A while ago (March, actually) I wrote a piece entitled "Poor Down, Middle Class to Go," in which I went on about bankruptcy legislation aimed at letting big business screw the middle classes.
Well, they're at it again. A few weeks ago, congressional Republicans (it's strange... there's almost no need to use terms like "conservatives," "liberals," or anything else since the thuggery of the Republican leadership combined with the fear-mongering of the Democratic leadership has given us an era of party-line voting the likes of which have never been seen) were hard pressed to explain why they thought tax breaks for the wealthy (link updated 12/14) were good for the economy mere days after they shoved through a load of slashes to government services for the poor with the explanation that the government just didn't have enough money to afford them, what with the deficit and all. Apparently, the deficit is not so bad that we can't forego a lot of the payments the government would have gotten from the super-rich, however. I guess that when times are tough, the government figures the poor can fend for themselves, while the rich need the government to bail them out. I guess that's an attitude that explains the Katrina aftermath...
But I digress. I really wanted to write about the proposed elimination of the deduction of interest paid on a mortgage from taxable income. This is aimed squarely at the middle classes. The extremely poor don't have a mortgage on a home that they own, instead they're paying rent (which is not even deductible currently). The super rich can afford to buy a home for cash without taking out a mortgage (or shift money around so that they end up borrowing money in some other way that is deductible), so it doesn't apply to them. It applies to people who are able to save enough to put a down-payment on a home but not buy it outright, and depend on a bank or other lending institution to pay the rest of it with a loan on which they collect interest for the next 15, 20, or 30 years. It makes sense that this money should be deductible since the homeowner doesn't get anything for it. The money that goes toward paying off the principal owed on the loan actually does buy them part of their house, and therefore it's reasonable to tax them on it. The interest, however, merely bought them the opportunity to have what only the really rich could afford in this day and age without mortgage loans: a house of their own.
So, from the proposal of a flat tax (which sounds fair... but isn't... but that's another post) to this proposal eliminating the deduction of mortgage interest, the powers that be want to rewrite the tax code to eliminate the deductions that apply to the most people while preserving the loopholes that allow the super-rich to get richer. Isn't this what our ancestors came to this country to get away from?
- "Doctor, question that's always bothered me and a lot of people: Mayflower, combined with Philadelphia - a no-brainer, right? Cause this is where the Mayflower landed. Not so. It turns out Columbus actually set foot somewhere down in the West Indies. Little known fact."
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
The Impossible Dream
So, I was just looking at my school's API report for last year. If you don't know what an API report is, I envy you. Let me ruin you now: API stands for "Academic Performance Index." It's an average of the scores on a statewide standardized test for all of the students in your school. The way a student gets a score is not based on how many questions they got right... not directly, anyway. What happens is that all students are ranked based on the number of questions they got right. The bottom 20% of students get a score of "200." The next 20% get a score of "400," and so on. This divides the students into five groups of 20% each. These groups are called quintiles. Everyone in the quintile gets the same score, no matter what the range of the quintile is. It's entirely possible for a student in the bottom quintile to have answered 85% of the questions correctly if the test was really easy, or for a student in the top quintile to have answered only 20% of the questions correctly if the test was very difficult.
So, our school had an API of 575 last year, up from 528 the year before. We gained 47 points, which is pretty impressive when you consider that the goal the state set for us was just 14 points. We also surpassed our targets in all of the key demographics, which for our school were black, latino, and socio-economically disadvantaged students.
What does an API of 575 mean? Well since individual students can only get scores of 200, 400, 600, 800, or 1000, it means that we probably had most kids in the 3rd quintile, with a few in the second quintile. That makes us statistically average, since a student right in the middle of the state would score 600. (for statisticians reading this: I know this is confusing the meaning of "mean" and "median," but the whole system's screwed up anyway, so give me a break!)
This is good news, isn't it? I mean, if you're average, you're not... below average. You're not above average, either, but come on! Isn't it enough to ask of a significantly poor, minority, urban school that they do as well as the average students in the state? It seems so to me.
But not to the California Department of Education and the state government in Sacramento. If you read the legend below the initial score report, it says that an "A" "means the school scored at or above the statewide performance target of 800 in 2004."
