More Unsent Letters

Dear Christian Science Monitor,

How nice of you to send me a teaser magazine suggesting I subscribe to your publication.  The contents of that teaser were exceptionally instructive, particularly when you explained how money doesn't matter to school success.

As you see it in your center-right, two-sides-to-every-issue faux contrarianism, some schools are making it work without a penny extra.  Apparently they do this through merit pay.  Since my understanding is that merit pay would, in fact, lead to higher salaries, I must assume money is being cut elsewhere - either through destroying retirement funds or cutting student programs, I suppose.

Despite there being not one datum that supports merit pay in any way, I have to tell you you're missing the obvious:

Money Does Too Matter.

Money matters for my students, who annually get more crowded classrooms with fewer resources.  It matters to their families, many of whom live in poverty with all of its deleterious effects on school success (bad health, trauma, poor nutrition, food insecurity, housing insecurity...).  It matters to me, because I am on track to spend more than my "Hard to Staff" bonus on the school supplies California won't buy this year.

It matters to the many, many upper-middle class parents - some of whom undoubtedly work for the Monitor - as they willingly pay five and six and seven times more than California's per-pupil allocation in search of well-funded, low-poverty private schools.


And it definitely matters to you, editors of the Christian Science Monitor.  What underlies all this "school success has nothing to do with cash" nonsense is selfishness.  "Public schools take too much of our hard-earned tax dollars," you huff and puff.  "We need that money for other things, like tax breaks for the wealthy.  After all, private school tuition is higher than ever!"


Your teaser made it abundantly clear that your publication is not to my tastes, and I'm not the kind of reader you want.  In the future, to save on paper and postage, I recommend that you cross-check your purchased mailing lists with public teacher credential databases.


All the Best,


E. Rat


 

News Bias.

I often take umbrage with Chronicle stories because I find their framing biased.  For instance, their political reporting on the debt limit has been pretty bad with the throwaway comments.  They usually manage to toss in something about increasing Medicare costs and how they are unsustainable, but they link Social Security into their "everyone agrees that cuts are needed" line.  Since Social Security's financials do not mimic Medicare's, this is bad framing.  Even if everyone (except people like me, I suppose) agreed that Social Security needed to be trimmed, it doesn't follow that it is unsustainably budgeted just because Medicare is.

What bothers me more is the bias in what stories get told.  By the Chronicle's lights, SFUSD has had two important things going on this summer: tossing out workbooks and planning what to do with their Mission St. property.  While SFUSD has been wasting resources (cough) and worrying about things other than education (because teacher housing has nothing to do with maintaining a stable teaching force, and teachers have nothing to do with education), charter schools have been recruiting an awesome workforce!

This article has bad framing: Aspire gets a pass on its all-test, all-the-time approach.  The notion that charter schools "cherry-pick" is mentioned, but Aspire gets a pass - again, without any proof.  And Apsire's flacks make the general college-ready claims, despite the fact that Aspire has not been around long enough to prove it.

But what really irritates me is that SFUSD also has an Urban Residency Program.  SFUSD serves over 50,000 students in the Bay Area.  Aspire serves 10,000 nationally.  SFUSD's program works with local philanthropies and USF (also Stanford).  Aspire works with the University of the Pacific.  SFUSD's program has a bigger impact on Bay Area students.  But it's not the one that gets the press.

Covering Aspire's "innovative" program is one thing.  Ignoring SFUSD's is another.  It's when you add it up that problems happen.  What the trend of the stories reported creates is a narrative of awesome charter schools doing awesome things while SFUSD wastes public resources.  It's not accurate, and it's not fair.

Whether this is a global and intended bias at the Chronicle or just an artifact of what seemed newsworthy on any one day is irrelevant.  The Chronicle's story choice is abdicating its responsibility to objective coverage.

The Chronicle posted yet another of its limited utility yet temperature-raising reports on SFUSD this week. This one is particularly prettied up, I have to say.  It starts with a big number (half a million), but one that certainly includes salaries and dues and things like that.  The meat ends up being relatively small sums -  $22,000 for food (food that doesn't meet the Districts' nutrition plan for schools, which as a NPTL I must note with disappointment), blah blah blah.

