Important column by Jill Stewart. I hope Arnold and Dick read it.
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Dick and Arnold Face the Awful Anti-Educators
Could Riordan Pul-eeze Not Get in Way of Hard-won Reforms?
(Nov 12, 2003)
~ By Jill Stewart
I don't like Gray Davis. He's a weak leader who stuck his finger in the wind to decide what to think. By contrast, I like incoming California Education Secretary Richard Riordan, recently appointed by Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I know Riordan to be a leader with strong beliefs.
Since this is true, why do I feel so damn queasy about the prospects for California's near-miracle in the public schools to survive now that we have Schwarzenegger and Riordan in charge?
The answer is that for all his failure, Davis greatly succeeded in one thing. He stopped a high-pressure crowd of educators and politicos who are hell-bent on reversing the big advances which have ended 25 years of academic freefall in California's public schools.
I realize this sounds insane. Who would want to end the historic wave of success we are observing, mostly in our grade schools? What sort of people would oppose the first sustained, major improvements in achievement among children in California in more than two decades?
Davis understood this bizarre, multi-level chess game. So did his Education Secretary, the sharp Kerry Mazzoni.
Every year, opponents of reform would bring forth ugly, politically motivated legislation to roll back the improvements, and the Democrat-controlled legislature would shamefully approve them. Every time, Davis showed unusual grit and vetoed these attacks on school reform.
Indeed, Davis went the opposite direction.
Building on reforms adopted by the state Board of Education under Gov. Pete Wilson, Davis' Board of Ed. adopted rigorous, state academic standards that are the same for all children, and are tracked through testing so the public can see how well their school is teaching the subject matter compared to other schools near and far.
Districts like Los Angeles Unified School District saw student achievement levels skyrocket once they began teaching explicit phonics and actual arithmetic to grade schoolers and English immersion to immigrants, and re-trained teachers who had learned next to nothing at the state's useless teacher colleges. In roughly 70 school districts, tens of thousands of teachers have now been retrained under California's "Reading First" program.
But at districts that fought the state reforms, like dismal San Diego Unified School District, student achievement is in the tank.
The most amazing thing revealed by statewide testing is that poor children---who the California Teachers Association and big teachers' unions for years insisted could not be taught because of "poverty"---weren't held back by poverty, but by the teachers themselves. At reformed schools, even the poor, disadvantaged children now work at nearly suburban-kid levels in reading and math. All they needed was decent instruction.
Schwarzenegger and Riordan don't know these crucial issues like Gray Davis and Kerry Mazzoni do. They are so green they probably don't even know that a few days after he lost the recall on Oct. 7, Davis finally buckled to the anti-reformers.
Sadly, Davis signed a law allowing California to ignore the rule that federal reform money can go only to programs teaching English. This will allow the money to be diverted into the mostly Spanish "bilingual" program, a damaging fad from which children often emerge at age 12 functionally illiterate in English. When a new fund source is found for a program--even one like bilingual education that voters killed--it means the program could come roaring back.
Schwarzenegger and Riordan have only a nanosecond of political time to get up to speed before unions and anti-reform politicos start slamming them with incomprehensible legislation freighted with backdoor ways to end grade school testing, muddle phonics, insert chaos into the curriculum standards and water down school accountability.
The unpleasant games start at the top in Sacramento, with people like state Sen. John Vasconcellos, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, and include many beginners too, like junior Assemblywoman Loni Hancock of Berkeley. Much of the Los Angeles Democratic legislative delegation in Sacramento has authored or co-authored legislation attacking the successful education reforms, including Jackie Goldberg, Marco Firebaugh, Sheila Kuehl, Herb Wesson, Larry Levine and Paul Koretz.
These most avid, liberal union-backers are fighting, for example, to end state testing of second-graders. The tests allow schools to identify struggling children before they enter third grade, by which time it's already too late to help many slow readers. The tests also clearly show which teachers are failing to teach reading and math when, right down the hall, other teachers are imparting that knowledge to the same sort of kids just fine.
Teachers' unions desperately want to keep this telling information from principals. It is already illegal to show the classroom-by-classroom results to parents or the public--thanks to successful bargaining by the sneaky unions.
Another obstacle to reform is the powerful, 330,000-member California Teachers Association. The CTA keeps trying to push through a law that would force the state to revamp its subject-matter standards every seven years.
Since it takes years to develop these standards---which dictate exactly what a child should know about everything from grammar to multiplication, and by what age---such a law would create permanent upheaval.
