teacher's unions

The popularity of the narrative that unions are bad for jobs, bad for business, and bad for taxpayers is one of the best tricks the right wing ever pulled on the poor and working class. In this post, I want to discuss the attitude that surrounds unions in general and teacher's unions in particular. I also want to focus on one subset of the kind of improvements that unions tend to negotiate, class sizes in this case, and talk about how this issue has effected my teaching practice.

The myths surrounding teacher's unions discussed by both Ravitch (2010) and Gorski & Zenkov (2014) are as follows: unions obstruct 'common sense' fiscal and administrative decisions in order to provide teachers with cushy quality of life benefits. Unions actively protect the interests of teachers who are unfit for service by making it difficult or impossible for administrators to fire them. Unions contribute to the budget crisis by demanding financial accommodations which are not in line with fiscal realities. These myths are not specific to teacher's unions. I used to work in a fabrication shop in Brooklyn, and there were always stories about the Local 1 in Manhattan (the arts and entertainment union for theatrical carpenters, set dressers, etc.) where one worker is payed $120 per hour to push the button that opens and closes the curtains on Broadway shows. These myths are curious because they are naturally populist (they serve the narrative of lazy, shadowy mobsters getting rich while making it harder for the 'common man' to work) while being aggressively anti-proletariat.

All of these myths are easily disprovable bunk. Tenure for teachers is not a guarantee of job security, but rather a requirement for documentation that fights against arbitrary or politically motivated dismissals (Gorski & Zenkov, p. 98). The benefits that unions fight for do cost money, but those costs are shown to produce specific academic benefits for students, and must be contrasted with the financial burden of a consistently undereducated and underserved working class (Ravitch, p245). Back to my shop in Brooklyn, we had a saying that went "never time to do it nice, always time to do it twice" (i.e. there was never room in the budget for high quality materials and proactive staffing at the beginning of a project, but always room for overtime when we had to rush to fix a poorly done first attempt). Finally, the kinds of benefits that unions push for tend to observably benefit students just as much as teachers (Gorski & Zenkov, p. 99).

This leads me to a quicker discussion: the size of my classes affects my teaching probably more than any other factor. My first teaching job, as a long-term substitute in Las Vegas, involved teaching high school art in a portable trailer to classes of between 45-50, most with limited English fluency. In this case, I was a very bad teacher. as Ravitch notes, "if a teacher has a large class, his or her job becomes an exercise in management and control rather than instruction" (p.244). My one-on-one time with students is the most important part of my instruction. Art thrives on individual differentiation, unique cultural/subcultural interests, and directed mentoring. These practices are impossible in a situation where I have (at most) one minute of class time per child. Teacher's unions protect the existence of these kinds of 'quality of life' benefits that make authentic teaching possible.

References

Gorski, Paul C., and Kristien Zenkov, eds. The big lies of school reform: Finding better solutions for the future of public education. Routledge, 2014.

Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America's public schools. Vintage.

Charter Schools / Voucher Programs

I might be starting to repeat myself. The last two posts cover the territory I am dealing with here (misplaced trust in the free market, as guided by bad populist ideology), but charter schools and voucher programs seem to represent the end-stage of the process. Au (2014) describes the linkage between testing, assessment, and school reform under neoliberalism as follows: "Bad businesses (schools) will go out of business (be closed) because their products (students) do not pass inspection (high stakes testing). To replace bad businesses (closed schools), entrepreneurs (charter management organizations) will be encouraged to open new businesses (charter schools) free of public regulation and public oversight" (p.145). In my first blog, I mentioned that the school reform movement seemed so transparently sinister that it made me feel like a conspiracy theorist, but the linkage still seems pretty clear to me.

As we discussed in class, the specific effectiveness of both charter schools and voucher programs seems besides the point. They are certainly utilitarian, and are more or less effective (depending on the specific context of the school, students, and district). They fail, though, because they use an inappropriate capitalistic model that is inappropriate for education. Ravitch (2013) cites John Merrow, who asks "why America- which had pioneered the mass-produced automobile with the Ford Model T- had not been able to mass-produce high quality schools" (p.174). The answer seems obvious: regions are different, schools are different, and children are different. Attempts to mass-produce education will never yield quality education so long as these things are true.

I am leaving aside the shady business practices, conflicts of interest, ethical violations, etc. that tend to follow charter schools and voucher programs, because I want to emphasize that even if those issues disappeared, and we could somehow trust boards of directors to be moral, privatizing education is bad for students, teachers, and communities.

References

Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America's public schools. Vintage.

Gorski, Paul C., and Kristien Zenkov, eds. The big lies of school reform: Finding better solutions for the future of public education. Routledge, 2014.

Merit Pay / Teacher Evaluations

This topic is heavily tied to the last (high stakes testing), as the most frequent requirement for merit-based pay bonuses is an increase in standardized testing scores. Merit-based bonuses are, among other issues we have discussed in this class, an application of free-market principles within an inappropriate context. The overwhelming consensus of the literature seems to agree with Ravitch's (2013) statement that "the paradox of merit pay in education is that even if it did work, it would still fail" (p.122). I take that to mean that even if we assume that the requirements for merit pay are valid measures, that teachers require the possibility of a pay bump to 'try harder,' and such a system was implemented without bias, the results would still be bad education.

