work- Now; regardless of the numbers, regardless of the risk.  

Without evidence that aging ventilations systems have been updated to handle the virus.

Without PPE that was promised to be there

Without testing of students or fellow staff

Without required social distancing or masks for students.

While the school board is still virtual

While central office is still virtual

While numbers are still rising

By the end of day today, most of the staff of FCPS are being forced to take a stand to be available at call to go into buildings now or resign, with no option for change. (the only other options are a year’s LOA without pay or health insurance, or retire). 

Even if most of the staff decide to come into the buildings, even if most of them manage to survive the cavalier use of their dedication and lives, the teaching force that made Fairfax County Public Schools great will never be the same, not as the premier place to teach, and likely neither will the great school system it made. 

The #OpenFCPS group that is demanding the schools fully open do not care about that though. Using the language and tactics of Trump, passing on misinformation: 

• Children don’t get it (There have been 3072 of age 0-19 cases in Fairfax and 1943 cases of 70+ age people) 

• It’s not a serious disease for children (unless the child is immune impaired or get MIS-C) 

• Children don’t transmit it (both the CDC and Princeton studies say otherwise.)

#OpenFCPS uses the repertoire of Trumpisms like a playbook: 

• What aboutism (Delivery services are working)

• Name calling, accusing, and demeaning (lazy, union thugs, selfish)

• threatening (they have already threatened two school board members with recall campaigns if they do not open schools now.)

Which is the tipoff that this is a political game, not a genuine concern for children or our community. The push to open schools is the act of a political minority trying to regain political clout in a county they just lost- and regain that clout by bullying. 

So, today the School Board and Dr. Brabrand’s administration will collaboratively kill the goose that laid the golden egg, in nursery rhyme terms, to satisfy them. 

In July when school board member Abrar Omeish asked health Department head, Gloria Addo-Ayensu if there’s a guaranteed loss of life if schools reopen, Dr. Addo-Ayensu said the short answer is, “Yes.” 

The only question is who: Will it be my child, your child, my child’s teacher or yours. Whose family member: the teacher’s spouse, or parent, the student’s parent or grandparent.  It will be more than a few someone’s. And who will represent FCPS at the funerals?

In Memoriam FCPS

Why DMV Educators Must Say NO! to Trumps' Demand to Re-Open Schools

In an article titled "Trump Urged governors to get going on school re-openings," the Hill reported: On Monday April 27, the President had a conference call with Governors.  Afterward, Monday at a press conference detailing his administration's ongoing efforts against coronavirus, The President, told reporters, "Not a long way to go in the school system right now… for this year. But I think you’ll see a lot of schools open up, even if it’s for a very short period of time." (The Hill)

Reports had already been circulating stories of him pressuring Gov. Hogan of Maryland, Mayor Bowser of DC, and Gov. Northam of Virginia to open schools.

Though I’ve been a union member for 22 years, and an organizer for Educators United grassroots actions, I am not a big advocate for strikes.  I’ve always seen them as a last resort when other options have been exhausted, and when the problem was so extreme compromise could not be the answer. However right now, the Educators of the Mid-Atlantic and the nation have to become the voice of reason.

In the last 3 days there have been 1,941 new COVID cases in Virginia, 2,865 in Maryland, and 193 in DC. (in DC, figures are for 2 day only, no figures for 4/27); making the total DMV new cases 4,999 for just the last 3 days. (Wikipedia)

But the administration and the financial sector is antsy, and wants baby-sitting so it can call back its workers. Returning students to school in these high-risk circumstances cannot be rationalized as for any other reason.  It is too late to do serious recovery work, and little would be academically accomplished with this short burst of days.  

Now is the time the Educators of the DMV must band together and refuse to allow schools to open. 

The Maryland Education Association, the Virginia Education Association, the Washington Teachers Union, and American Federation of Teachers units in Maryland and Virginia must all call on their teachers to stay out should the state and District governments cave to Trump’s demands.

Non-unionized educators and the Educators United movements of the area must likewise refuse to return to work in buildings should the call come to do so before it is fully safe for students to attend.

Parent Groups from the PTA to local PTOs, and grassroots groups like Parents Across America, and the Opt-Out Movement must stand with their Educators and local schools to refuse to send their children as sacrificial lambs to the craven call of politicians and the financial sector. 

Economic and Social Justice groups must likewise refuse to allow our children to be sacrificed for the continued profit of the elites.

Our state, local, and district school boards must refuse to ‘follow orders’ and say no to sending our students into harms way for the sake of oil and stock prices.

When we are at school Educators are charged with protecting and defending our students from harm, and Educators have done so in numerous dangerous circumstances. That is no less necessary or true now.  I recognize it is illegal in all three regions the DMV to strike. However, it is also illegal to kill children, and when it comes to the choice, Educators must participate in the first, not the second. There are some things which should remain non-negotiable.

Should the order come down to resume in-building classes, Educators must refuse and not allow schools to reopen until it is safe for our students to return to their classrooms: Regardless of what the President, the Administration, the States, or any other authority says.

