The Secretary wants equity so badly that, according to Education
Week, he has dedicated 4.2 million dollars to develop a “technical
assistance” network to help states develop their plans.
Golly gosh gee willikers, Mr. Secretary, 4.2 million dollars.
To put that figure into perspective, that 4.2 million is less money than one
modest sized urban school district in the country will spend in one year on the
new Common Core testing regime that the Secretary has bribed states to
participate in.
I would say that backing this equity initiative with a
pittance in cash indicates just how committed to equity this administration is.
If we wish to read where their real commitments lie, perhaps we should look at
other places where they spend money.
In 2010, the Department of Education, under Secretary Duncan,
granted 50
million dollars to Teach for America. You read that correctly. Ten times
more cash was committed by this champion of equity for a program that literally
defines inequity.
A quick refresher. Teach for America (TFA) provides recent
college graduates looking to pad their resumes and who have shown no prior interest
in education as a career, with five weeks of training in teaching and throws
them into the classrooms of some of our neediest children. A large majority of
these recruits are gone from the classroom in 2-5 years. Originally designed to
fill a need in underserved areas, they now replace furloughed certified
teachers in many areas and form the bulk of the staffs in many charter
operations.
To recap, Duncan has committed 4.2 million to teacher equity
and 50 million to insuring that inner-city children get teachers who are clearly
not qualified to teach and will leave the profession in a couple of years. Whether
it be under the No Child Left Behind definition of “highly-qualified” or any
other designation of a well-trained, committed and certified teacher, TFA is no
friend of teacher equity.
If the Secretary wanted to strike one clear blow for equity,
he would immediately disavow TFA and insist that every teacher in urban schools
be fully trained and certified. Don’t hold your breath.
It will be interesting to see what the states come up with
in these equity plans. I would think that the plans would call for making
teaching in urban areas more attractive to teachers. This would include things
like insuring school buildings are clean, safe and under good repair. It would
include insuring a professional staff that included counselors and other
support staff that could help to meet the needs of students in crisis as so
many urban children are. The plan might include good pay, but even more
importantly, job security and the kind of autonomy that high performing
teachers desire. It might also include
an evaluation system that includes multiple measures of performance and that does
not rely on spurious value-added formulas, famously skewed against teachers of
struggling students, to assess teacher performance.
But wait. Secretary Duncan recently praised
the Vergara decision that stripped teachers of their job security
protections. Duncan pushes for value-added measures so we can (erroneously) identify
who the best teachers are. Duncan pushes for charter schools (he gave 50
million to KIPP charters in 2010 also) that drain the funds urban districts
might use to fully staff schools and repair and maintain buildings. Good luck getting your equity plans past the Secretary if you include job protections and autonomy and disavow value-added.
.
Secretary Duncan is the enemy of the very equity to which he
gives lip service.
For a full and witty discussion of the false promises of the
teacher equity concept, I highly recommend you read what my colleague, Peter
Greene, has to say about the issue in this
Huffington Post article.
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