The State of Public K-12 Education
Q: I am intrigued by your research on the inequity of the current system of AP and IB programs. I would like to hear more about that and any ideas you have to improve those programs, particularly for rural settings.
GVG: AP and IB programs are inequitable mainly because poor and small rural schools can’t afford them. For the IB program, the school pays a hefty price. So poor districts, whether rural or urban, do not tend to offer them. The AP program is becoming very popular because there is a chance for parents to save money on college courses. But the rising number of kids taking the AP tests isn’t matched by a rising number of kids passing. Surprisingly, Hispanics are proportionally represented among AP test takers, but the proportion passing is much lower for Hispanics than for Anglos. The reason is that they are in schools that can’t afford to offer the AP courses. The AP program brags about offering scholarships for poor and minority kids to take the test. But that doesn’t do any good if they aren’t prepared to pass. Then the question is how good are these online programs that offer AP courses and pipe them to rural schools? To my mind, it is hard to put together a first-rate course in physics, chemistry, biology and the like over the Internet. Where is the dissection demonstration in the biology class, for example? So there are inequities top to bottom in the AP and IB programs.
Q: I could probably count on one hand the number of Appalachian Ohio school districts that offer an IB program.
GVG: And here I sit in Boulder, Colorado, at the moment—home to the upper-middle class-- and I’m probably surrounded by them.
Q: Can you talk about the impact (good or bad) of state-level education policy shifts such as recent Wisconsin and Ohio collective bargaining changes that affect public school teachers? GVG: The state policy is a reflection of all of the trends addressed in my book, Fertilizers, Pills and Magnetic Strips. Almost every education policy you see being debated these days is aimed at lowering the cost of providing public education, favoring the white, middle and upper classes. What we are observing as a result of the economic and demographic trends is the hyper-politicization of education policy like never before. At the heart of that is the fact that the position of state superintendent of public instruction is a separate election—as opposed to gubenatorial appointment--in 14 out of 50 states. This tends to be truer in the south and west where unions are weaker. We are seeing the whole business of education politicized like never before because the stakes have grown so high.
Q: In terms of the cost?
GVG: Yes, what is happening is the centuries-long trend in the economy is the shifting from manufacturing to service. And this is particularly true in the United States. Whereas 100 years ago the economy was driven by growing and making things, now it is driven by services like teaching, nursing, police and fire protection. This is a result of technological advancements in production. What happens is that, decade after decade, people see the service industry, education being part of it, eating up more of the GDP. You can build a widget tomorrow cheaper than you can build a widget today because you keep refining the methods of production. There aren’t such economies to be had in service industries. So the cost of services keeps rising year after year. Consequently, people, working through their elected officials, attempt to control the cost of services or hold down the cost in order to save money. This is being acted out in states all over the country and in service industry after service industry.
People in education have a tendency to think that all measures to reduce cost of education are personal and directed only at them. But in fact, in every area of the service economy, they are feeling the same kinds of pressure —medicine, police, fire, parks and recreation, all of them are under the same pressures. All speak the same language about program evaluation, zero-based budgeting, etc., that have become to familiar and obnoxious to educators.
Q: What are your views on the near- and longer-term impact/ or pros and cons of teacher pay-for-performance.
GVG: Pay for performance is smoke and mirrors and another way of trying to de-skill the teaching profession and reduce the cost of providing competent and qualified teachers. People say we need to pay teachers based on the amount the kids learn. Here is the problem with that. There aren’t tests for 75% of the professionals in the school. There is no test for the music and PE teachers; you can’t even get people to agree on the content of a social studies test. The solution is to move the criterion for value-added to the level of the school. So it becomes “school pay for performance.” Then the entire school has to make last year’s achievement gain plus one month in order for the whole school to get this $1,000 bonus per teacher. This system can’t go on for many years because the criterion for the bonus is last year’s gain plus some increment—you pretty soon run up against the ceiling of these tests. Just like we are seeing with NCLB with the academic progress measure. There is a prediction out of the Obama Administration that, in two more years, four out of five elementary schools in the country will be labeled failures under the AYP criteria because they are running up against the ceiling of the tests.
