Top 4 Things McKeesport Area School Directors Need to do to Extinguish the District Dumpster Fire

It gives me no joy to write this, but McKeesport Area School District (MASD) is a raging dumpster fire.

School directors reneged on a teachers contract. Their business manager ran for the hills. And at the last board meeting two school directors had their dirty laundry aired during public comments prompting one to call a White Oak Councilperson a homophobic slur.

Our finances have been given over to an accounting firm paid for by Dick’s Sporting Goods. An $86 million district budget (2023-24) at the mercy of the place where you go to buy new sneakers and fishing tackle.

This is pretty low – even for schools as historically dysfunctional as McKeesport.

As a local reporter in Pennsylvania’s Mon-valley area in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I saw a lot of crazy things happen at local government meetings throughout the western corner of the state.

But McKeesport School Board meetings were legendary. The nepotism, incompetence, ignorance, glad-handing and focus on anything but education was something my colleagues and I would marvel at when we had time to compare notes.

Now the running of district schools threatens to grind to a halt by a prospective teachers strike! If we want to get things back into some semblance of order, I think we need to do a few things.

As a lifelong resident of the district, an alumni and father of a child who currently goes to school there – not to mention a public school teacher at a neighboring district with more than two decades in the classroom – I think school directors need to focus on these four things first.

They are:

4) Pass a Code of Conduct for Board Members and Administrators

I am sympathetic to School Board members Jim Brown and LaToya Wright. At the last board meeting several people trolled the pair with questions about their marriage. Since school board members have to live in the district, these folks wanted Wright removed if she were separated from her husband and had relocated outside of the district.

While it’s fair to require school directors to provide proof of residency, this kind of Jerry Springer style questioning is not appropriate for a public meeting. If I had to constantly answer questions like this while volunteering to help guide the community’s schools, I might also find it hard to keep my composure.

However, that does not excuse using slurs of any kind at a public meeting – not racial, religious, sexual or otherwise.

Brown has apologized on-line for his indiscretion and should do so again at the next school board meeting. But his actions highlight a glaring problem within our district.

We need a code of conduct for our school board members and administrators.

The previous Superintendent Dr. Mark Holtzman was frequently sarcastic, flippant and rude to members of the public who asked questions he did not like at board meetings – myself included. It has been pretty standard procedure for board members to ridicule each other, make threats and/or stifle public comments.

These are the people who run our schools. They make the decisions that impact all of us as taxpayers and citizens – decisions that impact those of us with family enrolled in the school even more.

They should have to abide by a certain minimum level of civility – especially that hate speech of any kind not be tolerated.

Given the circumstances, I do not think Brown should be removed from the board. However, he should be given the chance to publicly apologize at the next board meeting. If he does not, he should be censured by his fellow board members.

It should be entirely clear what kind of behavior would bring censure, removal and/or impeachment.

School directors often act like being on the board gives them the right to hand out jobs to unqualified relatives and acquaintances, to seek revenge for supposed wrongs done to family or friends, and an excuse to enrich themselves on the public dime.

This needs to stop.

We need to draw a line in the sand to show what behavior is appropriate not just as a model for our children who we are supposed to be serving here, but also so that despite our differences we can finally work together in the best interests of everyone in the community. That’s why these people are supposed to be there in the first place.

3) Start Streaming Council Meetings Again

During the Covid pandemic, MASD would routinely video and stream its school board meetings on-line. About a year ago, the school board voted to stop.

Why?

These are public meetings. We are a working class district. Most people don’t have the time to physically attend every meeting.

This isn’t 1973. It’s not even 2003. We have the technology to cheaply and easily tape and share the meetings. We should absolutely do so. There is no possible excuse not to comply.

My middle school students have the know how to do this – and could do it in better quality than the district used to provide.

In the past, the board was indifferently microphoned so it was incredibly difficult to make out what they were saying – especially if they didn’t want to be heard. The camera was so far away, you couldn’t see anything except a few blurs behind a table.

That showed indifference to the public. Not streaming the meetings at all shows downright hostility.

Board members are afraid of spectacles like that which happened at the last board meeting becoming a video part of the public record. With the relative lack of almost any reliable newspaper to cover the area, it is often the case that board meetings aren’t even reported in the local paper and if they are, it may be in the most rudimentary terms possible or behind a paywall.

The school board should absolutely reverse itself on this point and renew taping the meetings and release them on-line. They could even invite a high school video club to do the work and probably greatly increase the quality of the product. The board should be proud of what it’s doing – not cower in the shadows. If the results are embarrassing, the public has a right to see it. What better inducement for board members and administrators NOT to behave badly?

