October 5, 2016--Hillary Clinton's Plan for Education

Over coffee yesterday, John, a lifelong liberal, said with some sadness, "Look, I know Hillary's going to win and that's a very good thing, but why is she running? I mean, in big picture terms, how would she summarize what she will do for America when our president?"

"She could say 'I'm not Trump,'" I quipped.

"Or, 'I'm a woman,'" Rona quipped.

"Though I can't stand him," John said, "Trump effectively sums up why he's running by saying, 'I'll make America great again.' Of course what he's proposing to do, if he is proposing anything more than tax cuts for people like himself, is either nothing or preposterous. But he's still attracting almost half the potential voters."

I said, "A lot of that has to do with the fact that he's not Hillary, not a woman, and is white."

"And not a politician," Rona added.

"She has a plan for this and a plan for that and then another plan for something else," John said. "I think she has at least 100 plans. But still, she isn't saying what she wants to accomplish. This may sound cynical, but I suspect that one reason she isn't ahead by 25 points is that many people, very much including those who would be eager to feel good about voting for her, think she's running for the presidency because she feels it's her turn and that she just simply wants to be president. Which is very different, obviously, than telling the public what she would do if she were elected."

"Maybe we're being unfair," I said. "I confess I haven't, but have either of you looked at any of her plans? She keeps encouraging people to look at them on her website. Maybe they're terrific and if enacted would accomplish good, progressive things. If so, the problem might be that she's not that great a communicator. She admits to not being a natural politician like Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan."

John and Rona indicated they hadn't read any of Clinton's plans and so I volunteered to look at the one for education and report back to them about what I think about it.

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Her plan for K-12 education says that--

As President, Hillary will: 

Launch a national campaign to modernize and elevate the profession of teaching.
Provide every student in America an opportunity to learn computer science.
Rebuild America's schools.
Dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

I scrolled down to see if there was more on her education agenda but there isn't. This is it.

Since the other's are self-explanatory, I took a closer look at priority 1--elevating the teaching profession.

Here it is in its entirety--

America is asking more of our educators than ever before. They are preparing our kids for a competitive economy, staying on top of new pedagogies, and filling gaps that we as a country have neglected--like giving low-income kids, English-language learners, and kids with disabilities the support they need to thrive. We ask so much of our educators, but we aren't setting them up for success. That's why Hillary will launch a national campaign to elevate and modernize the teaching profession, [sic] by preparing, supporting, and paying every child's teacher as if the future of our country is in their hands--because it is.

There is little new here but it is still good to remind people that we need to do better by our young people.

Of course it is true that the future is in teachers' hands. At least partly. Parents count even more and there are also significant roles for other service providers and programs such as school lunch programs and rich pre-school and after-school programs. Perhaps these are addressed in other Clinton plans.

"Supporting" teachers is fine as is paying them appropriate wages, but there is not a word here about holding teachers in any way accountable for how their students progress. Raising this gets us into the hot topic of using high-stakes achievement testing as part of the accountability process.

The kind of testing we do as part of the process of evaluating and rewarding teaching excellence is not the only way to do this. As someone who prides herself on her 30+ years of advocacy for children one could expect much more than is revealed in this skeletal plan.

We hold doctors and surgeons accountable for the outcomes of their work so why not teachers?

There is also not one word here about helping teachers learn and employ methodologies that have proven to be successful. There are many with excellent track records which could be endorsed and funded through vigorous and visionary presidential leadership.

Clinton's whole approach to education improvement is too soft and in effect a pander to the organized education establishment.

Her call for "elevating the profession of teaching" could have been written by one of Clinton's most fervent supporters--highly visible on the platform the night Hillary accepted the Democratic nomination--Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. In effect, the national teachers' union.

Weingraten has been a lifelong opponent of anything having to do with changing the existing teacher tenure system and has lobbied long and effectively to kill off the nascent accountability movement.

*   *   *

I suspect when I report back to John and Rona they will not be surprised. I only hope they won't ask me to read any other plans.

With Randi Weingarten

August 27, 2014--Off the Hook

At the heart of Barack Obama's education reform initiative, Race to the Top, are various ways to hold school districts, administrators, and especially teachers accountable for student learning. This approach is actually an extension of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind.

From day one, back in Bush's day, teachers unions offered lip service support for these efforts, feeling that though their main agenda is protecting teachers' jobs, even incompetent ones, they could not publicly oppose approaches designed to enhance student learning, especially those that address the achievement gap that separates minority students from more affluence white students.

But first with NCLB and more recently with Race, the unions quietly and increasingly more openly have been chipping away at the accountability provisions of both programs.

Most recently they have criticized the results of high-stakes academic achievement testing as the primary way to measure teacher performance, claiming that with the introduction of the new Common Core curriculum in nearly 40 states, a product of the National Governors Association, there has not been enough time for teachers to be orientated to carrying it out effectively.

Until just recently the Obama administration, led by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has been holding the line, saying there in fact has been enough time for states and school districts to help teachers master the new content and the use of testing would continue to be used when evaluating individual schools and individual teachers.

This is quite a big deal because not only can there be consequences for low-performing teachers (they might not get tenure or, rare, even be let go) but also federal education dollars to states and districts are largely contingent on how schools and districts perform.

Under considerable pressure from teachers unions that historically have provided significant support for Democratic candidates, and because in June Duncan stepped into the current teacher tenure debate, offering his strong endorsement for a judge's decision to dramatically limit tenure in California, Duncan last week said that the DoE would allow another year to pass before using student test scores when evaluating teachers.

He said, "I believe testing issues are sucking the oxygen out of the room in a lot of schools" and thus teachers needed more time to adapt to the new standards and the tests pegged to those standards.

What he might have said is that oxygen is being sucked out of schools because students in unacceptable numbers are not learning and teachers and school administrators must be held accountable for that. Not in another year, but now.