Oh, Those Poor, Powerless School Boards

August 12, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Mike Petrilli draws attention to this Washington Post column by Laura Berthiaume of the Montgomery County, Md. school board. Mike seems be taking Berthiaume’s claims pretty seriously. I’m not sure why.

Berthiaume is responding to the Post‘s complaints that school boards bend to the wishes of the unions, because the unions have disproportionate power in school board elections.

She begins by acknowledging that the Post is basically right:

It is true that all current board members have gotten their seats with some level of union blessing.

Well, give her this at least: she’s not doing this the easy way. Beating your opponent at chess by knocking down your own king as your opening move is a tough challenge!

She writes:

In the balance of power between the board of education and the bureaucracy, the superintendent and his staff hold all the cards.

That’s a mighty strong claim, considering that, on paper, the superintendent works for the school board. So how does she justify it?

They outwit, outlast and outplay.

Well, forgive me for asking, but: whose fault is that?

Berthiaume elaborates:

When the union felt threatened by an impending state action more tightly linking teacher evaluations to student performance, an “agreement” between MCPS and the unions was announced in The Post on April 21 — and all but one board member found out about it that same morning, in the newspaper.

Well, OK, that was a nasty thing for the superintendent to do. And to hold him accountable you did what?

In my experience, the board actually has little to no impact on union contract negotiations: The superintendent and his staff negotiate the contracts.

And the superintendent is supposed to be held accountable for looking out for the district’s interests in these negotiations by whom?

Even if there ever were actual board opposition, it would be met with a fierce, resolute wall of angry staff.

And the staff work for whom?

Just what does Berthiaume think the voters of Montgomery County put her in office to do? Just what does she think the taxpayers of Montgomery County are paying her for? To rubber stamp whatever the superintendent and his staff do?

If they’re just there to look good, why don’t they put their pictures on the ballots so we can judge for ourselves which candidates are best qualified to fulfill the expectations of the office?

Look, I understand the obstacles to reform are humongous. But if God puts you in a position of responsibility (and really, he’s put all of us in some kind of position of responsibility) then it’s your duty to fight for the right as smartly and as spiritedly as you can, get whatever you can get, and go home at the end of the day satisfied that whatever else others may have done, you fought the good fight.

And if you really think your ability to accomplish anything is zero – well, shame on you for wasting the talent God gave you by spending your time on something you admit is useless!

Update: Just to be clear, Berthiaume is right that the Post shouldn’t go easy on the superintendent and lay all the blame on the board. But she should quit going so easy on herself and laying all the blame on the superintendent!

2 Comments | politics, teacher union | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Arguing the Merits

August 11, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Last week I noted that Fordham had offered up the Gadfly as a platform for an argument, made by guest columnist Eugenia Kemble, that the next logical step after establishing national standards is a single national curriculum.

Well, my post has drawn a sharp response from Kemble. Of course, she disagrees with me on the substance (the merits of a national curriculum and the badness of teachers’ unions) but that goes without saying. More interestingly, she accuses me of not addressing her argument on the merits, but only being concerned with the significance of her piece having appeared in the Gadfly. The indictment has two counts. First, she accuses me of not offering an argument for my position that “common” standards adopted by the states are really “federal” standards (i.e. controlled by the federal government.) Second, she accuses me of practicing “guilt by association” by insinuating that if Checker publishes a union piece, he must embrace the entire union agenda.

To the second count I plead not guilty. I didn’t insinuate that Checker agrees with the unions about everything. I insinuated that his position in favor of national standards was having the effect – whether intended or not – of advancing the unions’ agenda in one respect. And that the appearance of Kemble’s piece in the Gadfly clearly demonstrates that those of us who have been saying this all along were right. And I stand by that insinuation.

But to the first count I plead guilty as sin. I did not address the merits of Kemble’s claim that it is possible – not just in some hypothetical cloudcoocooland but in the real world, right now, in the actual political climate as it stands now and under all the other conditions that currently prevail – to have “common” standards nationwide (thus “national” standards) that are not controlled by the federal government. On the merits of this claim I said nothing at all.

Here are some other claims whose merits I have never addressed:

  • The existence of the tooth fairy
  • The medical effectiveness of aromatherapy
  • The flatness of the earth (oh, wait)

Even Checker admits that national standards have been “entangled in a competition for federal money,” that it’s bad that “that same federal money [is] paying for development of new assessment systems to accompany the standards,” and that “it would have been lots better if President Obama had never hinted at harnessing national standards to future Title I funding.”

As Matt aptly put it: other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

But never mind. My real point was to highlight the fact that Checker has spent weeks calling us “paranoid” because we thought national standards would become the first step toward greater national control of schools, especially by unions; then offered up the Gadfly to a union blogger as a platform to argue that national standards should become the first step toward greater national control of schools.

3 Comments | instructional reform, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

A Little Context for OFA’s Sob Story

August 10, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The latest item making the rounds is an e-mail from Organizing for America, the old Obama campaign appendage now grafted into the DNC. A teacher from Ambler, Pa. pleads that if we don’t shovel a huge chunk of money into the EduJobs rathole, it’s theoretically possible that someone “like me” could potentially lose a job.

