By Katy Grimes

Efforts in California to usher in teacher and school administrator accountability have been nearly impossible due to opposition from the teachers’ unions. But some reformers aren’t giving up, including in the Democratic Party.

Sen. Ron Calderon, D-Montebello, has authored SB 441, attempting reform one more time. Thus far, it appears he has bipartisan support. But the hurdle to overcome in the past has not been achieving bipartisan support; the hurdle has been overcoming the teachers’ and school employee labor unions, and the politicians they support.

Democrats divided

At last month’s California Democratic Party Convention, Democrats killed efforts led by other Democrats to call for much needed public school reforms.

Convention delegates even passed a resolution slamming education reform groups like StudentsFirst and Democrats for Education Reform, claiming they are merely front groups for Republicans and Wall Street money.

The stark divide appears to be between supporters of the California teachers’ unions on the one hand; and on the other hand, supporters of school choice and linking teacher evaluations to student performance.

I talked recently with Jessica Ng, Communications Director at StudentsFirst, about the possibility of school reforms. StudentsFirst is a grassroots school reform advocacy group.

“We’re pleased Sen. Calderon has taken on the issue of improving teacher evaluations, and we particularly applaud his effort to base SB 441 on the guidelines laid out by the Obama administration,” Ng said. “We believe that this conversation is an important one because a strong teacher and principal evaluation system is critical to improving student learning, and we’re glad to be part of the broad-based coalition supporting Sen. Calderon’s bill.”

But many teachers blame students and their parents, complaining about the “poor quality of students” public schools have to deal with.

But some scholars look at teachers. “Teacher quality is the key to improved schools,” said Eric Hanushek in his book, “Teacher Quality.” Hanushek is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

“Teacher quality cannot be readily linked to teacher characteristics; therefore new and more extensive certification and training standards are unlikely to be effective,” said Hanushek. “Policies aimed at student performance instead of inputs (like more education spending) offer the only real hope for improvement.”

What SB 441 would do

Calderon’s bill amends various provisions of existing laws governing the evaluation of certificated employees. It would, according to a Senate analysis:

* Require the evaluations to use multiple measures, including a minimum of four rating levels.

* Increase the frequency of evaluations for teachers with 10 or more years of experience in a school district from every five years to every three years.

* Require school districts to avail themselves to the input of parents, according to Senate analysis.

According to Calderon, the current teacher evaluations process under the Stull Act has proved to be insufficient in the recognition of high performing teachers and the identification of those that could benefit from professional development. Under the Stull Act, passed in 1971, a school district must include student achievement as part of a teacher’s evaluation.

Recently the Los Angeles Unified School District was charged with never having followed the Stull Act. According to education reform experts, the teachers union wouldn’t allow it.

While some districts incorporate student performance in their evaluation systems, others do not. And in districts that simply rate their employees as “meeting” or “not meeting” expectations, teachers may not receive sufficient feedback during the evaluation process to understand how to improve their practice.

Key to this bill, according to Calderon, are several research studies which document the correlation between teacher quality and student achievement. Differential teacher effectiveness is a strong determinant of differences in student learning, far outweighing the effects of differences in class size and heterogeneity, the bill analysis said.

This is correct, according to Marcus Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. In his new book, “How Important Are Teachers?” Winters explained: “Research using the value-added approach consistently finds that teacher quality is the most important factor for boosting student performance. Students with nearly identical backgrounds will perform quite differently on standardized tests depending on which teacher they were assigned.”

There is another hearing on SB 441 Wednesday in the Senate Education Committee. Last week the bill was nearly killed when the committee deadlocked on the vote, but Calderon asked for reconsideration so SB 441 could be heard again Wednesday morning.

Parents, teachers and student advocates feel muzzled

Julie Collier, the executive director of the Parents Advocate League, has spent her Tuesdays and Wednesdays for the last three weeks traveling from Orange County to the Capitol to support student-sponsored legislation. “Unfortunately, three of the four student sponsored pieces of legislation have failed,” Collier said. “Our last hope is SB 441 by Sen. Calderon.”

