Don't drink the corporate school reform Kool-Aid
This note consists of two messages originally posted to Minneapolis-based listservs
Also see my note of 19 March 2010,
Arne Duncan and the phony New Civil Rights Movement

Message #1. Obama Acts Like Reagan 1981, the Union-Buster | Black Agenda Report
Message #2. Is Doug Mann getting soft on the teachers' union? / Don't drink the corporate school reform Kool-Aid

Message #1
Obama Acts Like Reagan 1981, the Union-Buster | Black Agenda Report

The president has signaled loudly and clearly that he and education secretary Arne Duncan have a “'final solution” for public education. Like Ronald Reagan, Obama is portraying the unions as a threat to the national welfare..... http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-acts-reagan-1981-union-buster

Comment by Doug Mann

Obama administration ignores systemic racial discrimination in state run schools

Obama's administration is carrying out a set of corporate-style school reforms, marketed during the Bush administration as No Child Left Behind: Shutting down state-run schools and pushing students into charter schools, reintroduction of merit pay, and the elimination of tenure, seniority and due process rights for teachers.

NCLB never addressed systemic causes of malfunctioning schools, like watered-down curriculum tracks and the practice common in big city school districts of firing and replacing most teachers during their post-hire probationary period, resulting in a high concentration of new teachers and super-high teacher turnover rates in most schools where students of color are over-represented. These harmful practices have a disparate impact on black students. That's what I call systemic racial discrimination.

Message #2 Is Doug Mann getting soft on the teachers' union? / Don't drink the corporate school reform Kool-Aid

Michael Atherton writes,

A number of years ago I supported and voted for Mr. Mann.
For a long time he was a lone voice detailing inequalities
in the MPS and he knew his facts.

Lately I've been bothered how on the one hand he
criticizes teacher turnover in minority schools and
on the other fails to identify that although the
union has eliminated a racist seniority policy,
they still support restrictions that prevent
the administration from relocating teachers in a more
equitable manner. The current passive approach will
take years, if not decades, to eliminate inequalities.
It seems to me that, for whatever reason, that Mr. Mann
had softened his approach towards the MFT. Perhaps
I'm confused and Mr. Mann has a reasonable solution
to redistributing teacher quality. Mr. Mann?

Doug Mann responds,

I advocated a scheme to reshuffle the teaching staff to instantly achieve a
a more uniform balance of the most to least experienced teachers in
all schools. However, I came to the conclusion that such an approach
would do the district more harm than good. And here is my reasoning

1. The critical problem is the practice of firing and replacing most
teachers during their probationary period, which results in a high
concentration of new teachers and high turnover rates district-wide, and
a super high concentration of new teachers and super high turnover rates
in schools where low-income and minority student just happen to be
over-represented. The poor retention and high turnover of new teachers
was identified as a critical problem and was made the focus of the
district-wide school improvement plan in 2002.

2. Don't use a nuclear bomb when a stick of dynamite will do.
Ending the revolving door for new teachers is the most effective
and least painful way to stabilize the teacher staff and to lay the
basis for dramatic improvement in the quality of instruction in
the district's 'poor performing schools.'

Reshuffling teachers [to instantly balance experience levels]
would involve breaking up teams of teachers in the district's stronger
programs as well as teams of newer teachers in chronically malfunctioning
programs who might be able turn things around if the district would stop
firing and replacing them and start supporting their efforts to improve the
quality of instruction.

3. Giving the administration authority to reassign teachers "as
needed" is not something I would trust our district leadership to
use wisely. Abuses of that authority led to the enactment of a
teacher tenure law in 1926. And I think it is better to leave teacher
tenure rights intact. Under the current tenure law, even the teachers
on probationary status are not supposed to be involuntarily
reassigned unless their job is being eliminated or their reassignment
would preserve the job of a tenured teacher.

To their discredit, the MFT and the teachers unions across the US
have failed to challenge a very old and deeply rooted practice of
using black schools as teacher training facilities. I get the sense
based on chance encounters with MPS teachers while on the
campaign trail in 2008 that many MPS teachers agree with me.

I don't believe that tenure, seniority, and due process rights are
inherently bad. In fact, I think these rights should be preserved.
These rights can have a very positive effect on teacher morale and the
quality of instruction the teachers deliver. The problem isn't the
teachers, their union, and their rights. The problem is
administrative actions that do great harm to a majority of our
students.

Glen Ford used the term 'final solution' in saying that No Child
Left Behind, as it is being aggressively promoted by the Obama
administration, is a kind of 'final solution' for the problem of teachers
unions and public education as we know it, i.e., the system of
schools operated by school districts. In many big city school districts,
the process of privatization / charterization is already halfway
accomplished. The Obama administration is pushing this agenda
much harder and getting far less resistance than W. Bush encountered.

One reason I do not object to the use of the term "final solution,"
as it is being employed by Glen Ford is that No Child Left Behind
and whatever Obama calls it is a corporatist solution that is entirely
compatible with principles of fascism / national socialism. What Joe
Nathan calls a complex strategy to improve public education is a
formula for privatization / charterization of the public school system,
and involves stripping teachers in district run schools of
tenure, seniority, and due process rights. And the pay-for-performance
is a resurrection of merit pay, an issue around which teachers organized
unions in the first place, in order to abolish merit pay and to enforce
other rights that are being lost through the implementation of No
Child Left Behind.

No Child Left Behind and whatever name its given by the Obama
administration is toxic to teachers unions and public education
as we know it. The lofty goals which the Obama administration
says it is striving to reach is just the kool-aid into which the
poison is being mixed. Don't drink the Kool-aid!

-Doug Mann