With that special blend of entitlement mentality and self-righteousness only the blob has mastered, she solemnly intones:

I’m not a special interest. I’m a teacher.

(Portentious boldface in original.)

Jim Geraghty would like you to be aware of the numbers featured above – this teacher’s school district, Wissahickon, has an average salary almost half again as high as the state average salary. And that’s before we look at benefits, which are much richer for teachers than in the private sector. Geraghty remarks:

When the local board of education spends money at a rate that the local tax base cannot afford, those teachers who refuse to adjust their salaries to reality do start to look like a special interest.

Mike Petrilli hammers the point home:

Your job could easily be saved if your union leaders were willing to accept some modest concessions. (Even a salary freeze might do the trick.)  But when teachers demand job protections, generous benefits, and salary increases in the midst of a recession…well, that’s expecting special treatment, indeed.

Not to mention JPGB’s own Matt Ladner, commenting on the instantly-famous chart comparing private sector job destruction in the current crisis to government job protection:

The yellow line just put another $10 billion on the credit card of the red line. Let them eat cake!

Sometimes I almost feel sorry for these people.

3 Comments | money myth, politics, teacher pay, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Does Fordham Support a National Curriculum?

August 5, 2010

 

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

For weeks, Checker has been calling us “paranoid” for worrying that the national standards machine Fordham has helped create will be hijacked by the teacher unions.

Today, there lands in my inbox the new Gadfly from Fordham, featuring a guest editorial by Eugenia Kemble of the Shanker Institute. Kemble’s argument, in a nutshell: Now that we have national standards, the next thing we need is a national curriculum. That way we don’t just ensure that all schools set outcome targets and measurements in the one best way that’s right for everyone regardless of their individual needs; all schools will do everything in the one best way that’s right for everyone regardless of their individual needs. And we’ll have a benevolent dictator who will make sure that everyone will do everything in the one best way, and who will never abuse that power.

I paraphrase.

On Kemble’s list of the heroic, wonderful people she admires who have been pushing not just for national standards but a national curriclum are Bill Schmidt and Randi Weingarten at the AFT; teacher union shill Diane Ravitch; and . . . Checker Finn.

Inquiring minds want to know:

  1. Does the Fordham Foundation support a national curriculum?
  2. Given that Fordham is offering up the Gadfly as a platform from which Kemble can advocate using national standards as the first step toward broader federal control of schools, does the Fordham Foundation still consider it “paranoid” to be worried that national standards will be used as a first step toward broader federal control of schools?

I’ll hold my breath and wait for Checker to give us a clear, unambiguous answer.

5 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Checker Finn, FREAK OF NATURE!

July 30, 2010

 

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Yet you can count the voucher programs on your fingers.

Wow! Checker Finn has TWENTY-FIVE FINGERS!

(P.S. Congrats to FEC on the rockin’ new website.)

[Update: Just realized I should have added a link to Matt’s outstanding demolition of Checker, below.]

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Posted by Greg Forster

Two Senses of “Character”

July 28, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Thinking back over these two posts on schools, citizenship and culture, I think there’s a further distinction I need to add. When I composed those posts, I didn’t explicitly distinguish two different ways in which schools can be said to contribute to the formation of national identity or moral character.

I was concerned to identify what I thought was a continuous historical dynamic, running from the foundation of the government school monopoly to the present day, in which the government monopoly is seen as a solution to America’s perennial anxieities over the formation of national identity and moral character. Because America has embraced religious freedom more fully than any other nation in history (far more fully than, say, the governments in continental Europe that preen themselves on their commitment to religious freedom while passing law after law after law governing the permissible boundaries of religious expression), and for other reasons as well, it is endemic to the American experiment that we are constantly worried about whether we will continue, over time, to share a common commitment to the shared moral values that define our civic order (don’t kill, don’t steal, etc.) and to the shared national identity that is the prerequisite of basic social cohesion. Many people are driven to embrace an aggressive use of government power, in the form of the school monopoly, in the name of various educational schemes designed to alleviate these anxieties. While many people on both sides of the ideological divide succumb to this temptation, I believe the temptation itself (as distinct from those who succumb to it) has its roots in the collectivist thinking that has historically been an ideological product of the left. And it can never work, for all the reasons that collectivism in every form can never work. And I still think all of that is right.

But I didn’t sufficiently distinguish between this dynamic and what one might call the “natural” role of schools in nurturing the formation of national identity and moral character in children. It was never my intention to deny that schools can, and should, nurture the formation of these attributes. What I deny is that the exercise of government power, in the form of a school monopoly or in any other way, contributes to such formation. Quite the opposite is the case, as the evidence shows – the more government gets out of the way, the better a job schools do at nurturing the formation of national identity and moral character.