And if the board won’t do this, some enterprising members of the public should. The teachers union or others could easily do this. These are public meetings. We have every right to tape them and put them on-line.

And any district who wants any kind of control over that should provide it as a free service, itself.

2) Hire a New Reputable Business Manager

Business Manager Scott Domowicz left the district over controversy about the board’s rejection of the teachers contract (more on that below).

The board accepted Domowicz’s resignation at its September meeting, but it won’t go into effect until the beginning of November. The board passed a motion to advertise the open position.

Meanwhile, accounting firm Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG) is ensuring the district’s finances are in order.

The board voted 5-4 to allow Dicks Sporting Goods to pay for 50 hours of accounting services by the firm, one of the big four in the industry.

Personally, I don’t like our schools being beholden to the largest sporting goods retailer in the country even if they are based in nearby Coraopolis. Our district already is too focused on its athletics program to the detriment of academics. I may just be cynical, but I don’t believe in corporate philanthropy – only philanthrocapitalism. I wonder what Dicks is going to ask MASD to do to repay this debt or what backroom deals may have already been made along these lines.

The district needs to hire a new business manager ASAP – and this time it needs to be someone with experience and a good reputation.

Domowicz originally had been hired in late February 2022 at an annual salary of $100,000. He had been the business manager at Spectrum Charter School in Monroeville for about a year. Before that he was Senior Management Consultant for two decades at Great Lakes Management Consulting, a firm offering accounting and tax preparation services to customers and small business owners in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

Spectrum Charter School is much smaller than MASD. The privatized school employs 11-20 people and has $1 million to $5 million in annual revenue. MASD has roughly 3,000 students and 300 teachers with a proposed budget of $86 million next year.

The previous Business Manager Joan Wehner had more experience in the education field. She was assistant to the business manager at Penn-Trafford School District for 10 years before coming to McKeesport. She left the district to become business manager at Greensburg Salem School District.

It would be beneficial to get a replacement with a demonstrated track record in education – but it may be difficult to entice someone like that to come to a place as toxic as McKeesport. However, we need to do whatever we can to make it so.

1 ) Pass a Teachers Contract with No Tax Increase

School directors and the teachers had agreed to a tentative new contract in June, but the board tabled it after concerns that the district didn’t have the money to pay for moderate raises.

Then the board skipped the entire month of July without a meeting. But had no answers when they came back in August or September.

They just heaped blame on Domowicz, so he resigned.

Meanwhile, the teachers current contract expired at the end of August and the 266 teachers and professional education staff become so fed up, they voted unanimously to authorize a strike. This does not mean an immediately work stoppage, but it is the first step toward one.

The union has agreed to one more 30-day extension to contract negotiations. However, union President Gerald McGrew said that this is the final extension the union will grant. So the board needs to make this right by the end of October.

I think the teachers are being fair. The proposed raises in the contract rejected by the school board are moderate and well below what some educators in neighboring districts make.

Over five years, the proposed pay increases are: 6.11% in 2023-24, 6.59% in 2024-25, 6.03% in 2025-26, 4.38% in 2026-27, and 3.26% in 2027-28.

If they can afford relatively similar pay scales at West Mifflin, Steel Valley and other neighboring districts, MASD should be able to do so, too. The school board needs to make this work.

The district should be open about its finances. How much exactly would this cost? What cost saving measures can be conducted to reach this goal? And no ridiculous speculation about how much this might cost from board members with no financial background. These numbers should come from the experts. Facts not politics.

Obviously this should be done without a tax increase. I think it is entirely realistic to expect such an outcome without further information to the contrary. However, let’s be real. Ensuring fair pay for our teachers needs to be done even if that means raising taxes.

The heart of a school is its teachers. You can’t have a great school without great educators and you won’t have them without fair pay.

We are already being eaten alive by charter schools. Every child living in the district who goes to a charter school takes away money that would have gone to fund MASD. The district paid $14 million toward charter school tuition in 2022-23, according to Domowicz. He budgeted $16 million next year. That’s 17 percent of the new budget going toward charter schools.

If MASD doesn’t have quality teachers and a quality academic program, we’ll lose even more to these privatized schools. The only way to reverse the trend is to provide the best education and get the word out.

If we leave schooling to the competing piranha charter schools, they will gobble up our taxes while we have no say whether they are raised or not since most charter schools have no elected school boards.

McKeesport School Directors may be dysfunctional, but at least they’re elected representatives. At least they are members of the community who are required to listen to the public and conduct business in an open forum.

They could do their jobs better, but at least they’re ours. And we can replace them.