Still, I do think this is indicative of two larger SFUSD problems:

1. SIZE ISSUES.
I have heard the Superintendent say "It's only a million dollars!"  That's true enough when your budget is five million dollars, but the thing is that all of those millions add up, and when you're laying off teachers in March we don't forget them.  Is $22,000 a lot of money in the Big Picture of SFUSD?  No.  Is it a lot of money?  Yes.  I am tired of getting annual pink slips and twenty cents for supplies.  Every expenditure really needs to be means-tested if you are going to go on and on about belt-tightening and sharing the pain.

Every teacher in the District took a pay cut by furlough.  District employees and Board Commissioners need to pack a meal.  (FYI: As you can see here (courtesy the SF Budget Blog), working at the District Office - even for those working for the Board - is more lucrative than teaching in SFUSD.)*

2. OPTICS.
Dear BoE, Superintendent and Similar:

When this stuff comes out - and it always comes out - you feed nasty notions about school budgeting.  "WHY FUND THOSE BLOATED ADMINISTRATIONS?" howl deformers.  "Hmmm," says the voter.    "I just read that the SFUSD Board of Education is going to a lot of conferences."

THINK ABOUT IT.

Love,

Your teaching staff.

*Which is not to say that I think these salaries are unwarranted or excessive, because I don't.  And goodness knows there are lots of SFUSD employees who aren't making this kind of money and are working at the DO.  That said, buy your own food.  In interest of demonstrating my moral righteousness, I am also against catering teacher PD days, which I may have gone on about earlier on this blog.

Looking forward to a pleasant weekend at home.

This is the response I sent to NBC.  There are instances of poor word choice and redundancy, but I will excuse myself since I wrote it at 5:30 in the morning in less than four minutes.

After significant consideration, I have decided not to attend this event.  It is a great deal of time outside my classroom; moreover, it is abundantly clear that the guiding principles of the Town Hall are antithetical to my own.  As a veteran public school teacher with a long record of success in the classroom despite the institutional challenges placed upon me, my students and our community, I have outlived a great deal of "education reform", any number of organizations explaining that it's not about the money, and the daily denigration of my profession by people with less experience and far less education than I have.

It is clear to me that the Town Hall will prioritize these voices.  Since I do not believe that there is any interest in opposing viewpoints, I do not feel it is in anyone's best interest that I attend.

I think that NBC has the power and ability to make sure that audience malcontents like myself keep their malcontented mouths far, far away from microphones.  I strongly doubt that I could get through "Waiting for the End of Public Education" without some snarky comments.  I mean, I couldn't get through "Contact" without some snarky comments, and I had to leave "Titanic" forty minutes in.  So I would be a known problem entity prior to the teacher panel.

The sad thing is that with ten years in public K-12, I HAVE outlived several reforms/programs, all of which were supposed to...well, do something:

• Reading First
• II/USP (aka "March of the Consultants")
• Small Schools (Gates Foundation iteration)
• Edison Schools
• Jr. 6th grade/moving 6th out of middle school/moving 6th back
• 20:1 class size reduction (SFUSD not included YAY)
• Full day Kindergarten (SFUSD not included)
• I could go on forever and ever but just making this list makes me jaded.

Top Ten Reasons I'm Not Going to the Education Town Hall, Even Though It's a Free Vacation.

1. Several of my students this year have trauma issues.  Four days out, having just missed two, would be cruel.
2. The organizations funding this NBC programming extravaganza all share the same viewpoint, which does not make me confident that other views will be expressed/allowed to be aired.
3. After being in southern California, it is clear that my continued solvency is strongly dependent on not being within one hundred miles of an Alexander McQueen store.
4. Especially when I am likely to be disgruntled and wishing to justify my vacation through avarice and dresses.
5. They are mandating viewing of "Waiting for For Profiteers", and I have ADHD. Sitting through movies is not my thing.
6. They are mandating chit chat with Davis "My Kids Go to Private School" Guggenheim, and I have ADHD.  Pique and impulsiveness might lead me to conclude that there is ample reason to fashion my program into a dunce cap and place it on his self-satisfied white liberal head.
7. They are mandating viewing/chit chat (see 5 and 6) that are a renunciation of everything I do in my working life.
8. They are mandating viewing/chit chat (see 5 and 6) that are a renunciation of everything I do in my working life.
9. They are mandating viewing/chit chat (see 5 and 6) that are a renunciation of everything I do in my working life.
10. They are mandating viewing/chit chat (see 5 and 6) that are a renunciation of everything I do in my working life.