To reiterate the wisdom of Silent Cal:

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

It is not the role of schools, but the role of government, that is the problem. What this ultimately boils down to is an insistence that schooling is a natural, and therefore prepolitical, phenomenon, not a creature of the state – and that the formation of national identity and moral character are included in the prepolitical nature of schooling. It may sound paradoxical to say that the formation of national identity is prepolitical, but it shouldn’t; indeed, the assertion that national identity precedes politics rather than following from it is basic to all liberty.

1 Comment | civic values | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Forget “Who’s Fickle?” Who’s Paranoid?

July 26, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Earlier this year, Checker Finn went through a brief period where he was tying himself in knots, sounding a whole lot like he was both for national standards and against them. Mike Petrilli chose that moment to take potshots at Arne Duncan for being “Fickle on Federalism.” I had a little fun asking “Who’s Fickle?”

Since then, Checker has finally decided where he stands (at least for now). He’s accused those of us who ask embarrassing questions about whether national standards will be hijacked by the blog blob of “paranoia.”

[Update: Hijacked by the “blob,” of course. This was totally not a Freudian slip. The blog doesn’t hijack anything – as far as you know. Nothing to see here, folks…]

Well, the game just changed. Neal McCluskey has dug up a 1997 Weekly Standard article in which Checker makes the same arguments against national standards we are now making. None of the relevant facts on the ground has changed. So today I get to ask, “Who’s Paranoid?”

2 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

The Blob v. Reform SRN Podcast

July 8, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

My first-ever pod-type casting module is now available through the Inter-Net system of tubes via School Reform News. From the NEA $10 billion coke-and-hooker-slush-fund grab to the inevitable subversion of national standards by the blob, it’s a joyful romp through the lighter side of soul-crushing tyranny.

2 Comments | instructional reform, politics, teacher union | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

State, Nation, Culture, and Citizenship: Silent Cal Speaks Out

July 6, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

After publishing last week’s much-discussed post on schools, state power, culture and citizenship, I had two further experiences that I think are worth recording as a sort of appendix.

One clarification I want to add first, though – I should have bent over a little further backward to stress the distinction between “conservative ideas” and “ideas championed by conservatives.” I never denied – in fact I explicitly said – that the use of the government school monopoly to impose a moral order and civic culture on the nation is something some conservatives have advocated. What I deny is that the idea itself ought to be called “conservative.” If that’s a distinction we’re never allowed to make – which seems to be the position from which my post is being assailed – I can’t see any ground for even using labels like “conservative” at all, since they would have no meaning.

A few days after I put the post up, I was discussing Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom with a friend who is, not exactly a liberal, but certainly not a conservative. Hayek’s thesis was that the “soft” collectivist trends of the Anglo-American world mid-century were parallel in some very important ways to the “soft” collectivism of Germany after WWI – and that murderous totalitarianism was the logical endpoint of both trends. Not because the intentions of the soft collectivists were not noble and uplifting, and everything one might wish them to be; but because the unintended effect of their policies is to destroy the institutions and thought-patterns that obstruct totalitarianism, and strengthen those that give rise to it.

“Well,” remarked my friend,”it sure does make your job easier if you can tie your opponents’ position to Nazism.”

“Yes, it does,” I replied, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

The epigram to the introduction of Road to Serfdom, from Lord Acton, says it all: “Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas.”

I’m more than willing to have a civilized debate about the facts, provided I can find an interlocutor who’s interested in a civilized debate about the facts. Until I do, I think that’s pretty much all I have to say about this aspect of the controversy.

Then, over the weekend, I ran across Calvin Coolidge’s speech on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The speech is very, very good and I encourage you to read it all. His critique of Progressivism, which was then in the slow and painful process of receding from the height of its power and influence, is simply devastating:

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

The more I learn about Coolidge, the more I think he’s known as “Silent Cal” primarily because he only spoke when he had something worth saying.

But in light of the topic I posted on last week – the contrast between the progressivism that sees the diligent exercise of state power as the grounding of a strong moral culture and civic identity, and the conservatism that trusts in our strong moral culture and civic identity as the grounding of state power – I couldn’t help but notice Silent Cal made the same point very well (and far more succinctly). Much of the speech is devoted to the idea that free political institutions ultimately derive from a culture that loves liberty, and cannot survive in its absence. After discussing the historical origin of that culture and some of the social institutions that maintain it, he remarks:

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

Wish I’d said it that neatly.

But then, how many hits did Cal’s blog have?

And how did I run across this speech? It was linked in The Corner by…Jonah Goldberg. Small world!

32 Comments | civic values | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Let’s You and Him Fight!

July 1, 2010

HT Dateline Silver Age

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Check out the editorial in today’s Washington Post about David Obey’s shameless attempt to redirect funding away from RTTT and into the teacher unions’ coke-and-hooker slush fund. While there’s a lot in it that’s worth reading, I particularly appreciated this twist of the knife:

That Mr. Obey’s proposal would pull back money intended to fund Race to the Top applications that have already been filed can only be seen as undercutting any credibility U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan would have in coaxing state officials to make the often-hard political decisions of education reform.

Did you hear what Dave just said about you, Arne? Are you going to stand there and let him say that? Fight! Fight!

Leave a Comment » | politics, teacher union | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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