Ravitch notes a few general findings from different forms of merit-based bonus systems. The first is that teachers tend to tailor their curriculum towards the middle of student achievement levels, spending less time with advanced students (whose growth is less measurable) and struggling students (who require a disproportionate amount of effort) (p.117). Another tendency is to narrow curricular focus towards tested subjects (p. 117). Finally, even if we remove standardized testing from the requirements for a bonus and focus only on teacher evaluations, morale and motivation among teachers goes down (p.119). All of these outcomes, which I hope we can agree are entirely negative, rely on the assumption that standardized testing is a valid means of measuring learning, which our previous readings should call into question.

The inclusion of teacher evaluations into merit-pay discussions also requires an analysis of their usefulness and validity. This is a bit more complicated than simply measuring standardized test scores, as teacher observations/evaluations at least offer the opportunity for some degree of reflectivity and adaptation. I have actually enjoyed being observed, because I like the opportunity for feedback from administrators who are invested in the particular requirements of a given educational environment. The usefulness of these evaluations, though, is dependent on administrators who have time for rigorous observation of teachers, the existence of mentoring and professional development to shore up areas of weakness, and evaluations that measure authentic criteria (Donaldson, 2016). When not tied to merit pay (for the reasons mentioned above), I think there is at least an opportunity for usefulness here.

I enjoyed Ravitch's emphasis that merit pay is not a new idea (p.116) but a failed practice that keeps getting revisited because free market principles simply must work. As if the only thing that is preventing me from becoming a highly effective teacher is an extra $1,500 per year. Its fine, I guess, if policy makers want to trust capitalism so much, but maybe they could try increasing teacher wages across the board to allow the possibility of entrance into the upper middle class if they like competition so much.


References

Donaldson, M. L. (2016). Teacher Evaluation Reform: Focus, Feedback, and Fear. Educational Leadership, 73(8), 72-76.

Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America's public schools. Vintage.

High Stakes Testing

I've talked a bit about how some of the issues we are covering don't tend to touch me as an art teacher. High stakes standardized testing is one of those issues, and their absence from an arts curriculum is actually a pretty big reason that I pursued art education as opposed to literature or science. I would have a hard time enjoying my work, or teaching in good faith, if my students' success (and my job) was tied to this kind of arbitrary trickle-down wrongheadedness. I'm old enough that standardized testing was not as present in my education as it is now, aside from late high school proficiency tests that were required for graduation. Mostly, I have no experience either as a student or as an educator with their specific effects in the classroom. The standardized testing that I take part in takes the form of portfolio submissions, which I am actually a big fan of. I'll talk more about this later, but these assessments measure learning progress, relate to authentic activities, and are referenced according to local norms.

I do want to make a weird comparison though between the effects of high stakes standardized testing and a trend that was prevalent in art education up until the 1980s-90s and still presents itself in the classrooms of lazy art teachers today: what Efland (1976) defines as the 'school art style.' The school art style is difficult to define, but we have all probably experienced its outcomes: snowmen made of puff balls, decorative fish filled in with predefined patterns, or turkeys made by tracing hands. This is the bad side of 'kid art.' It is bad not so much because of the quality of products produced, but because those products have no relationship either to authentic academic learning or actual works of art. The school art style, according to Efland, has "little or no counterpart either in the personal spontaneous expression of children or in the culture outside of the school" (p. 38). Authentic arts instruction should either offer some sort of academic progress (through multidisciplinary connections) or at least mimic the kinds of activities that 'real' artists do. This might be a stretch, but I want to make a comparison between the school art style and the existence of high stakes standardized testing in that standardized testing has no academic or authentic counterpart. It is entirely context specific (we are familiar with the phrase 'teaching to the test'), and has no relationship either to holistic education nor skill-specificity. All that is to say I think high stakes testing is bizarre, bad, and useless. I have nothing but sympathy for educators whose actual job performance is tied to such garbage. 

My arguments with the existence of these assessments are mostly aesthetical, but standardized testing, as applied to Value Added Models, might not even be valid. As Amrein-Beardsley, Pivovarova, and Geiger (2016) note, "VAMs are open to distortions themselves — such as student sorting, teaching to the test, cheating, and artificial score inflation — just like other methods of evaluating teacher effectiveness that are often deemed less “objective" (p.4). I guess I am curious about whether or not there we can think of any defense for this kind of testing. 

References

Efland, A. (1976). The school art style: A functional analysis. Studies in art education, 17(2), 37-44. 

Amrein-Beardsley, A., Pivovarova, M., & Geiger, T. J. (2016). Value-added models: What the experts say. Phi Delta Kappan, 98(2), 35-40.

Poverty

I want to talk briefly about how poverty presents itself in schools, and more specifically share some thoughts, based on my experience teaching in primarily high-need schools, about how it can affect an arts curriculum.