Did you get that? The statewide performance target is 800. Do you remember what 800 means? It doesn't mean that you got 80% of the questions right. It means that you were among the top 40% of students in the state. No matter how many questions you got right. Or wrong.
So, the "performance target" that the state is setting up is for every school to be in the top 40%. If you're not a mathematician, let me say that another way: ... no, I won't. Because you don't have to be a mathematician to figure out that it's IMPOSSIBLE for every school to be in the top 40%! Do you know how many schools were in the top 40% last year? 40%. The year before that? 40%. Let me do a little prognosticating and tell you that I will bet 100 million dollars that next year, 40% of the schools will be in the top 40%!
I can just picture the geniuses at the department of ed. scratching their heads and saying, "gee, student performance went way up this year, but there's still the same number of schools meeting the statewide performance target of 800. How is that possible?" or, "Wow, this year we forgot to mail out the test books and every student just randomly guessed, and we STILL had exactly the same number of schools meeting the statewide performance target of 800! How did they do it?"
There's nothing better for a bureaucracy than making it's reason for existing a goal that is by definition impossible to achieve. The standardized testing racket will continue to be given millions of your tax dollars to give you the same meaningless statistics year after year: Once again, 40% of the schools in the state met their performance target and - surprise! - they're the schools that are predominantly white and asian non-socio-economically disadvantaged students with university educated parents. The other 60% of the schools "failed."
We are doomed to have 50% of our students perform below average year after year. Not doomed by fate or market forces or social and cultural disadvantages. Doomed by the nature of numbers and the definitions we don't understand. This is not a doom we should fear, it is a reality that we should dismiss as inherent to math and nothing to worry about. Being below average isn't a bad thing, it's inevitable that half of any given group are below average by definition! Half of the geniuses in the world are "below-average" geniuses!
Anyway, I look forward to a future where all of our children are above average, human flatulence is found to be a low-cost source of simian organisms, and the number one cause of airline crashes is mid-flight porcine collision. It's an impossible future, but when your governor is a time-traveling killer robot, no dream is too big, or too stupid to throw millions of tax dollars at... especially if its money that could have been used to actually educate children.
- "'You'll be on the run with no friends! You'll live in constant danger of betrayal!' 'I live that way now!'"
So, our school had an API of 575 last year, up from 528 the year before. We gained 47 points, which is pretty impressive when you consider that the goal the state set for us was just 14 points. We also surpassed our targets in all of the key demographics, which for our school were black, latino, and socio-economically disadvantaged students.
What does an API of 575 mean? Well since individual students can only get scores of 200, 400, 600, 800, or 1000, it means that we probably had most kids in the 3rd quintile, with a few in the second quintile. That makes us statistically average, since a student right in the middle of the state would score 600. (for statisticians reading this: I know this is confusing the meaning of "mean" and "median," but the whole system's screwed up anyway, so give me a break!)
This is good news, isn't it? I mean, if you're average, you're not... below average. You're not above average, either, but come on! Isn't it enough to ask of a significantly poor, minority, urban school that they do as well as the average students in the state? It seems so to me.
But not to the California Department of Education and the state government in Sacramento. If you read the legend below the initial score report, it says that an "A" "means the school scored at or above the statewide performance target of 800 in 2004."
Did you get that? The statewide performance target is 800. Do you remember what 800 means? It doesn't mean that you got 80% of the questions right. It means that you were among the top 40% of students in the state. No matter how many questions you got right. Or wrong.
So, the "performance target" that the state is setting up is for every school to be in the top 40%. If you're not a mathematician, let me say that another way: ... no, I won't. Because you don't have to be a mathematician to figure out that it's IMPOSSIBLE for every school to be in the top 40%! Do you know how many schools were in the top 40% last year? 40%. The year before that? 40%. Let me do a little prognosticating and tell you that I will bet 100 million dollars that next year, 40% of the schools will be in the top 40%!
I can just picture the geniuses at the department of ed. scratching their heads and saying, "gee, student performance went way up this year, but there's still the same number of schools meeting the statewide performance target of 800. How is that possible?" or, "Wow, this year we forgot to mail out the test books and every student just randomly guessed, and we STILL had exactly the same number of schools meeting the statewide performance target of 800! How did they do it?"