The only way we get MASD back on course is to pass a fair teachers contract. And to do that we need a reputable, reliable business manager. We need to video and stream school board meetings so everyone can see them easily. And we need to cut the crap and start conducting those meetings civilly and respectfully in the spirit of cooperation and the good of the community at large.

The way I see it, these are the first steps to get there.

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If You Don’t Want Teachers to be Saviors, Don’t Put Them on a Cross

 
 
 
At the end of the school year, I like to show my 8th grade students the movie “Freedom Writers.” 

 
It’s a good culminating film for the class because many of the subjects and texts we read are mentioned by the characters – “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the civil rights movement, journal writing, etc.  

 
It reinforces the relationship between historical narratives and the fight for human rights as well as underlines the importance of raising your own voice. 

 
However, it is also a movie that has come under fire for perpetuating the white savior trope.  

 
The film is based on the true story of Erin Gruwell, a white middle class woman, who taught inner city children to find their own voices by writing about their lives in Freedom Writer journals. 

 
The biggest problem seems to be that in the film the teacher takes on more jobs to afford supplies, spends time putting together field trips, and even ends up losing her marriage so her students’ needs will be met in the classroom. 

 
Is she a white savior transforming, saving and redeeming the lives of her students through her own personal sacrifices?  
 

Is this essentially a feel good story about a white person saving otherwise irredeemable brown skinned children?  

 
Honestly, I don’t think so. I suppose the answer depends on how much the students’ success should be attributed to the sacrifices of their teacher, and how uncomfortable we should be by the fact that she’s white while her students are predominately children of color. 

 
Is there something wrong with these kids? Absolutely not. Stereotypes aside, their problems arise from the circumstances in which they live more than anything else. 

 
But if I’m being truthful, I have to admit these are tough questions, even more so when we’re asking them about real teachers and students. After all, I show the movie to my students because we’re in a somewhat similar relationship. They have many analogous experiences and I try to teach them using some corresponding texts and methods.  

 
And am I not also a white teacher with a class of mostly black and brown children? 

 
How often are people in my own position labelled white saviors? And what part of that label is denigration and what part valid criticism? 
 

On the one hand, there are legitimate challenges born out of this situation. 

 
About eight-in-ten U.S. public school teachers (79%) identified as White (non-Hispanic) during the 2017-18 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Fewer than one-in-ten teachers were Black (7%), Hispanic (9%) or Asian American (2%). So this situation is pretty much the norm – most students of color have white teachers. 
 

 
This is challenging because study after study shows white teachers bring their biases with them to the classroom. They often have lower expectations for students of color, which greatly affects their students’ motivation and achievement. This may even impact expulsion and discipline rates as well as other facets of students’ academic experiences. 

 
 
With the constant emphasis on standardized test scores and the testing gap, it is easy to fall into the trap of seeing students of color as less than. After all, children of color in general do not score as well as richer whiter kids. So teachers are encouraged to look at the situation as one in which they can act on their students and MAKE them have higher scores simply by giving the right test prep and forcing their students to do these boring and extrinsic assignments by using increasingly punitive inducements.  
 

 
However, I do not think it is correct to characterize this as being a white savior. I think it is being a colonizer, and I have seen the same kinds of attitudes and actions from people of various races and ethnicities.  

 
In my own admittedly limited experience, the most test obsessed teachers and administrators I have ever know have been people of color – almost as if they were trying to make a point about their own racial identity by raising test scores of the children in their charge.  

 
The problem is that the testing gap has nothing to do with any deficiency in black and brown students. It comes from biased and unfair questions which are based more on privilege and culture than authentic academic ability.  

 
The problem with being a colonizer is that it enforces a prejudicial status quo. So raising test scores (even if you’re successful) does little to help people of color. It simply justifies making them jump through biased and unfair hoops in the first place with the excuse, “See? They did it. Why can’t you?” 
 

In this way, I agree with, Dr. Christopher Emdin, an associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, who advised educators in his book “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too”: 

 
“You are there not as a savior, but as a revolutionary.” 
  

Teachers should be openly antiracist – especially white teachers. As difficult as it can be sometimes, we must not allow racism to become a taboo topic – something to be whispered about but never spoken of by name. We need to have the uncomfortable conversations. We need to read texts by people of color and honor every student’s race and culture. We need to prize difference and examine our own reactions to it. 

 
 
However, as I said I do not think the issue here is saviorism.  

 
That is something completely different though just as harmful. 

 
Regardless of race or ethnicity, teachers are forced to be martyrs .  

 
You can criticize Gruwell’s story because of all she gives up for her students, but that is kind of what teachers are obliged to do if they want to accomplish even a smidgen of their responsibilities.  

