RIFed

by Donna Schoenkopf

We are sitting around the fire on the outdoor patio at Ports O’ Call in San Pedro.

Ports O’ Call is a lovely restaurant, koi ponds, graceful trees, glass and wood, on the edge of the Los Angeles Harbor. On most days huge cargo ships and cruise ships pass by, a few feet from us folks. As the ships slide soundlessly through the water I always feel as though it is me who is moving. It is a strange visual illusion that leaves a person slightly off balance. On Fridays at 5:00 in the afternoon there is a special treat—a cruise ship, with all its happy cruisers at the rail waving to us. We all wave back, glasses in hand, as happy as they are. The ship lets loose its basso profundo whistle as it passes.

But today it is after school on a Monday afternoon and my sweetest teacher friends are here to have another, and maybe final, get-together.

I have been gone since the end of the school year in 2007. There is a lot of news to absorb. Things have changed, kiddo!

The first thing I find out is that fifteen, FIFTEEN, of the wonderful, wonderful teachers at dear old 61st Street School will be RIFed. And two more, displaced, or sent to another school.

RIFed? Stands for Reduction in Forces. They will be fired from their jobs. There are forty-nine permanent teachers at the school. That’s over a third of the staff being let go.

What the hell??!??

I am stunned. What has happened? Why? And the story unfolds as my dear teacher friends tell me all about it.

It boils down to the fact that there is a new charter school opening up down the street. Juanita Tate Charter School, a product of the corporate world, Aspire “Public Schools.”

Did you know that charter schools are non-union schools? Did you know Ronald Reagan’s attacks on public education came began during his terms as governor of California and continued through his presidency, when he tried to eliminate the Education as a Cabinet-level department? Did you know that charter schools were and are considered a way to get rid of unions? Did you know the smear against union workers has gone on so long that most people believe the lies? Did you know that my union told us that the union will not fight for a teacher who has proven to be unsatisfactory?

It’s all about corporate interests, folks, and corporate interests HATE unions.

Charter schools are the “genius” idea of that slimy, opportunistic mayor, Anthony Villaraigosa. He cheated on his wife, he cheated on United Teachers of Los Angeles, and now he’s cheating on public education, all for his own personal enrichment. I have never liked that guy.

Here is a blurb from Aspire, describing what they are doing:

The Juanita Tate Elementary campus is slated to relieve the overcrowding of the feeder schools 61st Street, 66th Street and 68th Street Elementaries in South Los Angeles. These three feeder schools have grown an average of 58 points in student achievement over the last three years, as compared to the average of 155 points that Aspire elementary schools have seen over the same time period.

First of all, 61st Street School is not overcrowded. Let me make that very, very clear. I can’t speak to the other schools, 66th and 68th, but 61st Street was losing students and had gone from a four track school to a traditional track school because we didn’t have enough students. And even with a new grade level added on, 6th grade, the school only had approximately 870 students.

That’s the first lie from the lips of Aspire.

Then there is the maneuvering of statistics, which is a lie. Aspire points to their elementary schools raising their average scores by 155 points, but they don’t tell you how they got those numbers. Which schools are they measuring? Where are those schools?

To illustrate this, here is a paragraph from Education Justice Law Center:

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found in a 2009 report that 17% of charter schools outperformed their public school equivalents, while 37% of charter schools performed worse than regular local schools, and the rest were about the same. A 2010 study by Mathematica Policy Research found that, on average, charter middle schools that held lotteries were neither more nor less successful than regular middle schools in improving student achievement, behavior, or school progress. Among the charter schools considered in the study, more had statistically significant negative effects on student achievement than statistically significant positive effects. These findings are echoed in a number of other studies.

The Aspire Corporation also says 100% of their students qualify for a college education. Something about that number tells me it just isn’t true. Something just doesn’t sit right with me on that one. Never, in the history of the world, have I heard numbers like that.

To me, these corporate charter schools are nothing but entities that want to suck on the teat of public education, enriching themselves from what has been a noble public enterprise. To do this they prey on public figures, in this case Oprah Winfrey and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to lend respectability to their projects.

I wish the District would ask ME what to do in public schools! It certainly ISN’T going through major upheavals every couple of years. (Every teacher knows this. We laugh cynically about it. We know it’s all about the positioning of the powerful and not about education and teaching and students.)

Here’s what Marguerite La Motte, a board member of LAUSD, had to say about the whole thing:

Written by Marguerite Poindexter La Motte, on 03-25-2011 16:18

In what appears to have been a carefully orchestrated performance, the Board of Education voted last Tuesday, to give away seven of our schools (new and existing) to outside (private) charter agencies during its discussion of Public School Choice (PSC). The Board’s action was appalling and its willingness to easily turn schools over to private operators, represents an ominous sign for the future of public school education.