Out of Kilter - The Extreme Polarities Exposed by Covid-19

The author with Lily Eskildsen Garcia
and Randi Weingarten delivering
DeVos report cards

                  

Yesterday morning I saw the notice for the upcoming live stream unveiling of the National Assessment Governing Board’s National Report Card on Civics, Geography and US History. Another sign that not much has changed, in spite of the daily reality that everything has changed.

The data in this report card will be like the report cards students receive this year, an incomplete rating due to circumstances beyond control, yet still a reflection of a society wildly out of equilibrium.

Educators have become accustomed in the last 20 years to collecting data on a myriad of minutia about their students and their practice, and having it used to competitively measure their students, their professional lives, and their communities.  It is mandated. Even the educational resistance got in the spirit of measurement, facetiously giving Betsy DeVos her F report cards from teachers across the country at the end of her first year in office.

Then came 2020 and Covid-19, which turned everything we had been told was “best practice” on its head. All the meticulously developed standards, tests, and step-by-step delivery methods have become suddenly impossible to implement.  The measurements which revealed children and families were in widespread poverty and deeply distressed no longer needed standardized tests to expose the situation. 

Even if we could by some amazing stretch of effort develop testing capabilities in the middle of a pandemic, there is no way to deliver the instruction in a way that would allow our students and us to be safe, and no way to compare the wildly variant conditions of student trauma or student exposure to learning, much less create uniform testing conditions. Literally, abandoning competitiveness has become a life or death choice.

Everything we were told was required is no longer possible. 

Simultaneously, the economic system we had all come to rely on as the condition for daily life, and the standards and measurements related to free-market-capitalism began a free-fall which all the king's horses and all the king's men could not prevent or stop. 

Everything we believed about how life ran is no longer how things are. 

Policy makers across all sectors of society are scampering to figure out how to recover from a total disruption of the status quo. Yet, others are recognizing that a return to the status quo is both impossible and unwise because it would leave us all vulnerable to the next disaster. 

So, this morning I was struck, not just by how hollow National Report Cards are at this point, but by their connection to all the other competition driven components/sectors of our society. 

Education reform and how we conduct our society has long been driven by two complementary opposites: Collaboration and Competition. 

A complementary opposite is also often called a polarity. They are two ideas that appear to be opposites, and in either/or thinking one solves the problem and the other is the problem, depending on which pole you prefer. 

To those who prefer competition, collaboration is often seen from it’s weaknesses as ineffectual and less productive. To those who prefer collaboration, competition is viewed from its negative traits, and seen as destructive and elitist. Yet when both sides of a complementary pair are exercised in punctuated equilibrium from their strengths, the deep dives into dysfunction can be mostly avoided, and timely response to problems are more possible.  When we move from an either/or dichotomy to a both/and view, the pair can create a dynamic energy flow that is more successful. 

The standardized tests and school report cards of our recent education policies have been based heavily on the competition side of this particular polarity or c-pair. Those who have promoted standardization and assessment consistently maintain that it is about global competitiveness of our children. Just as radical free-market capitalism is about an intense competitiveness dependent on competing against and defeating other vendors or providers. Indeed we have reached the point that we use the competition model of free market capitalism as the basis for most of our sectors of society, including education, government, and even religious organizations.

Those who have resisted the education “reform” movement have often done so based on an argument for the other side of this c-pair- Collaboration or cooperation. As competition measures participants in an activity against one another, collaboration approaches endeavors as a mutual effort among participants with the goal being for all to achieve as much as possible without it becoming an extreme win-lose scenario. What measurement there is becomes more concerned with progress for all than winning for one or a few. 

The irony about polarities is that while they are often seen as exclusive opposites, in reality they are both necessary. Neither can function without the other. Each is positive and useful when functioning at positive levels, and when both sides of the pair are in dynamic equilibrium, functioning in their healthy ranges, both are effective.  Similarly, when either is over emphasized, it becomes dominant, and swings into it’s unhealthy range. When that happens, that side of the pole can create a world of problems, including a collapse of the system. 

All dictators and empires are based on an extreme form of competitiveness. The leader or country must have ultimate control of all others. Communes and Kibbutzes are based on collaborative ideas, and old fashioned communism as practiced in the 20th century was a failed attempt at collaborative economics and government. Neither of the extremes - either dictatorships or communism were the positive iterations of their side of the polarity, but both sides of the polarity are required to develop a functioning system. 

I am watching as those in decision making positions try frantically to figure out how we can return our systems to the way they were, even doubling down on more of what was. This week Michael Petrilli from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Stanford was making the case in the Washington Post that we should hold children back, and double down on increased seat time and do double testing to make up for the measurements missed to re-establish who is ahead and who is behind. There have been others suggesting that we abandon students deemed less able to focus on the ones whom we expect to be successful.  Paul Reville of the Harvard Graduate School of Education has been writing for The74 and Boston Globe, quickly trying to recover dominance of influence by acknowledging poverty and systemic failures without acknowledging HGSE and its promotion of competitiveness as having contributed to the entrenched dysfunctional competitiveness that created those failures.