There's nothing better for a bureaucracy than making it's reason for existing a goal that is by definition impossible to achieve. The standardized testing racket will continue to be given millions of your tax dollars to give you the same meaningless statistics year after year: Once again, 40% of the schools in the state met their performance target and - surprise! - they're the schools that are predominantly white and asian non-socio-economically disadvantaged students with university educated parents. The other 60% of the schools "failed."
We are doomed to have 50% of our students perform below average year after year. Not doomed by fate or market forces or social and cultural disadvantages. Doomed by the nature of numbers and the definitions we don't understand. This is not a doom we should fear, it is a reality that we should dismiss as inherent to math and nothing to worry about. Being below average isn't a bad thing, it's inevitable that half of any given group are below average by definition! Half of the geniuses in the world are "below-average" geniuses!
Anyway, I look forward to a future where all of our children are above average, human flatulence is found to be a low-cost source of simian organisms, and the number one cause of airline crashes is mid-flight porcine collision. It's an impossible future, but when your governor is a time-traveling killer robot, no dream is too big, or too stupid to throw millions of tax dollars at... especially if its money that could have been used to actually educate children.
- "'You'll be on the run with no friends! You'll live in constant danger of betrayal!' 'I live that way now!'"
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
To strike or not to strike...
I just had a really helpful conversation with my colleagues in the math department here at Mission High School. We talked about why we became teachers, and why we teach at Mission. I'll share my story, and suffice it to say that there was significant overlap in key areas among the department.
I knew I wanted to teach at MHS before I even knew what MHS was. When I moved to San Francisco, I wanted to teach at the high school where the Latino immigrants went. If you teach in LA, that description fits a lot of schools, but in SF, Mission High School is the place to be.
I grew up in a family of teachers: my mom and her three sisters were all elementary school teachers working with Latino immigrant kids in the LA area. My uncle is an actor and writer, but his biggest gig up to that point ("that point" being the year I graduated from college) had been as part of the ensemble cast of "Square One Television," a PBS show that did sketch comedy about math... so we can count him as a teacher, too. My mom's family had immigrated to the US from Mexico when she was 7 years old, and I knew from my own family's history that immigrant children face a monstrous barrier to education in the fact that they don't speak or understand English. A child immersed in English can become conversant in a year or two, and functionally literate in five to seven years if they are just thrown into the same classes as the other students that speak English as a native language. The price they pay, however, is all of the content in their other classes while they're learning English. Around the time I was finishing college, it was clear that the general population of California was trying very hard to believe that immigrant students did not need (or perhaps, did not deserve) additional support while they learned English. There were propositions trying to do away with bilingual education as well as trying to make sure that undocumented immigrants (whose work is vital to the functioning of our economy... but that's for another blog entry) were denied access to services like emergency medical services that are paid for by public money.
I knew that there were kids who needed more help than society was willing to provide, more help than their families had the resources to find, and I knew that those were the kids that I wanted to teach.
So now I do teach those kids. I teach math to students who have been in the US for less than 2 years (4 semesters). I get new students almost weekly from all over the world, and they all come into my room with one thing in common: they don't understand English.
Now back to the title of this entry: to strike or not to strike? Our union has been deliberating with our district for three years over our contract. We've been working without a contract for over two years. The most immediate bone of contention as we lead up to the possibility of a strike is over COLA (Cost Of Living Allowance) money from the state. The way it is now, we've gone five years without a cost of living increase, although the cost of living (especially in San Francisco) has certainly gone up in that time. For years, we've been hearing that its because there just isn't money; not from the state, not from the feds, not in increased tax revenue, nowhere. We learned recently, however, that money had been released by the state to our district to cover a COLA of 15%! Great news, right? Well, in negotiations, the district offered our union a COLA of 2%, and not retroactive. If the state had just given us some long overdue money into the general budget and it had gone to cover other vital expenses, that would be one thing. The problem is, the state released this money specifically to cover a COLA. So where did it go? Nobody knows.