This is a big topic- the ways that poverty negatively affect the educational experience seem endless. Lack of health care can lead to increased absences and undiagnosed psychological/developmental/behavioral disorders. Transiency (again, more absences) destabilizes the cumulative nature of most curriculum designs. There are so many effects that poverty might have on the emotional and psychological development of a child, I don't know where to begin. More troubling, to me, is when the symptoms of poverty get mistaken by teachers and administrators as character flaws. One of my Kindergarten students couldn't sit still. He would not sit in his chair, or would use it incorrectly. He would sit on other students, roll around on the ground, etc. This was not due to undiagnosed ADHD or 'rowdiness.' A home visit revealed that the apartment where he lived had no furniture. Using a chair was a skill that had to be taught. Having furniture, and the correct use of that furniture, is a class-based skill set that not everyone has access to. As Gorski and Zenkov (2014) say, "perhaps the biggest and most pernicious lie about poor people is that their poverty is their own faults" (p.14).

In an arts classroom, poverty presents itself in a few specific ways that can have a profound effect on curriculum. First and foremost, the way that we conceive artistic 'talent' nearly always has more to do with time, access, and involvement than innate skill or aptitude (Visconti, 2012). Students with money, who have access to art supplies at home, access to extracurricular enrichment, and leisure time, are 'better' artists than those without. This is a definitional problem, since arts programs are "premised on the general assumption that the arts, in particular, are a domain that somehow transcends the dynamics of social inequality that usually shape racial and class segregation in schools" (Gaztambide-Fernandez, Saifer, and Desai, 2013, p. 126).

On a more practical level, art supplies are expensive, and the relationship between cost and quality has a very steep curve. Crayola colored pencils, which are the supplies most students have access to (if they have access at all) are less than $1.00 for a set of twelve. These pencils are qualitatively hot garbage, and present several instructional difficulties (the lead is fragile, the colors are inconsistent, they do not layer, etc.). Prismacolor pencils, which are closer to what a 'real artist' might use, are approximately 20x more expensive. I try to base my curriculum on authentic activities and discipline-based projects. That is, we learn about art by thinking and acting like artists. It is troubling to me that 'thinking and acting like an artist' usually involves having the time and money to do so.


References

Gaztambide-Fernández, R. A., Saifer, A., & Desai, C. (2013). “Talent” and the misrecognition of
social advantage in specialized arts education. Roeper Review, 35 (2), 124-135.

Gorski, P. C., & Zenkov, K. (Eds.). (2014). The big lies of school reform: Finding better solutions for the future of public education. Routledge.

Visconti, V. (2012). Linking the nature of secondary school students who are highly artistic with
curriculum needs and instructional practice. Exceptionality Education International,  22(2), 46-60.

Our Public Schools

I am going to attempt to summarize the state of public education in 2017. Before I begin, here are some caveats:

I am not a veteran, or even experienced, educator. My experience involves a few years of substitute teaching in the Las Vegas valley, instructing college-level art classes, a one year internship teaching elementary school in South Knoxville, and a summer of panic spent planning lessons and curriculum for my upcoming job as an art teacher in Oak Ridge. Further, I am an art teacher. I am not involved in standardized testing, am not subject to test-based teacher evaluation, and my curriculum is not a hotly contested item of public scrutiny (except, perhaps, as an authentic area of study). Finally, this post takes place at the beginning of a course dealing with exactly these subjects (I imagine this is a bit of a pre-assessment), so my thoughts are not yet defensible by theory or practice.

That said, here goes: the movement towards charter schools seems so sinister to me that it borders on conspiracy theory. The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act created an environment of high-stakes testing in which "reliability, validity, and content were not on the radar, eclipsed as they were by the larger issue of accountability" (Wexler, p.53). These tests, of course, do not measure authentic learning, but rather create an opportunity for outside influences to authoritatively state that schools are 'failing.' Conveniently, an alternative to public schools is available in the form of the school choice movement, that "appeals to values Americans have traditionally cherished- choice, freedom, optimism, and a latent distrust of government" (Ravitch, p.4). The school choice movement is a transparent corporate power grab masquerading as reform, and I can't help but see parallels between its astro-turfed origins and the most recent presidential election. I understand distrust of government bureaucracy, but I cannot fathom why that trust should then be placed in the free market in which "we apply capitalistic strategies to manage all our precious resources, from our children to the environment, and all our daily human needs and desires" (Wexler, p.60). I don't see a way out of this trajectory other than total rejection.

I don't want this post to seem too goth, so here is what gives me hope: my students are excellent resilient feral weirdos that I never get tired of interacting with. My peer teachers are well-educated, idealistic, and quick-witted enough to dance around the bureaucratic doom that surrounds them. I believe in art as a form of research, therapy, and as a primary site for empathy (and thus ethics). The community where I teach is a vibrant site of place-based exploration, full of natural assets, local artists, and involved families. I am excited to find an 'exit strategy.'

References:

Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America's public schools. Vintage.

Wexler, A. (2014). Reaching higher? The impact of the Common Core State Standards on the visual arts, poverty, and disabilities. Arts Education Policy Review, 115(2), 52-61.