 
In fact, it is almost impossible to be a teacher – especially a teacher of predominantly black and brown students – and not be viciously coerced to sacrifice yourself.  

 
For example, more than 90 percent of educators use their own money to buy school supplies for their students, according to a survey from the National Education Association (NEA).
 
An analysis from My eLearning World showed teachers for the 2022-2023 school year spent an average of $820.14 on classroom supplies.  

However, educators cannot deduct even half of that cost from their taxes.  

Why do teachers do this? Because schools don’t purchase what kids need. So – especially in impoverished areas – educators are left with the choice of watching students do without or simply meeting that need, themselves.  
 

Almost every aspect of teaching involves some kind of sacrificial trade off like this.  

You can have a classroom with bare walls or you can buy and put up your own decorations to make it a welcoming environment for students. You can try to get kids up to your school’s meager library (assuming one even exists with a full-time librarian to keep books in stock) or you can just purchase your own classroom library.

 
Heck! There are only about 40 minutes or so in most teachers’ day to plan their lessons and grade student work. That’s not nearly enough time. Just to get the bare minimum done, educators have to spend hours and hours extra daily without pay.  

 
Moreover, teachers salaries are not commensurate with other professionals. They are paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, and a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet. 

You want more teachers of color to enter the profession? Then stop making privilege a prerequisite to apply!

 
This is why so many teachers are leaving the profession. They don’t want to be sacrificial offerings anymore.

 
The entire country is in the midst of a national educator walk out. Teachers are refusing to stay in the classroom due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect. 
After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers. 

Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left! 

Finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available. 

 
And you want to complain that teachers are acting like saviors!?  
 

Fine! Stop giving us two pieces of wood and some nails!  

 
While there is a legitimate caution behind the white savior teacher trope, it is mischaracterized and misused in order to gaslight educators to simply take the abuse and be quiet.  

 
Yes, educators need to stop defending the status quo. We need to examine our biases and embrace racial and cultural differences. We need to actively work to tear down systems of oppression even in our educational system. 

 
But we also need to reform those systems so they don’t require us to self immolate. We need an education system that actually provides enough resources to students so that their teachers don’t need to jump on the pyre to keep them warm. 

 
These are two sides of the same coin. The same system that oppresses children of color by withholding enough compels teachers to become saviors. The one is built upon the other.  

 
Civil rights activists need to do a better job recognizing this and speaking out against it.

 
As activist Lilla Watson famously said: 
 

 
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” 

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Like this post?  You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

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Just CLICK HERE.

I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

McKeesport Teachers Without a Contract Because of Bad Business Manager or Bad Faith School Board?

Which is it?

Does McKeesport Area School District (MASD) have a terrible business manager or a regressive school board?

School directors and the teachers had agreed to a new contract, but the board tabled it in June after concerns that the western Pennsylvania district didn’t have the money to pay for moderate raises.

Then the board skipped the entire month of July without a meeting. Which is fine if you don’t have any pressing business left unfinished, but I guess the livelihoods of hundreds of employees don’t count.

Now classes are set to begin on Aug. 21, yet the board is no closer to solving the problem.

At a school directors’ meeting last week, the board mostly blamed Business Manager Scott Domowicz.

“A contract was negotiated with ineptitude, and we cannot afford it,” said board member Matthew Holtzman. “Our business manager did not negotiate well. We don’t have the money to cover this.”

No board members sat on the negotiating committee? You just left it all up to the business manager?

“This board wants to give the teachers the raises, we can’t afford it,” board member Joseph Lopretto said. “Taxpayers will be looking at a 30% raise in their property taxes over five years.”

Where did you get that percentage from exactly? What are the exact figures, the exact cost?

All of which really comes down to the question – how is this possible!?

The pay raises in the proposed contract are not extravagant and the district does not pay as much as nearby districts.

Over five years, the proposed pay increases are: 6.11% in 2023-24, 6.59% in 2024-25, 6.03% in 2025-26, 4.38% in 2026-27, and 3.26% in 2027-28.

“This contract was offered to us. We accepted this contract. It was not the numbers we wanted, but it’s the numbers that were given to us, and that’s what we went with,” said Gerald McGrew president of the McKeesport Area Education Association (MAEA).

“At the end of five years, our highest salary is still not at some of the local district highest salary now. The parents and the kids are the ones being affected mostly by this.”

So how can this happen?

Can a business manager – a person responsible for a district’s finances – negotiate a contract without a full understanding of what the district can and cannot afford!?