Another goal of anti-reformers is to jettison the statewide test, known as STAR. While anti-reformers claim they want to make the test better, nobody really buys this. If a new test is created every few years, it makes year-to-year comparison extremely difficult and protects failing teachers from notice.
In 2004, a massive war is going tol erupt over STAR. Riordan had better be ready to battle to the bone to make sure STAR isn't changed.
I spoke to Riordan about his new job, and though he is knowledgeable on general topics, he did not volunteer the kind of information I believe should be on the tip of his tongue.
I'm worried Riordan will be drawn to trendy uber-discussions while the jerks in the legislature turn back the clock. (A disclosure here: I worked with Riordan last spring and summer on his proposal to launch his own newspaper in Los Angeles. That work has ended and the newspaper is dead for the foreseeable future.)
Don't get me wrong--Riordan's no neophyte. He has a history in education reform. But his big successes tended toward electoral victories and bricks-and-mortar stuff. As Los Angeles mayor, he pushed ideas to cut red tape and build schools more quickly to relieve student overcrowding, for instance.
His biggest education reform came when he upended the Los Angeles school board, whose seats were controlled for years by a union, United Teachers-Los Angeles. The Riordan-backed candidates instituted sweeping curriculum reforms, including a widely criticized requirement that grade schools devote three hours per day to teaching reading.
The reform, bitterly resisted by teachers, worked. Most L.A. schools ended up using the hugely successful Opencourt reading and phonics program, and today, heavily minority Los Angeles Unified School District enjoys higher test scores than California itself--a major achievement.
When California voters backed Proposition 227 five years ago, requiring that immigrant students be immersed in English, Riordan was the only elected official I could find in California who had the cojones to go on record supporting Prop. 227.
Riordan has also spent a small fortune privately underwriting the nationally known Puente Learning Center, on L.A.'s poor eastside, where immigrants of all ages attend and graduate from well-regarded English immersion classes.
But Riordan has been behind some awful flops, too. He has a penchant for arms-length reforms that never hit the classroom.
In the 1990s he enthusiastically backed an unproven plan called LEARN, in which student achievement was expected to greatly improve once teachers, parents and principals were allowed to co-govern their school. Never happened. The biggest result of this fad was squabbling and union dominance over parents.
LEARN never changed what teachers did. So the teachers kept right on using ineffective teaching methods such as the old California standard of "go at your own pace, do your own thing" that has set children so adrift since the 1970s.
Riordan also poured millions of dollars into computers for poor schools. But it turns out poor children are not helped much by computers, which distract teachers from core goals like literacy.
Riordan will be a success only if he accepts the fact that Davis, a failure as governor, really knew what he was doing in education.
Riordan should hire outgoing Secretary of Education Kerry Mazzoni immediately, if she's willing to coach him. He should hire former executive directors of the California Board of Education John Mockler and Bill Lucia and current executive director Rae Belisle, who played key roles in reform.
The one person Schwarzenegger ought to reappoint to the Board of Education, without a doubt, is Marion Joseph, the hero who tore the lid off California's "whole language" disaster in the 1990s. Joseph is the toughest education reformer around, a stickler for allowing no backsliding on the standards that are finally working for California.
Riordan should also persuade Suzanne Tacheny, Joe Nunez, Nancy Ichinaga and Janet Nicholas to stay on or return to the state Board of Education, though rumor has it Ichinaga will step down. The bluntly honest Ichinaga is the most gifted school turnaround expert in California, and Nicholas led the battle to require California's schools to resume teaching core arithmetic skills.
He also needs frequent chats with reading genius Alice Furry, of the Sacramento County Office of Education, to learn which school districts are refusing to educate their kids. Bureaucrats in places like San Diego have no right to withhold proven reading methods from failing children who deserve to learn. It's like withholding medicine from the sick.
The other day, Riordan was talking to me about possible ways of "empowering principals," a reform idea discussed in a book by Riordan's longtime friend Bill Ouchi.
Hey, I agree it's a great idea to empower school principals. I'm all for it.
But there's no time, Dick.
Right now, he has to forget about untested ideas that swirl around education. He needs a battle plan for the dirty tricks, sneaky legislation, constant attacks on testing and content standards, and God knows what else coming his way tomorrow.
He may not realize it yet, but Riordan's new job is to fight people who, for reasons only they grasp, are intent on ramming California's education miracle right back into the dark ages of the 1980's and '90s.
So, Dick? You still want the job?
jillstewart.net |
