If Mayor Michael Bloomberg had his way, he told students at M.I.T. that he would fire half the teachers in New York City, pay them twice as much to teach classes double the current size.  One of the Corporate Reform Movement slogans is weed out ineffective teachers.  Bloomberg’s theory is if we fire half of them, then maybe the quality of the teachers remaining are better than those fired. Bloomberg actually believes that he can make education better by firing half of all New York teachers, and paying the rest higher salaries.

Bloomberg’s comments are the face of the corporate reform model that some have termed the “billionaire boys club.”  For more than a decade, the force of the corporate reform movement has undermined public schools as we have known them, and is attempting to replace them with charter-type for profit schools that can do as Bloomberg suggests, fire at will.

The corporate reform movement has powerful effects on science teaching, and in general, they are destroying public education. Here are two effects.

Erosion of the Profession of Teaching

Stan Karp, in his Rethinking Schools Blog, suggests that corporations are the leading erosive force in demonizing teachers and unions, and undermining any efforts to improve teacher quality and evaluation.  By financially supporting the creation of large data systems and high-stakes tests, the corporate mentality is destroying education by using detached, and impersonal evaluations to determine teacher quality.  It’s effect is to erode the profession of teaching.

Unlike Bloomberg who is fixated on getting rid of bad teachers, Karp is suggesting that we should be developing and sustaining good teachers.

Karp describes a successful model of professional growth as the principle undergirding quality teaching.  He cites the Montgomery County, Maryland Professional Growth Systems (PGS) which is a collaborative system to improve teaching, rather than corporate and state led “value-added” or “student growth” approaches.  Read more here…

In the Montgomery Model, which was negotiated through collective bargaining, a clear vision of professional teaching is the basis for the program, test scores are used as one of a host of indicators of student progress, peer assistance and review are integral, and a qualitative approach is used to promote teacher quality.  The Montgomery model has been in effect for 11 years, and has used a peer assistance and review (PAR) for novice teachers, and underperforming tenured teachers.  The Montgomery model uses six standards, which are based on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Five Core Propositions.

A side note:  While I was a teacher in the Lexington School System (MA) in the 1960s, the district implemented one of the first evaluation programs for teachers based on professional growth.  Named the Teacher Leadership Program, a teacher could apply for the leadership program after three years of service.  To do so required that the teacher create a portfolio of work including lesson plans, projects, student evaluations, peer evaluations, samples of student work, sample of teacher innovative products.  The portfolio was assessed by a team of peers and administrators.  If the teacher’s credentials were deemed high quality, the teacher entered the Teacher Leadership Program, and for the next three years, would jump two steps each year on the salary ladder.  At the end of the three years, the teacher could reapply.  The underlying premise of the Leadership Program was to focus on professional growth, and high quality teaching.

Disingenuous Nature of School Choice

School choice is the essence of the corporate reform movement.  The wisdom is that in a democracy parents should have a choice where not to send their students.  For example, it’s believed that charter schools are far superior to their neighboring public schools.  In fact, the law is that if a public school that your child attends has been deemed a failure, “then students could transfer schools, opt to attend a charter school, or receive a voucher to attend a private school.”  In her New Times Opinion article, Natalie Hopkinson explains Why School Choice Fails.   She puts it this way:

The idea was to introduce competition; good schools would survive; bad ones would disappear. It effectively created a second education system, which now enrolls nearly half the city’s public school students. The charters consistently perform worse than the traditional schools, yet they are rarely closed.

Meanwhile, failing neighborhood schools, depleted of students, were shut down. Invariably, schools that served the poorest families got the ax — partly because those were the schools where students struggled the most, and partly because the parents of those students had the least power.

In the mind of the corporate reformers, ignorance is bliss.  Charter schools, the direct recipient of school choice, have consistently not done as well as public schools.  But because of the NCLB Act, schools can be closed based on high-stakes performance testing, and mass firing of teachers is now a reality.  As Hopkinson points out, most of the school closures occur in poor neighborhoods, not affluent communities.   Anthony Cody suggests that this type of educational reform ends up creating turmoil, especially in neighborhoods of high poverty.