Domowicz was hired in late February 2022 at an annual salary of $100,000. He had been the business manager at Spectrum Charter School in Monroeville for about a year. Before that he was Senior Management Consultant for two decades at Great Lakes Management Consulting, a firm offering accounting and tax preparation services to customers and small business owners in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

Spectrum Charter School is much smaller than MASD. The privatized school employs 11-20 people and has $1 million to $5 million in annual revenue. MASD has roughly 3,000 students and 300 teachers with a proposed budget of $86 million next year.

The previous Business Manager Joan Wehner had more experience in the education field. She was assistant to the business manager at Penn-Trafford School District for 10 years before coming to McKeesport. She left the district to become business manager at Greensburg Salem School District.

However, could Domowicz really be so clueless about MASD finances to negotiate a contract with the teachers that the district could not pay?

He certainly seemed on top of district finances at the board’s May meeting where he discussed the 2023-24 budget.

Domowicz said next year’s total proposed budget is for $86 million with an approximate fund balance of $10.6 million. This is an increase from the $79.8 million budget approved by the board for 2022-23.

Even though this years budget has a fund balance for the future, expenses are rising.

“Contractual labor agreements and additional staffing represents an increase in payroll expenses of 8 percent,” Domowicz said.

“There (have) been a lot of labor market pressures making recruitment and retention difficult without making some market adjustments to what we are offering in starting salaries. And there (has) been a decline in the median income of the families that we support with the district.”

This does not sound like someone ignorant of the issues.

He even noted that charter school costs were one of the leading causes of financial increases. Every child living in the district who goes to a charter school takes away funding that would have gone to fund MASD. The district paid $2 million toward charter school tuition in 2006-07, which has risen to $14 million in 2022-23.

If this continues, Domowicz said he expects the district will need to pay $16 million next year. That’s 17 percent of the new budget going toward charter schools.

If Domowicz’s figures were accurate all along, why is the school board suddenly refusing to approve the contract with the teachers it had originally offered?

In today’s increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-teacher environment, it is no stretch of the imagination to see why.

The entire country is in the midst of a national educator walk out. Teachers are refusing to stay in the classroom due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.

After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers.

Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!

Finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.

Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

And now MASD school board is refusing to approve very reasonable raises for educators who have given everything to the district and its children.

This is my school district where my family was educated, where I graduated and where my daughter still attends. I’ve seen so many fine educators give up the ghost and leave the classroom for better opportunities elsewhere.

If MASD school directors don’t do something to solve this problem, we will only lose more talented and experienced teachers. The quality of education will fall further while charter schools gobble up even more of our tax dollars. This means devaluing our properties and paying even higher taxes.

No one wants a tax increase.

The median income in the district is about $34,379, according to Domowicz. The community cannot afford to waste its declining tax revenue.

School directors need to either prove that the business manager they hired is incompetent and replace him – or prioritize educators when writing their budgets. You can’t have an excellent school without excellent teachers. And you can’t have excellent teachers – especially in a time of shortage – without paying them a fair wage.

Even though many school boards don’t have a meeting in July, perhaps MASD directors shouldn’t have done the same without a solution ready in August. That kind of disrespect is just asking for educators to strike – though the MAEA has not threatened to do so.

It is a shame that we are even in this position.

US schools should not have to rely on local tax revenues to fund neighborhood schools. Rich communities can afford to give their children the best of everything and poorer ones like McKeesport have to make do with whatever they can scrape together.

This is not how other modern countries do it. Internationally, schools are more often funded by state or federal governments so that all children get equitable resources. And charter schools do not even exist in many modern nations. However, until our own regressive governments catch up with the rest of the world, it is up to our duly elected representatives at home to get down to work and make sure all our children have the best we can provide.

School directors, no more excuses. Get to work.

 

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Like this post?  You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

 

Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

Teach for America (TFA) was a solution to a problem it helped create.

Educators have been leaving the profession for decades due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.

So Wendy Kopp, when in Princeton, created a program to fast track non-education majors into the classroom where they would teach for a few years and then enter the private sector as “experts” to drive public policy.

These college graduates would take a five week crash course in education and commit to at least two years in the classroom thereby filling any vacant teaching positions.

Surprise! It didn’t work.

In fact, it made things worse. Apparently deprofessionalizing education isn’t an incentive to dive into the field.

That isn’t to say everyone who went through the program became a bad teacher. But the few good and committed educators that did come through the program could have done so even more successfully by graduating with a degree in education.

Now the organization created in 1990 is expecting its lowest enrollment in 15 years. TFA anticipates placing slightly less than 2,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall. That’s two-thirds of the number of first-year teachers TFA placed in schools in fall 2019, and just one-third of the number it sent into the field at its height in 2013.

Apparently fewer people than ever don’t want to train for four to five years to become lifelong teachers – and neither do they want to be lightly trained for a few years as TFA recruits, either – even if that means they can pass themselves off as education experts afterwards and get high paying policy positions at think tanks and government.