But, if we are to survive this crisis with the least damage possible, and be ready to meet the accelerating next crises- whether it be a pandemic, food or water shortages, or intense weather patterns, or wildfires, or rising seas- we will have to recalibrate our emphasis about this polarity. 

Collaboration does not preclude knowledge of the variables and conditions in a situation; in fact, it may involve incorporating more details, just not in the same way and not for the same purposes. Nor does recalibration involve a total abandonment of healthy competition. It just avoids the dysfunctional by-any-means mentality that has us on the brink of collapse.

When Covid-19 arrived, we were already crippled by our own deep dive into the competitiveness side of this polarity, and our win-at-all-costs mentality continues to deepen the crisis.  We were receiving multiple signals that we were too far in dysfunctional overemphasis on competition. Yet, we were insistently ignoring those signals. Even our outrageous salaries for CEOs and professional athletes is a symptom of that disequilibrium. Now we realize the effects of that lopsided emphasis has much deeper and more damaging effects than a few out of whack salaries.

The time when we can ignore those signals is past. The stakes have gone up, and societal survival is at stake.  More measurement, whether by national or local report cards or digital tracking may give us a false sense of understanding, but will not solve the failures of our societal disequilibrium.

For more information about Managing Polarities or Both/And Thinking see the work of Barry Johnson, Cliff Kyser, Beena Sharma, or Michael DePass at the Center for Creative Leadership

#10&10in2020

Why Virginia Educators United’s 10% and 10% pay increase

is the Reasonable and Appropriate Choice for Virginia 

Governor Northam’s proposed 2 year Virginia budget calls for 0 increase for teachers in the first year, and 3% in the second year.  Virginia Educators United, the campaign begun in 2018 to raise funding for public schools, is putting forward a 10% and 10% Demand structured to reach all by making it easier for localities to accept the state funding. 

“Good luck with that, never happen.” Is the reflexive response many people knowledgeable about school funding in Virginia have to that recommendation.  But a look at just the facts, reveals a strong case that #10&10in2020 is the more appropriate number for this budget than either the Governor’s or other proposed lower figures.

First of all, educators in Virginia are $8,000 per year behind national average pay in spite of Virginia being 10 or 12 in wealth (depending on whose figures you use). Two years ago the legislature passed legislation that directed a goal of at least national average salaries for public school employees.  No attempt has been made as yet to start monitoring or scheduling attaining that goal.  It would take a  9% and 9% increase during the next two years to just reach the legislatively directed goal of the national average.

Secondly, for several years the issue of teacher shortages has been widely publicized as a major concern for the commonwealth. The Governor’s budget, which would be the equivalent of a pay cut, is likely to make the shortages far worse, accelerating the growing flood of teachers from Virginia schools, and making it nearly impossible for districts to compete against other states in attracting qualified candidates. The 0% & 3% is also likely to discourage college students from enrolling in education programs which have dropped in enrollment to dangerously low levels already, at least in part because $31K less than your other graduating classmates is too big a hit to take with today’s heavy student loans. With anything less than the national average, the exodus will continue as well because no one wants to work in the lower half of the market. 

The third reason 10%&10% is appropriate is because virtually every elected official in the state’s aspirational campaign message was about supporting education.  To renege on K-12 educators, students, and communities now would expose the Democratic party and individual electeds to accusations of falseness which would undermine looming and future elections by breaking trust with the families of Virginia in a glaring way.  

However, taking the bold move to fully fund the SOQs as recommended by the Board of Education at $2B (which would provide adequate dollars for the 10% increases), would give credence to a grand new vision for the Commonwealth as a point of destination for the best schools in the country. Since educators already achieve rankings that place Virginia near the top (4th in the nation) with their current miserable provisions, it makes sense to take pr advantage and give them some real funds to work with, which would affirm both their achievements and the state’s commitment to high quality schools. 

The fallback argument that there is not enough revenue for #10&10in2020 is seriously embarrassing. Whatever combination the legislature decides on – from distributed Corporate returns to the lowlow 40 year old corporate tax with loopholes that allow 40% of large corporations to pay no tax, to the $500M in revenues that exceed expectations announced in December, to a more progressive income tax structure, to the gaming funds, the potential marijuana funds, and, and, and- there are clearly enough ways to provide for the schools without making anyone too uncomfortable. 

Why would Virginia not be proud to be first in the nation in education instead of 40th in funding, even if it meant dropping to 2^nd or 3^rd in the nation for business? Yet, educators are not asking for top pay in the nation, or even top levels for all school funding. They are only asking for the national average – 25^th- and what the Board of Ed says is needed to make up for prior losses. It is what is needed before the public service disruptors in both parties collapse the school system that contributed so heavily toward making us first in the nation for business.

#10&10in2020 is neither outrageous, nor unattainable.  It is what our educators should be receiving already without having to ask.  

Pass it on #10&10in2020- the sensible and appropriate choice.