For the diehard unionists, this is the rallying call to a strike. It serves as proof-positive of the district's corruption, incompetence, intractability, mean-spiritedness or some combination of all of these. On the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, I don't necessarily follow the logic that leads inexorably to a strike. First of all, I see a strike as the labor-relations equivalent to war: you don't go to war until all diplomatic options have been thoroughly exhausted. A strike is the ultimate action... there is no next step after a strike.
Second of all, I am aware of the ways that the position of teacher is different than say, a hotel worker or airline mechanic or factory worker. Those people produce a product or provide a service that directly lead to their employers turning a profit. The pressure on their employers is economic: without workers productivity goes down which drives down profit. The public-relations hit is a secondary pressure, but it's not the primary pressure. For teachers, we don't contribute to a profit-bearing product. Our employers only spend money, they don't make any, and they spend the same amount on education regardless of how effective we are as educators. The only pressure on our employer is public relations, and since our employers are politicians, that PR pressure only affects them at the level of possibly costing them votes in the future.
The problem is that shifting more money to education would get them votes in the future, if the public were accurately informed about it. The political machine, however, is funded and powered by interests outside of education with enormous bankrolls who spend countless dollars to bombard the public with messages of dubious authenticity and almost no relevance to the issues at hand. These messages serve to accomplish one goal: get the guy elected whose gonna make sure I pay as little as possible and get back as much as I can. Not too many of these power brokers are educators. We're busy with, well, with education.
So we have unions to do that work for us. But the reason we need unions to do it is because it's work that runs antithetical to the ethos of the teaching profession. It's a Catch-22 situation: it's work that teachers don't want to do (and for some, the work they got into teaching to avoid). If it's not done, however, the powers that be will continue to whittle away at the teaching profession to the point that even those who care nothing for money will have to leave their students to find jobs that pay them enough to provide food, clothing and shelter for their families.
So I ask again: To strike or not to strike? Is a strike morally permissible? Is it politically expedient? Does it have a chance of accomplishing what it's meant to? Does it matter? Is it standing with the marginalized professionals against the government machine, or is it standing with calculating careerists against helpless students? Or are we spending our time and energy fighting the wrong enemy? Who has the money... the district? Is the district spending billions on unwinnable wars instead of on education? Is the district finding new ways every day to give tax breaks to millionaires while decreasing tax-breaks for the middle classes? Is the district shifting money away from local governments by requiring them to spend millions on "special elections" to get around the elected legislature and try to snow the public with slickly packaged initiatives that blame and punish teachers for the failures in education and give excuses to try and fix the problem by making it harder to become and remain a teacher?
I think that every teacher in California should strike together. Our struggle is not with the SFUSD, it's with Sacramento. All of the teachers in America should strike together. We should be addressing these problems to those who have created them. These are strikes that I would gladly join in.
But should the teachers of the SFUSD strike? And if they do, should I join them? Should I cross picket lines with my students and teach them?
What do you think? I'd be interested to hear from you.
"Anyone? Something -D -O -O economics? Voodoo economics."
I knew I wanted to teach at MHS before I even knew what MHS was. When I moved to San Francisco, I wanted to teach at the high school where the Latino immigrants went. If you teach in LA, that description fits a lot of schools, but in SF, Mission High School is the place to be.
I grew up in a family of teachers: my mom and her three sisters were all elementary school teachers working with Latino immigrant kids in the LA area. My uncle is an actor and writer, but his biggest gig up to that point ("that point" being the year I graduated from college) had been as part of the ensemble cast of "Square One Television," a PBS show that did sketch comedy about math... so we can count him as a teacher, too. My mom's family had immigrated to the US from Mexico when she was 7 years old, and I knew from my own family's history that immigrant children face a monstrous barrier to education in the fact that they don't speak or understand English. A child immersed in English can become conversant in a year or two, and functionally literate in five to seven years if they are just thrown into the same classes as the other students that speak English as a native language. The price they pay, however, is all of the content in their other classes while they're learning English. Around the time I was finishing college, it was clear that the general population of California was trying very hard to believe that immigrant students did not need (or perhaps, did not deserve) additional support while they learned English. There were propositions trying to do away with bilingual education as well as trying to make sure that undocumented immigrants (whose work is vital to the functioning of our economy... but that's for another blog entry) were denied access to services like emergency medical services that are paid for by public money.