On the one hand, this is good news.

Watering down what it means to be a teacher is even less popular than actually being an educator.

On the other hand, we have a major crisis that few people are prepared to handle.

The US is losing teachers at an alarming rate.

After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers.

Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And that’s on top of already losing 250,000 school employees during the recession of 2008-09 most of whom were never replaced. All while enrollment increased by 800,000 students.

Meanwhile, finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.

Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

It’s no wonder then that few college students want to enter the profession.

Over the past decade, there’s been a major decline in enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs in education.

Beginning in 2011, enrollment in such programs and new education certifications in Pennsylvania — my home state— started to decline. Today, only about a third as many students are enrolled in teacher prep programs in the Commonwealth as there were 10 years ago. And state records show new certifications are down by two-thirds over that period.

To put that more concretely, a decade ago roughly 20,000 new teachers entered the workforce each year in the Commonwealth, while last year only 6,000 did so, according to the state Department of Education (PDE).

But don’t look to most of the so-called experts to solve the problem. A great deal of them are former TFA recruits!

Through programs like TFA’s Capitol Hill Fellows Program, alumni are placed in full-time, paid staff positions with legislators so they can “gain insights into the legislative process by working in a Congressional office” and work “on projects that impact education and opportunities for youth.”

 
Why do so many lawmakers hire them? Because they don’t cost anything.
 

Their salaries are paid in full by TFA through a fund established by Arthur Rock, a California tech billionaire who hands the organization bags of cash to pay these educational aides’ salaries. From 2006 to 2008, alone, Rock – who also sits on TFA’s board – contributed $16.5 million for this purpose.

 
This isn’t about helping lawmakers understand the issues. It’s about framing the issues to meet the policy initiatives of the elite and wealthy donors.

 
It’s about selling school privatization, high stakes testing and ed-tech solutions.
 

As US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said on a call with Justice Democrats:

“I don’t think people who are taking money from pharmaceutical companies should be drafting health care legislation. I don’t think people who are taking money from oil and gas companies should be drafting our climate legislation.”

 
I’d like to add the following: people taking money from the testing and school privatization industry shouldn’t be drafting education policy. People who worked as temps in order to give themselves a veneer of credibility should not be treated the same as bona fide experts who dedicate their lives to kids in the classroom.

 The whole point of this scam is to serve the needs of the privatization movement.

Investors want to change public education into a cash cow. They want to alter the rules so that corporations running districts as charter or voucher schools can cut services for children and use the extra cash for profits.

And that starts with teachers.

If we allow privatizers to replace well-prepared and trained teachers with lightly trained temps, we can reduce the salaries we pay instructors. We delegitimize the profession. We redefine the job “teacher.” It’s no longer a highly-trained professional. It’s something anyone can do from off the street – thus we can pay poverty wages.

And the savings from cutting salaries can all go into our corporate pockets!

This kind of flim-flam would never be allowed with our present crop of highly trained professionals because many of them belong to labor unions. We have to give them the boot so we can exterminate their unions and thus provide easy pickings for the profiteers.

This helps explain why so many plans to address the teacher exodus are focused almost exclusively on recruiting new hires while completely ignoring the much larger numbers of experienced teachers looking for the exits.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), it is teachers who are quitting that is driving a significant part of the current educator shortage. More teachers quit the job than those who retire, are laid off, are transferred to other locations, go on disability or die. And this has remained true almost every year for the last decade with few exceptions.

To put it another way, you can’t stop a ship from sinking if you don’t plug up the leak first!

But experienced teachers always have been the biggest obstacle to privatizing public schools and expanding standardized testing.

That’s why replacing them with new educators has been one of the highest priorities of corporate education reform.

After all, it’s much harder to try to indoctrinate seasoned educators with propaganda that goes against everything they learned to be true about their students and profession in a lifetime of classroom practice than to encourage those with no practical experience to just drink the Kool-Aid.

So it should come as no surprise that supply side policymakers are using the current teacher exodus as an excuse to remake the profession in their own image.

As Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama (Later Chicago Mayor) said:

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

If our policymakers really want to solve the problem, we’d spend at least as much time keeping the experienced teachers we have as trying to get new ones to join their ranks.

Research shows that teacher experience matters.

“The common refrain that teaching experience does not matter after the first few years in the classroom is no longer supported by the preponderance of the research,” Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky write in Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness?

“We find that teaching experience is, on average, positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career.”

Their analysis is based on 30 studies published over the past 15 years and concludes:

1) Experienced teachers on average are more effective in raising student achievement (both test scores and classroom grades) than less experienced ones.