But perhaps the most bitter aspect for Collier and her group of student advocates was at the hearing last week where Calderon’s bill deadlocked. “Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson thanked all of the supporters that traveled to Sacramento in support of SB 441,” Collier said. “And then she invited the opponents of the bill, two union lobbyists, to come up to the podium and speak again, after they had already given their testimony.”

Collier added, “It’s disappointing to me, as a former educator and concerned parent, that the paid lobbyists’ seat at the table is apparently more important to the Senator than parents, teachers and student advocates.”

Take a look at the supporters and opponents of SB 441. Will this bill end up as all other education reform bills have — in the waste bin?

SUPPORT

California Mayors (cities of Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Jose)

California United to Reform Education

EdVoice

Lanai Road Education Action Committee

Los Angeles Unified School District

Office of the Mayor of San Francisco

National Action Network Los Angeles

Orange County Business Council

Parent Partnership

Parent Revolution

Parents Advocate League

San Diego United Parents for Education

Simmons Group Inc.

Stand Up for Great Schools

Students First

Letters from various individuals

OPPOSITION

California Federation of Teachers

California School Employees Association

California Teachers Association

United Teachers Los Angeles

By Chris Reed

UC Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff’s blueprint for Democrats from a decade ago continues to reverberate. Lakoff stressed the emphasis of framing issues with the proper language and spoke of the power of metaphors. And so now we always hear government spending described as “investments.”

Now the teachers unions and their political pals/puppets are in their third or fourth year of their Lakoffian push to characterize all education reform efforts as being “corporate” and therefore evil. Take it away, Tom Torlakson:

“SACRAMENTO — California Democrats on Sunday condemned efforts led by members of their own party to overhaul the nation’s schools, arguing that groups such as StudentsFirst and Democrats for Education Reform are fronts for Republicans and corporate interests.

“Before delegates overwhelmingly passed a resolution excoriating the groups on the final day of the party’s annual convention here, speakers urged them to focus on protecting students and teachers.

“‘People can call themselves Democrats for Education Reform — it’s a free country — but if your agenda is to shut teachers and school employees out of the political process and not lift a finger to prevent cuts in education, in my book you’re not a reformer, you’re not helping education, and you’re sure not much of a Democrat,’ said state Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, a registered Democrat whose office is nonpartisan. …

“‘Let’s be perfectly clear,’ [said California Teachers Assn. President Dean Vogel]. ‘These organizations are backed by moneyed interests, Republican operatives and out-of-state Wall Street billionaires dedicated to school privatization and trampling on teacher and worker rights.'”

But this rhetorical hard sell is going to be tough. As the L.A. Times’ account laid out, the president and a likely future Democratic gubernatorial candidate qualify for the list of corporate tools that Torlakson and Vogel lambaste:

“The advocacy groups are calling for increasing parental choice, tying student performance to teacher evaluations and changing how teachers are hired and fired. President Obama, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker are among the elected Democrats who support the groups’ efforts.”

Romero calls the issue of poor schools afflicting struggling minority students a civil rights matter, and she’s right. But at a more basic level, the fight over teacher competence and job protections is part of the larger battle over government’s purpose in California.

Is its primary function to provide public services or to provide government jobs?

Incredibly enough, as this weekend’s Democratic convention showed, California’s dominant political party believes it’s the latter.

By Wayne Lusvardi

California Gov. Jerry Brown’s recently proposed radical public school financing reform –- the so-called “Local Control Funding Formula” –- reflects the Catholic Jesuit social doctrine of 1968 called “the preferential option for the poor.”

But there has been no public vetting of whether the former Jesuit seminarian’s new reform is a sound public policy or even good for disadvantaged students.  Nor has there been any discussion of whether such reforms may eventually lead to the erosion of support by rich suburban counties for Brown’s package of school financing changes.

When Brown successfully got voters to approve his state income tax increase on the Nov. 6, 2012, ballot –- Proposition 30 –- the wealthy Democratic suburban coastal counties that voted for it had no idea that Brown had pulled a taxation triple play on them.  Not only would income taxes be raised on the wealthy, but also budgets for public school districts in wealthier suburban areas would be intentionally underfunded, forcing them to raise local parcel taxes to fill the gap.  Brown pulled this off by burying his reform in a difficult to understand provision of his 2012-13 state budget. If this were known before the election, would Proposition 30 have passed?