I knew that there were kids who needed more help than society was willing to provide, more help than their families had the resources to find, and I knew that those were the kids that I wanted to teach.
So now I do teach those kids. I teach math to students who have been in the US for less than 2 years (4 semesters). I get new students almost weekly from all over the world, and they all come into my room with one thing in common: they don't understand English.
Now back to the title of this entry: to strike or not to strike? Our union has been deliberating with our district for three years over our contract. We've been working without a contract for over two years. The most immediate bone of contention as we lead up to the possibility of a strike is over COLA (Cost Of Living Allowance) money from the state. The way it is now, we've gone five years without a cost of living increase, although the cost of living (especially in San Francisco) has certainly gone up in that time. For years, we've been hearing that its because there just isn't money; not from the state, not from the feds, not in increased tax revenue, nowhere. We learned recently, however, that money had been released by the state to our district to cover a COLA of 15%! Great news, right? Well, in negotiations, the district offered our union a COLA of 2%, and not retroactive. If the state had just given us some long overdue money into the general budget and it had gone to cover other vital expenses, that would be one thing. The problem is, the state released this money specifically to cover a COLA. So where did it go? Nobody knows.
For the diehard unionists, this is the rallying call to a strike. It serves as proof-positive of the district's corruption, incompetence, intractability, mean-spiritedness or some combination of all of these. On the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, I don't necessarily follow the logic that leads inexorably to a strike. First of all, I see a strike as the labor-relations equivalent to war: you don't go to war until all diplomatic options have been thoroughly exhausted. A strike is the ultimate action... there is no next step after a strike.
Second of all, I am aware of the ways that the position of teacher is different than say, a hotel worker or airline mechanic or factory worker. Those people produce a product or provide a service that directly lead to their employers turning a profit. The pressure on their employers is economic: without workers productivity goes down which drives down profit. The public-relations hit is a secondary pressure, but it's not the primary pressure. For teachers, we don't contribute to a profit-bearing product. Our employers only spend money, they don't make any, and they spend the same amount on education regardless of how effective we are as educators. The only pressure on our employer is public relations, and since our employers are politicians, that PR pressure only affects them at the level of possibly costing them votes in the future.
The problem is that shifting more money to education would get them votes in the future, if the public were accurately informed about it. The political machine, however, is funded and powered by interests outside of education with enormous bankrolls who spend countless dollars to bombard the public with messages of dubious authenticity and almost no relevance to the issues at hand. These messages serve to accomplish one goal: get the guy elected whose gonna make sure I pay as little as possible and get back as much as I can. Not too many of these power brokers are educators. We're busy with, well, with education.
So we have unions to do that work for us. But the reason we need unions to do it is because it's work that runs antithetical to the ethos of the teaching profession. It's a Catch-22 situation: it's work that teachers don't want to do (and for some, the work they got into teaching to avoid). If it's not done, however, the powers that be will continue to whittle away at the teaching profession to the point that even those who care nothing for money will have to leave their students to find jobs that pay them enough to provide food, clothing and shelter for their families.
So I ask again: To strike or not to strike? Is a strike morally permissible? Is it politically expedient? Does it have a chance of accomplishing what it's meant to? Does it matter? Is it standing with the marginalized professionals against the government machine, or is it standing with calculating careerists against helpless students? Or are we spending our time and energy fighting the wrong enemy? Who has the money... the district? Is the district spending billions on unwinnable wars instead of on education? Is the district finding new ways every day to give tax breaks to millionaires while decreasing tax-breaks for the middle classes? Is the district shifting money away from local governments by requiring them to spend millions on "special elections" to get around the elected legislature and try to snow the public with slickly packaged initiatives that blame and punish teachers for the failures in education and give excuses to try and fix the problem by making it harder to become and remain a teacher?
I think that every teacher in California should strike together. Our struggle is not with the SFUSD, it's with Sacramento. All of the teachers in America should strike together. We should be addressing these problems to those who have created them. These are strikes that I would gladly join in.
But should the teachers of the SFUSD strike? And if they do, should I join them? Should I cross picket lines with my students and teach them?
What do you think? I'd be interested to hear from you.
"Anyone? Something -D -O -O economics? Voodoo economics."
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