2) Teachers do better as they gain experience. Researchers have long documented that teachers improve dramatically during their first few years on the job. However, teachers make even further gains in subsequent years.

3) Experienced teachers also reduce student absences, encourage students to read for recreational purposes outside of the classroom, serve as mentors for young teachers and help to create and maintain a strong school community. 

The road to keeping experienced teachers isn’t exactly mysterious.

First, there must be an increase in salary. Teacher pay must at least be adequate including the expectation that as educators gain experience, their salaries will rise in line with what college graduates earn in comparable professions. This is not happening now.

In addition, something must be done to improve teachers working conditions. Lack of proper support and supportive administrators is one of the main reasons experienced teachers leave a building or the profession.

And perhaps most obviously, politicians have to stop scapegoating educators for all of society’s problems and even for all of the problems of the school system. Teachers don’t get to make policy. They are rarely even allowed a voice, but they are blamed for everything that happens in and around education.

If we want teachers to work with socially disadvantaged students, they must be provided with the institutional supports needed to be effective and steadily advance their skills. 

But this requires making education a priority and not a political football.

To do that, you would need to stop bankrolling organizations like TFA.

However, the billionaires funding school privatization and the standardized testing industry would never allow it.

So unlike our public schools, as fewer and fewer applicants come to TFA, there will always be money to keep it afloat.

Those who are causing the teacher exodus will never be the ones to fix it.

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Absurd School Voucher Proposal Stalls PA Budget

How do you stop the other team from making a goal when you aren’t even sure your own team’s goalie will try to block the shot?

Pennsylvania House Democrats find themselves in that uncomfortable position as they refuse to pass a Republican supported 2023-24 budget on time.

The problem? School vouchers.

Democrats generally oppose them and Republicans love them. But in the commonwealth, new Gov. Josh Shapiro, ostensibly a Democrat, has let it be known that he likes vouchers under certain conditions.

So Republicans designed a bill exactly along those lines hoping that if they can get it through both legislative bodies, the Governor will give it his signature. (Under the previous Democratic administration, Gov. Tom Wolf blocked the worst the GOP could throw at him, stopping all kinds of horrible policies from getting through.)

A budget encrusted with voucher giveaways passed the Republican-controlled Senate on Thursday, but the House – where Democrats now hold a slim majority – refused to go along with it.

So Republicans are holding the entire budget hostage. As usual.

In a time when the state is flush with cash from inflation-juiced tax collections and federal pandemic subsidies, legislators still couldn’t pass a budget on time.

And it all comes down to our schizophrenic education policies.

Fact: the Commonwealth shortchanges public school students.

The state Supreme Court said so after an 8 year legal battle.

Now lawmakers in Harrisburg are rushing to fix the problem by tearing public schools apart and giving the pieces to private and parochial schools.

It’s called the Lifeline Scholarship Program – throw a lifeline of $100 million to failing edu-businesses and religious indoctrination centers on the excuse that that will somehow help kids from impoverished neighborhoods.

You could just increase funding at the poorest public schools – but that would make too much sense.

Better to give taxpayer money to private interests with little to no accountability or track record and just hope it works!

During the election, Shapiro admitted he liked the concept of these kinds of vouchers, but back then the only other choice was Doug Mastriano, a raving MAGA insurrectionist Republican. The Democrat could have said he had developed a taste for human flesh and he would have been the better alternative.

This means only the slim Democratic majority is left to uphold public schools over this wrongheaded policy nightmare.

House Democrats swear the bill is destined to fail.

House Majority Leader Matt Bradford, D-Montgomery, put it this way:

“There are not the votes for it. It’s not coming up, and if it comes up, it will be defeated.”

This seems to be the case. Yesterday, the House Rules Committee voted against sending the tuition voucher bill to the full House for a vote. So it is not scheduled for a vote at all.

However, now that the June 30th deadline has been blown, lawmakers probably will try to use this newest school voucher bid as a bargaining chip to get a spending plan – any spending plan – passed. This could drag on for months – it certainly has in the past.

The current voucher iteration is a taxpayer funded tuition subsidy for students attending private schools.

Under this bill, students in the lowest 15% of schools in the commonwealth (as determined by standardized test scores) would be eligible.

So what’s wrong with school vouchers?

  1) Vouchers have nothing to do with helping kids escape struggling public schools.  

   School vouchers overwhelmingly go to kids who already attend private or parochial schools.

This is true even when the law explicitly stipulates the money should only go to poor and needy children.  

