That’s what the Democratic Congressional committee chairs used to say about legislation the Bush administration submitted, and that was the message from the local chapter of the teachers union to the school board at its special meeting Tuesday night. At issue was the money the Obama administration is putting out to jump-start education reform nationwide. The school board ultimately voted to move ahead, but was afraid even to ask for the union’s cooperation.
The popular Janet Hansen, English and Forensics teacher at Sonoma Valley High School and enthusiastic coach of the mock trial team, is president of the Valley of the Moon Teachers Association. With no recommendation coming from the superintendent or the district staff, the discussion began with Board President Helen Marsh calling Hansen to the lectern to state the union’s position. There, she bluntly said, “No, we’re not signing the application” for federal funds, noting that the lack of her signature might hurt the district’s chances at getting the stimulus money.
Moreover, Hansen said (and several teachers later reiterated) that the union will refuse to discuss allowing any changes that the district might want to implement in using the money from the “Race to the Top,” as Obama’s calling it. For instance, one of the uses suggested is to pay bonuses to teachers who demonstrate that they are “highly effective.” Nope, the union won’t open contract negotiations on anything “except the calendar.”
The school district and the teachers union in Sonoma Valley have long had a contentious relationship; the flexibility lost over the years with respect to programs and assessments has stymied substantive reform. Readers know about the poor performance of our students on standardized tests. That’s not the only measure of education, of course, yet it seems logical that if we want to teach students to read and write, then it’s useful to test for the progressive acquisition of those skills. If we want high school graduates who can reason with numbers and who comprehend the revolutionary achievements of the American political system, then testing tells us whether that capability and that understanding are being developed.
And the test results so far tell us we’re failing on all of those counts. Hansen made fun of Obama’s choice for the program name, the “Race to the Top.” Well, why shouldn’t it be a race? For every year that it’s a stroll, instead – for every year that we promote students who cannot do grade-level work and for every year that we graduate students who have not fulfilled the “A-G” requirements that would let them attend state colleges – that represents hundreds of our students who move through the public school system without having had their educational needs met.
As retiring high school principal Micaela Philpot commented, parental education and socioeconomic status are the best indicators of student achievement: “It’s the poverty,” she said, that hurts students’ chances. Her remark met with applause at the meeting, and she’s absolutely right.
Let’s recall a lesson from the Johnson administration’s “Great Society” push in the 1960s for social welfare. (We can’t help noting the irony that less than half of our high school juniors are “proficient” in U.S. History after they complete that course.) Our point is that when something is subsidized (unwed mothers, for one example from that era), you get more of it, not less. In reality, don’t we subsidize academic failure by not holding all students accountable for learning what they’re supposed to learn each year? It shouldn’t surprise us that we’re not making much progress in closing the achievement gap.
Yes, many students are disadvantaged, but rather than use that as an excuse for holding them to a lesser standard and promoting them anyway, in our view it’d be far better to commit the additional resources necessary to help them overcome the disadvantage. That’s what Obama’s “Race” is all about.