Reason #7 deserves at least four slots on this list, I think.

P.S. I am not allowing myself to buy any clothes until January excepting bird print funnel neck dresses and even those only in my size, not random giant sizes, no thanks Gilt Groupe with your ridiculous e.

No, Actually: I Blame You.

One board meeting earlier than necessary, the BoE voted affirmatively on the poorly-planned, mendacious layoffs proposed by SFUSD. To evince said claims:

POORLY-PLANNED: The District is unable to state what percentage of teachers would be cut in a worst-case scenario (everyone who gets a 15 March letter is laid off). The District also failed to negotiate a hard-to-staff point for hard-to-staff schools: math and science credentials get an extra point on the seniority list, but the hard-to-staff schools don't. Therefore, schools that are hard to staff and have transient teaching corps, whose teachers are getting an extra thousand bucks on their paychecks this cycle and by the nature of hard-to-staff staffing, have very low seniority...are getting laid off.

SFUSD: Wasting Prop A Money on People It's Laying Off.

MENDACIOUS: The District's layoff list names all of the Associate Superintendents, Assistant Superintendents, a mess of Executive Directors, many Directors and a bunch of Program Managers. To some extent, these positions could be reduced and their holders bumped into the teaching pool, and if you think that's going to happen you must actually be Pollyanna.

Also, the District has implied that no permanent teachers will get a 15 March layoff unless they are "consolidated" (their position disappears, so they have to find a new one), but given their numbers this cannot be true. I have been told by District employees as high as Associate Superintendent that permanent teachers cannot be laid off, but that is wrong: in a catastrophic budget situation, there is a mechanism enabling such layoffs. The mechanism's conditions are met. It is disturbing to me that high-level District functionaries do not understand these issues as well as a run-of-the-mill teacher does.

The Superintendent and the Board would like you to know that they are totally blameless and committed to equity, which is why the layoff vote didn't happen until after 11pm. Before that, SFUSD committed to increasing ethnic studies and AP classes and renaming SOTA after Ruth Asawa. For what it's worth, I approve of all of these. I think the self-congratulatory pro-equity bent is compromised by layoffs that are by nature inequitable, though.

The Superintendent keeps repeating that he is absolutely blameless, and this is totally not his fault, and he doesn't want to cut one teacher, which is why his staff cannot come up with a coherent plan to present to the union, keeps increasing class sizes for next year and trying not to get anyone to notice that, and significantly increased District office staffing over the last year.

Also, the Superintendent and BoE are absolutely committed to closing the opportunity gap, which is why they are laying off teachers at high-needs schools, failing to make funding adjustments that will protect schools in poor neighborhoods, and have been threatening to sue the state for three years but...not actually suing the state.

Therefore, they are 100% in favor of 4 March demonstrations, which is why the Superintendent attempted to end same by sending out a threat letter to any school planning any kind of demonstration or organizing even off-hours participation.

Needless to say, SFUSD would prefer that no one discuss equity in budget cuts and have no plan to talk about it themselves (SFUSD: "What? How dare you ask! Don't you know: We're Beyond the Talk! Look at our five-year plan!"). Alas, it ends up that the District unfortunately hired some real radicals, who really believe in equity, and those people keep talking to the press and commenting in public forums. So far, we've managed to place quotes in the Chronicle and the New York Times, and our well-planned, easy to explain take on equity is shaping stories in the Chronicle and SFSU's paper. Seriously: so evident, clear and verifiable are our claims that we are able to change stories from "funding cuts are bad" to "funding cuts are inequitable, and SFUSD's particular cuts go against everything in its five-year plan".

Which isn't too shabby given that we are looking, site-wise, at layoff letters to at least 10 teachers and consolidation or layoff letters to at least two.