by Rich Gibson,
Emeritus Professor, San Diego State University
Substance News
September 2010
The Los Angeles Times, in mid-August, launched a data-attack
on school workers by publishing a “Value-added Measure,” list of teachers who,
in a given year, appear to have taught more successfully to high-stakes tests
than, for example, the teachers across the hall. Enormously popular, right off,
educators can expect to see the Times’ work turning up all over the country,
and at bargaining tables as well (the corrupt leadership of the United Teachers
of LA already announced they would reopen bargaining based on the Times’ story
while the San Francisco Chronicle editors supported the Times’ work on August
22nd and, on the 25th, a consortium of foundations and
charter schools released a statistical report on Detroit schools, based on test
scores, showing at least 3/4 of them are failing).
It’s classic demagoguery, designed to split school workers
from school workers, educators from parents and the community, as well as to
explain away booming inequality, all under the guise of “science.”
Top education researchers responded quickly. Stephen
Krashen, for example, pointed out the many variables that lead to test scores,
demonstrating the Times’ work lacked both reliability and validity.
Importantly, Krashen added that, “ poverty is a stronger factor than teacher
quality in predicting achievement. The best teachers in the world will have
limited impact when children are undernourished, have high levels of lead in
their bodies, live in noisy and dangerous environments, get too little sleep,
and have no access to reading material.” (See Krashen linked below).
Krashen’s nexus of school to society is too often left aside
by other education researchers who seek to pile their school-based facts up
against the Times, against other for-profit analysts or the flatly disingenuous
work at PBS’ Learning Matters.
While expert responses to the Times assault are assuredly
vital in this era where reason itself is assailed, it is equally important to
recognize that many Americans cannot distinguish one “fact” from another and,
thus, end up measuring who has the biggest heap–likely to belong to the Times,
et. al.
It follows that the connection Krashen makes, school and
society, is at least as important as the point that utilizing scores on
high-stakes exams to appraise anything significant is, at the least, an error.
Another angle is necessary as well.
The LATimes lies.
What does the LATimes lie
about?
The LATimes reporter Tony (The Embedded)Perry lies
about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan all the time. He lied at the outset of
the invasions and he lies still. Now he insists on the WMD myth about Iraq and
claiming the US might win in Afghanistan--that it is a good and decent project
(now, tossing in the de rigueur line that the US is saving women). The LATimes
fired the only reporter who had an inkling that his paper was lying: Robert
Scheer.
Imperialist war is a key reason for the current efforts
to win greater control over what has always been a capitalist education
system--in order to produce witless troops who consider warfare a duty
(nationalism), or a job (indifference).
The LATimes lies about the nature of class war, in Los
Angeles and out of LA, and it always has.
The Times’ antipathy to organized
labor goes back more than a century. Following the lead of, for example, Otis
Chandler, the LATimes built its empire on racism, devotion to developers, exploitation, and imperialist warfare, culminating in it relentless support
for the man who may still stand as the worst president in US history: Richard
Nixon. Today, as a decaying business, the Times laid off dozens of its
reporting staff, shifted editors nearly as quickly as schools switch
superintendents. In 2008, James E. O'Shea, editor since November 2006, quit the
paper, claiming “he was forced out
after disagreeing with Times Publisher David D. Hiller's plan to shrink the
newsroom budget.” The “value-added”
model is something of a paradox when applied to the Times itself.
Yes, sometimes the LATimes comes close to the truth,
perhaps in its movie reviews, dedicated reporting on Lyndsay Lohan, and its
attacks on Cesar Chavez (designed, not to win anything for farm workers, but to
make everyone cynical). How shall we judge a civilized paper that still runs a
horoscope?
In any event, the LATimes lies about the social context
of school. The Times, like D.C’s notorious Michelle Rhee, not only wants to
split the relationship of school and society, the Times wants to obscure the
reason poverty exists: the rule of the few over the many: exploitation.
Here is Rhee speaking to an assembly of principals,
scaring them:
"Our responsibility is to deliver the goods, no
matter what the situations our students are in. The reform is in the
schoolhouse. You are here because we believe you are the right people to
deliver this reform. The election is not our concern, the election is not your
concern. Go hard or go home!"
Rhee is the stick that lives, happily, along side the
many carrots who also serve as bosses in US schools.
But that is a partisan, ground-up, view.
From the LATimes owner's perspective, they tell the
truth on behalf of important sections of the ruling class, and occasionally
those sections fight it out both on the editorial pages and in the rest of the
paper too.