In the few places where they have tried ”teacher pay for performance” they have found that you get cheating and corruption. In July 2011, the front page news was all about teachers and administrators cheating on the state tests by erasing wrong answers. Years ago, the Superintendent of Schools in Houston was a guy named Rod Paige. The principals saw all the teachers in their schools getting bonuses. So the principals went to the superintendent and said, “Look we are the leaders here, why aren’t we getting bonuses?” Then program changed to where, if the school made gains, the principal got rewarded $10,000 to $15,000. It wasn’t a year or two before they found a couple of these guys erasing answer sheets in their offices and changing answers in order to get the bonus. I know of few professionals put under the pressure of having to function with an unfair and ridiculously flawed system like “pay for performance” who would not look for an out. Would I? You bet I would.
The reality is that these so called pay for performance systems are really just a replacement for the cost of living adjustments. It is a bait and switch process—what used to be yearly negotiations for pay increases is now called “merit pay.”
Q: What are the trends in the teacher workforce--preparing teachers, alternative paths to certification, etc?
GVG: All of these efforts are working to de-skill the teaching profession so that you can pay them less. Teach for America, etc… If you can train teachers in a 6-week summer program, then why would you expect to pay them like a professional?
Q: What do you see as the prospects for the profession? What could be done to stop these de-skilling trends?
GVG: Prospects are horrible for the profession. You see it in all of the lobbying that is going on with Teach for America. Charter schools hire uncertified teachers and pay them peanuts. “Alternative certification” programs are being offered online by profit-making private companies. It’s crony capitalism at its worst. When you have been around as long as I have you start dropping these futile hopes that something is going to come along to change it. This is economics at the bottom of it with politics driving it.
Q: Where do you see public education in the next decade?
GVG: Back in early 1990s when the Internet was coming into being, I started an online listserv discussion that evolved into an online policy journal which still exists (Education Policy Analysis Archives). One of the participants in that discussion back in 1993-94 was Tom Green, a philosopher of education at Syracuse. He was absolutely brilliant. He died about five years ago. He said in one discussion that the assumption that public education is always going to be around in America is untenable. He could see a future for the country in which public education exists only for the poor and the minorities. I thought he was crazy. I didn’t know how in the world he was coming up with this idea. Now looking back, he was seeing things that the rest of us are only seeing now. If you can manipulate the system through such things as tuition tax breaks, open enrollment, and the like, you can then produce an almost private form of public education at the public expense. Private education used to be the province of the Catholic Church. That is dwindling and disappearing; parochial school enrollments are down nearly 20% in the last ten years. What you are seeing emerge in more affluent communities is a “private-like” education paid for by the public. The increase in U.S. population from the 2000 to the 2010 Census is almost all ethnic minority. The public doesn’t want to fund their education. Minorities will be left in traditional public schools while the middle and upper classes will depart for publicly funded quasi-private schools.
Q: What is missing from the research community that would provide good information to inform the current policy debate?
GVG: Nothing. Research is used by both sides to legitimate their political points. People think it is “science.” What is needed isn’t the research. What is needed is a leveling of the field of debate. The creation of the right wing think tanks in the past 30 years has been very successful. They outnumber left wing think tanks 10 to 1.The conservative Right has invested a lot of money and work into getting their message out. And it helps that the media itself are controlled by corporations so they have a right-wing bent to begin with. Slowly we are seeing more investment in left-wing progressive think tanks that are learning the methods of communication. What is needed to level the playing field is more investment by the left wing in how to communicate its message and use research.
Q: What about universities?
GVG: Universities are just too lazy. And they don’t know how to get the message out.
Q: What do you see as the public value of the public school in America now and going forward? Will/how can the concept of the public school remain relevant/essential/viable?
GVG: It is a very grim prospect. The big money to be made these days that corporations are waking up to is in virtual schools. There are half a dozen companies that are big into that business. I’ve had three phone interviews this week on virtual schools, with the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and Mother Jones. Journalists are all waking up to this movement and trying to get a handle on it. Jeb Bush is traveling all around the country to get state legislatures to promote the growth of online schools. And they do it through going into a state and paying off lobbyists and legislators and allowing the formation of charter schools that are entirely online and that buy their coursework and other services from the corporations.
Q: Have you seen any good ones?
GVG: No. They are really horrible, and they are raking in hundreds of millions of public dollars. Arizona has an online charter school called the Arizona Virtual Academy. Its director, who has no background as an administrator in education, probably makes over $200,000 per year. She also sits on the state charter board that issues the charter for her school, and she is an employee of K-12 Inc. that probably receives 70 percent of the funds. In the state of Idaho the state superintendent is shepherding through a bill in the Idaho legislature to require every high school graduate to have 4 online courses – he took $40,000 in campaign money from the online company K-12 Inc. They threw a fundraising party for him in DC.
~2011
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