The March 15 agenda included six additional schools, which were split between charter operators and district administrations. The three existing schools: Henry Clay, Horace Mann and John Muir Middle Schools, are located within Board District I and are represented by my office. Each of these schools had submitted plans, written by teachers and administrators, to maintain district control of their schools. Each plan was written with the full understanding of community demographics and psycho-social dynamics. Each plan included provisions for special needs students who require professional services that are best provided by a unified school district. Despite the best efforts of teachers with experience working in communities with social conditions that frighten some, the Board found it necessary to vote contrary to my wishes. In one case, they voted against the recommendations of the Superintendent, a professional educator, who is ultimately in charge of the district.

During the March 15 meeting, some of the Board members appeared to have met in advance to write and rehearse scripts. During the Board meeting, they recited lines, complete with accompanying emotions and phony smiles. I stated that I felt the Board majority was voting in lock-step with City Hall. One school, formerly known as South Region Elementary School #6, recently re-named after the late community activist, Juanita Tate, was given away to Aspire Public Schools—a move that has infuriated members of the local community as well as myself. Located on a soccer field previously owned by Tate, the school is scheduled to open in September. Imagine the horror now being felt by the community, including Tate’s children, after the Board’s unprecedented action to award a new, named school to a charter operator with no sense of the culture or history of Mrs. Tate’s work in our community.

Finally, Gentle Reader, the problem with our public schools is beautifully articulated by Stephen Krashen, my absolute favorite expert on education, the man who validated my ideas on how to teach, (a student’s mind freezes when scared or stressed and opens when confident and happy) says it best:

Let’s blame (1) teachers (2) schools of education (3) the decline of the US (4) lack of a national education program (5) parents, but not the real culprit: POVERTY

Everybody seems to think that our educational system is broken, because of our "low" test scores on international tests.

The federal government and Bill Gates think that the solution is improved teaching and teacher education, and that we can force teachers and Schools of Education to get better by "raising standards" and by evaluating teachers according to student gains on standardized test scores. (My comment.)

In fact, the US Dept of Education is in the process of developing the most ambitious, brutal testing program ever seen in the US, increasing testing far beyond current levels.

But not everybody is blaming teachers. 

Newsweek regards American educational problems as part of an overall decline in the United States of America. (My response.)

A Barron’s writer says we should blame the fact that we don’t have a national education system (My response.)

An Indianapolis Star columnist says we should blame parents. (My response.)

The USC Trojan Family magazine even wondered if better online games would fix the "failing" schools. (My response.)

There is no evidence that any of this is correct, but there is plenty of evidence that the real culprit is poverty. As I mentioned in each of the letters and comments cited above, American children who do not suffer from poverty achieve do very well on international tests, scoring at the top of the world. This suggests that our schools, teachers, and parents are doing OK. (Of course we can always improve, but the data indicates that there is no national crisis).

I also cited the work of David Berliner and Michael Martin, who document the damage caused by poverty, the impact of an inadequate diet, environmental toxins, and poor health care, and several scholars have documented that fact that children of poverty have little access to reading material at home, in school, or in their communities, which means little chance to develop literacy.

In each of the letters to the editor and comments, I also mentioned some solutions, ways of protecting students from the effects of poverty that require far less effort and money than we are now eagerly investing in new tests.

The US Dept of Education will not even consider this possibility. They maintain that with determination, high poverty schools can do very well, a claim that both Gerald Bracey (to a large extent) and I (to a small extent) have challenged. All we need to do is raise the bar, or, in other words, make school harder and test more often.

This won’t work. When students are hungry, have serious health problems, and have not read much because of the absence of books in their environment, all the determination, hard work and inspired teaching in the world will be of little use.

A modest proposal:

1. No child left unfed (Susan Ohanian): In addition to free/reduced price lunch, a good breakfast.
2. Better health care: More school nurses in high poverty schools.
3. Improve school and public libraries, especially in high poverty areas.
4. Pay for this by reducing testing (NUT = No unnecessary testing)

I think about all this as the teachers tell me about their Friday the 13th demonstration after school. Every single teacher, one hundred percent, came out to hold signs to protest all the cutting and slicing going on by Villaraigosa and his cronies. And, in this urban, inner city neighborhood, with struggling families all hoping for the best for their children, dozens and dozens and dozens of parents stood side-by-side with the teachers, holding signs too.

I look at my beautiful teacher friends around the fire. Each one of them, in their own wonderful way, was a gift to their students.

Elisa, Lourdes, Scott, Ingrid, Patricia, have English speaking, high achieving students and pull fabulously high test scores out of their students, and Esmeralda, Violeta, Mary, and Ana, enrich their non-English speaking students with books and art and music and happiness, making them lovers of learning and school and getting them ready, down the road, for those standardized tests.

These teachers and the solutions Dr. Krashen writes about, NOT charter schools, or any of the other flavor of the week solutions, are what make the difference. When we find ways to enrich each student’s life, when they are well-fed and healthy, and have access to books and experiences that middle America has, THEN, and only then, will all students, everywhere, become their best possible selves.

Oh. And a real change in the curriculum would help, too. But that’s a whole other story for another time.

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