Within that context of what is really their truth, the
value added research "works," in that it sees school workers (who
have always been workers and have been professionals almost only when bosses
want educators to make sacrifices) as people whose minds must be stripped;
their minds and creativity replaced with the minds of managers as in the common
(bourgeoisie) core standards, in other regulated curricula, in high-stakes
exams (production quotas), and who must be won to this alienation as a
necessity for, on one hand, the chance to keep a job, and on the other hand,
for the good of the nation's kids (future workers and warriors).
In this "truth" of the Times, it follows that
what is always a social relationship, education, is taken as an individual
problem of productivity. And many teachers agree, or are browbeaten into shame
for bad scores.
That seems to me to be because teachers are taught that
the social context of school is like fate, normal, maybe the highest possible
form of human existence, and they see themselves isolated, alone, in a room
full of kids (widgets) to which they are to add some, specific, form of value.
It is, indeed, normal in capitalist society for people
to be forced to work for wages (as they have no real property), to then be
shoved into a war of all on all for jobs and health benefits, to lose control
of both the methods and products of their work, and the more they do this, the
more they enrich those who profit from the misery of the vast majority of
people.
The separation of educators, or
any workers, from the methods of work, from the products of work, that is, from
some of the most significant moments of their lives; this abolition is key to
subordinating labor to that powerful minority who own.
The force that lies behind schooling, as in any
capitalist relation, often goes unnoticed. However, in our action research tour
about two years ago, Susan Harman, Bob Apter, and I, saw that fear is driving
nearly all aspects of school life. Kids, parents, school workers, all fear the
false logic of the tests, and each of them faces consequences. More, when kids
don't go to school, we force them in (other than the home-schoolers who are for
another day).
When the LATimes lies about value added teaching, what
they are doing is not so much misusing research, but using it for their own,
exploitative, purposes, one standing above all the rest: protecting US
capitalism. Capitalist journalism seeks to veil capital and to convince most
people that we cannot understand and change our lives--achieved by taking a
piecemeal, segmented, approach to society (as if a unifying whole did not
exist) and by attacking real struggles for social change.
When union leaders (like Reg Weaver, paid $686,949 in
his last year as NEA boss, or UTLA’s well-paid President Duffy), refuse to take
direct action to halt today's surge on the schools, they do so because they
know that they themselves benefit from the arrangement described above.
Their wages are related to US
success in imperialist wars, to disguising and hiding the necessity of
recognizing the whole of the social system as capital and the equally necessary
need to connect fighting one aspect of it with all aspects of it (bottom up
class war). And, like the Times, the truth of the union bosses is that they
must demolish the potential of a mass, class conscious movement to rescue
education from the ruling classes (not preserve the myth of "public"
schooling) or that movement would demolish them---as it should.
Schools are now the central organized place in North
American society, and other societies too. It should be no surprise that they
are battlegrounds now. At issue is--who will win? Who will, on our side, take
the lead in controlling the methods and products of our labor, that is, take on
the fight between the real, “leading out,” purpose of education, and the
fallacious, social-control, purpose of those who hold power today?
Don't forget the day of strikes and action, October 7th,
the call coming from the student leadership that organized the massive
school-based demonstrations, occupations, and teach-ins on March 4th.
.
Here is Marx: "If we may take an example from
outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a
productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars,
he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid
out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does
not alter the relation. Hence the notion of a productive labourer implies not
merely a relation between work and useful effect, between labourer and product
of labour, but also a specific, social relation of production, a relation that
has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of
creating surplus-value. To be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece
of luck, but a misfortune. In Book IV. which treats of the history of the
theory, it will be more clearly seen, that the production of surplus-value has
at all times been made, by classical political economists, the distinguishing
characteristic of the productive labourer. Hence their definition of a
productive labourer changes with their comprehension of the nature of
surplus-value." (Capital Vol 1 p477 Lawrence/Wishart edition)
Good luck to us, every one.
r
rgibson@pipeline.com
References:
Stephen Krashen’s full commentary is at: http://susanohanian.org/show_nclb_atrocities.php?id=4024
On the LA Times and Nixon, see David Halberstram, “The
Powers that Be.”
For the LATimes vs Labor, see Mike Davis, “City of Quartz.”
For the LATimes’ devotion to developers, see Carey
MacWilliams, “Southern California, an Island on the Land.”
O’Shea pushed out as LATimes editor: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/21/business/fi-oshea21
Rhee quoted in Washington Post, August 23 2010: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dcschools/
LATimes Daily Horoscope:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-horoscope22-20100822,0,1116412.story
UTLA’s President, A.J. Duffy makes a base yearly salary of
$102,051. (Source: Substitutes Alternative Voice for Education).