What Brown actually did was divert some of Proposition 30 revenues to wage and benefit increases for public employees.  He then funded the remainder of his promised $6 billion in new tax revenues for public schools by cutting suburban school district budgets and diverting those monies to districts with a high proportion of disadvantaged students.

‘Preference for the poor’ and 1960s Catholicism

No one can be certain that Brown’s proposed school financing reforms were motivated by the influence of Catholic liberation theology’s “preference for the poor.”  Nonetheless, his package of reforms reflects radical Catholic social teachings dating back to the 1960s.

In the late part of that decade, Brown went to study in Mexico and Latin America after graduating from Yale Law School and serving as a California Supreme Court law clerk.  Brown was exposed to the political movement of liberation theology that found fertile soil in Columbia and Mexico in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Liberation theology is essentially an anti-capitalism movement that promotes political activism for social justice and the eradication of poverty.

Pedro Arupe first propounded the term “the preferential option for the poor” in a 1968 letter to Latin American Jesuits.  Simplified, it asserts the central moral test for any society is how it treats its poor.  Liberation theology asserts poverty is caused by capitalism and its solution is class struggle resulting in socialism.  Liberation theology is the same gospel preached by President Barack Obama’s former minister Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  Gov. Brown has preached a “preference for the poor” in social policy while practicing ruinous policies against the poor when it comes to economic policy.

Brown’s preference for crony capitalism

In his populist 1992 presidential bid and for years afterward, Brown sounded like the Occupy Movement of 2010 to 2012, especially on his “We the People” radio network. A sampling of his rhetoric:

“The conventional viewpoint says we need a jobs program and we need to cut welfare. Just the opposite! We need more welfare and fewer jobs.”

“We’re being ripped off and screwed by a bunch of liars, thieves, crooks, and criminals, and they’re not the folks below. Don’t look in the streets, look in the corporate suites.”

When in power, Brown has not promoted the work ethic but the ethic of “let’s get something that someone else gives us.” In his three terms as governor, the type of economy he has preferred has been the crony capitalism of redevelopment and green power subsidies — both of which harm the poor.

During his term as Oakland’s mayor he was reportedly “more interested in downtown redevelopment and growth than ideology.” But one of his first acts in his third term as governor was to eliminate redevelopment agencies.  However, this was only because redevelopment agencies were siphoning property taxes from public schools while there was a state budget deficit.  Brown’s phase-out of redevelopment was not motivated by its abuse of eminent domain or because of how it replaced mom-and-pop businesses with larger retail chain stores.

When Brown was attorney general, prior to being elected to governor for a third term in 2010, he appealed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for hidden subsidies for green power called “feed-in tariffs.”

However, even the Obama-controlled FERC ruled against Brown because California would have been able to control both wholesale and retail electricity prices.  This would have ended up rigging the energy price system mostly to the detriment of the poor and low-wage earners.  Surely, Brown has had a “preferential option for the state” for funding government programs for the poor but paradoxically also rigging markets against the poor.

As attorney general in 2008, he filed actions against purported predatory home lending practices against the poor and working class — but only after the mortgage meltdown that began in 2007.

Is Brown’s policy shift actually good for the poor?

The question raised by Brown’s “preferential option for the poor” in school financing reforms is basic: Is it truly good for the poor?  Renowned sociologist Peter L. Berger has some sharp insights into this question:

“[E]conomic growth is the precondition of any promising policy of moving people out of poverty into a decent level of material life. Populist redistribution, let alone socialism, will not lift people out of poverty – indeed, in arresting economic growth populism and socialism are the preconditions for making poverty permanent.

“Put simply, the ‘preferential option for the poor’ results in a preference for a capitalist economy focused on growth, since only this type of economy has shown the capacity to lead to dramatic improvements in the condition of the poor. … But the ‘preferential option for capitalism’ must be the basic guide for policy.”

Brown’s recent school financing reforms are more motivated out of a “preferential option for the poor” than any necessary option for capitalism.  The work ethic and savings ethic that brought about the Industrial Revolution didn’t come about until it had religious legitimacy.  Don’t look for any rapid turnaround of California’s economy for those at the bottom of the economic ladder until the state’s public theology shifts away from Brown’s implied liberation theology and towards capitalism.