D.C. Teachers Resist District’s ‘Slash-and-Burn’ Style

Unable to cajole or buy support from the Washington Teachers Union, D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee now says her version of education reform can be done with teachers—or to them. Contract talks screeched to a halt this fall when teachers indicated they would vote down a privately funded plan. It would have created two-tiered wages and traded tenure protections for merit pay based on high-stakes tests.

With mayoral support, Rhee is moving on to her “Plan B,” seeking federal emergency legislation to empower the city to bypass collective bargaining and expand non-union charter schools. The alternative plan includes a newly devised teacher evaluation and resurrects a rarely enforced contract provision allowing administrators to give teachers expedited evaluations.

Teachers would be monitored by their school administrator and, if funds are available, assigned a helping teacher during the evaluation period. After 90 days, an administrator can recommend termination. Parts of the proposed Plan B have already gone into effect. Union members report that the city is requiring D.C. principals to place a quota of teachers on 90-day evaluation plans by December 5. This is the first time in years that principals are being told to observe teachers en masse.

RHEE-MAKING SCHOOLS

Rhee’s slash-and-burn management style has already laid waste to job security in the district. Central office employees have been reduced to at-will status while school principals are tossed out without explanation. Seventy-eight probationary teachers have been fired despite positive performance appraisals, and hundreds more nearly certified provisional teachers have been terminated and replaced by uncertified substitutes. “The chancellor’s one-dimensional approach to school improvement, simply firing employees, is not working and has created an environment of advantage- taking,” said Nathan Saunders, WTU vice president. Rhee signed an agreement with WTU President George Parker at the end of last school year that fired 600 teachers and forced them to re-apply for their jobs because of budget cuts.

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When Calvin Coolidge Senior High failed to make progress on testing, the district reconstituted the school in June. Fourteen-year veteran Harold Cox was let go, despite receiving praise from his principal as the school’s finest teacher a year prior. Cox and others had to reapply for their jobs and those hired were required to agree to an extended workday, a violation of union rules. “The principal converted around 20 positions held by veteran teachers and replaced them with first- or second-year teachers,” Cox said. “That is almost a 50 percent savings for his school budget and to me that is the bottom line, not student achievement.”

D.C. SETS THE TONE

The tenure fight in D.C. has national implications, as Rhee continues to lobby Congress for emergency legislation. The national American Federation of Teachers union is putting boots on the ground to bring resources to WTU’s contract fight—and to signal shifts in the union’s stance.

AFT President Randi Weingarten recently spoke before a group of union leaders and education policymakers on seniority, tenure, and merit pay, stating that no reforms should be off the table as long as they are both good for students and fair to teachers. Much energy has been spent trying to figure out what this will mean in D.C., but after months of deadlock, district teachers are open to the support.

The AFT and the WTU are developing an alternate offer to rein in Rhee’s attack on tenure and create provisions for supporting teachers in the classroom. If their last-and-best proposal fails to break the stalemate, some union members are considering a planned “sickout” in early 2009.

Candi Peterson is a WTU building representative.

Comments

A Rhee Is Spit Up By The Global Economy

The global economy is at the very foundation of business model for schools, charters, vouchers, data driven instruction, merit pay, standardized testing, and most perversely of all, paying students to consume the corporate version of education.

It all began when the globalizers, fueled with the fire of the Reagan Revolution, put together their devious campaign at the Business Roundtable education summit in 1989. Standardized testing would be their primary weapon. The tests would isolate urban schools first and bury them under public posturing for accountability. The corporate vultures from Edison Schools and the others would move in to pick up the pieces and impose their gospel, the business model. Vouchers and charter schools would even redirect public monies to the destruction of public schools.

Toxic wastes, like incessant testing and mindless data collection and merit pay plans, would be pumped into the public school environment to sicken both teachers and students. And bye-and-bye the corporations would have a brave new education system to serve their global economy.

And they were so close when the roof fell in recently. They had their blueprint for legally closing public schools, the No Child Left Behind Act, in place. Billionaire Bloomberg and his CEO sidekick Joel Klein were in control in New York City. Mayor Daley and Arne Duncan were strangling the Chicago Public Schools. Mayor Villariagosa and Admiral Brewer were trying to get their hands around the throats of the Los Angeles Unified Public Schools. Jeb Bush, in and out of office, was calling the shots in Florida. Bill Gates had succeeded in winning Washington D.C. for Mayor Fenty and he in turn introduced the nation to a new level of ruthlessness and brutality in the person and policies of Michelle Rhee. Eli Broad's superintendents dotted the landscape from Vallas in New Orleans to Crew in Miami, chirping over the achievement gap and with grave voices declaring "the children of Singapore are eating our kids lunch." Many of those pesky democratically elected school boards had been eliminated.

Then just as the campaign appeared ready to bear fruit, their rationale for being, their precious global economy, crashed! Their pride and joy is on fire. It was supposed to be immutable. It was eternal! Now the attitude is all gone.

A forlorn John Castellani's mug has been all over TV recently. He's the president of the Business Roundtable. Who could have imagined that less than twenty years after their education summit these same men would appear on their knees, hat in hand, to desperately plead with every public school teacher, parent and student to give them $3,000 as their share of a $700 billion public bailout. Goodness, what happened to their vaunted business model? Somehow these proponents of data driven education have no idea what their collateralized debt obligations (CDO's) and structured investment vehicles (SIV's) are worth. Most shockingly, the poster boys for accountability who pranced around with their noses in the air chanting "no excuses" over the battered minds and bodies of poor children, now beg for sympathy and want to be rescued by their victims!

Our corporate tormentors will soon slink away to lick their wounds and we will have to rebuild the public schools, make them truly places of learning. Imagine there's no pacing guides, it's easy if you try. Our time under these sanctimonious, hypocritical blowhards is over! They have forfeited their right to any influence in our schools and in our lives.

Merit pay and teaching equity

The business model imposed upon acquisition of learning is a production line pouring in of information that sees no difference in the headlight strength of the students. The model implies a sameness that is non-existent, that would have us evaluated as if all things are equal and our qualitative ability to bring learning to our students is measured in quantitative terms. Rewards based on a false assumptions and assertions made all to real by the Rhees of the world.
We must as labor resist this move with all our anarchy, organized along the same constants used in our strife for health and wage improvements. We need to define what makes quality teachers not the lobbyists and bottom line appraisers. Then we need to educate, activate and organize our teachers around the central tenets of quality classroom teaching. The optimization of our students' neural plasticity by engaging them, allowing for specificity and application. These do not happen in a place of institutional mayhem invoked around students as pieces of data, information to be extracted from software drafted by behavioral psychologists in the name of sameness. No, they occur in a place defined by community: teachers, parents, students, and the metaphor acquisition needed for wholeness of mind, body and spirit through the presentation of simile (art of teaching) that allows access and knowing.

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