In the states that have released their data, more than three quarters of families who apply for vouchers for their children already send their kids to private schools. That’s 75% of voucher students in Wisconsin, 80% in Arizona, and 89% in New Hampshire. So these kids didn’t need our tax dollars in the first place.  We’re just paying for services they’re already receiving.

 Moreover, the very idea is absurd. If the school where the student is enrolled is struggling, why wouldn’t you simply invest in that school to make it better and fix the underlying problem? Why disrupt children’s educations by moving them to another school in another system that is entirely unproven, itself? 

2) Using taxpayer money to send your child to a private or parochial school has got nothing to do with getting a quality education.  

  If we look at the facts, using a school voucher to go from a public school to a private one actually hurts kids academically.  

  Large-scale independent studies in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., show that students who used vouchers were as negatively impacted as if they had experienced a natural disaster. Their standardized test scores went down as much or more than students during the Covid-19 pandemic or Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  

 This should come as no surprise. When we give children school vouchers, we’re removing their support systems already in place.

  They lose the friends, teachers, and communities where they grew up. It’s like yanking a sapling from out of the ground and transplanting it to another climate with another type of soil which may not be suited to it at all.  


 


   3) Vouchers have nothing to do with more efficient schools.  

  Let’s get one thing straight – voucher schools are businesses, often new businesses just opening up. And like any other start-up, the failure rate is extremely high. According to Forbes, 90% of start-ups fail – often within the first few years.  

 The same is true here. Like charter schools (another privatized education scheme), most voucher schools close in the first few years after they open. In Wisconsin, for example, 41% of voucher-receiving schools have opened and subsequently closed since public funding began in the early 1990s.  

  Yet when they close, they take our tax dollars with them leaving less funding available to educate all kids in the community.  

 Public schools, by contrast, are community institutions that usually last (and have been around) for generations. Their goal isn’t profit – it’s providing a quality education. 

  4) Vouchers have nothing to do with freedom or choice.  

   Unless it’s the choice to be a bigot and indoctrinate your child into your own bigotry. 

      Vouchers are about exclusion – who gets to attend these PRIVATE schools –  and indoctrination – what nonsense they can teach that public schools cannot.  

   Private schools can and do discriminate against children based on religion, race, gender, sexuality, special needs – you name it – even if those schools take public money.   

  For example, in Florida, Grace Christian School, a private institution that refuses to enroll LGBTQ kids has received $1.6 million so far in taxpayer funding. In Indiana, more than $16 million has gone to schools banning LGBTQ kids—or even kids with LGBTQ parents! That’s roughly 1 out of every 10 private schools in the state with just this one discriminatory enrollment.  

   Meanwhile thousands of parochial schools that receive public funding use textbooks provided by The American Christian Education (ACE) group. This includes the A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press textbooks. A Beka publishers, in particular, reported that about 9,000 schools nationwide purchase their textbooks.  

    In their pages you’ll find glowing descriptions of the Ku Klux Klan, how the massacre of Native Americans saved many souls, African slaves had really good lives, homosexuals are no better than rapists and child molesters, and progressive attempts at equal rights such as Brown vs. Board of Education were illegal and misguided. You know – all the greatest Trump/MAGA hits!  

  Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s a curriculum worthy of taxpayer dollars. I think if you’re going to take public money, you should have to accept all of the public, and you shouldn’t be allowed to teach counterfactual claims and prejudice as if they were fact.  

To be fair, this voucher program is not supposed to take money directly from the public system – one of Shapiro’s requirements for his support – but the money has to come from somewhere.

The state treasury would be responsible for managing the program, and it can’t just print money. This is taxpayer funding. We won’t allocate the money to support the schools we have, but we’re willing to send $100 million to schools we have no responsibility for now!? With no fiscal accountability!?

Lots of other states have enacted vouchers like this and surprise, surprise! The program expands enormously. For instance, in New Hampshire, voucher supporters predicted their program would cost taxpayers about $130,000, but within two years the cost had ballooned to more than $14 million.

Pennsylvania schools have monetary needs – but this voucher program is not one of them.

Lawmakers have been tasked by the state Supreme Court with increasing education funding.

That’s education funding for public schools – PUBLIC. Schools.

If they want to give away our tax dollars to their buddies in the private education industry or support religious indoctrination, that’s a different matter entirely.

And shame on Shapiro for giving the most reckless policymakers in the commonwealth on the other side of the aisle hope that these shenanigans will work.

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I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

 

Finally! PA Court Rules Unfair School Funding is Unconstitutional!

Welcome to Pennsylvania, where a common-sense judgement takes 8 years in court. 

 

And regressive Republicans respond with more illogical nonsense. 

 
A judge in Commonwealth Court finally ruled this week that the state’s school funding system violates the state constitution.  

 
It took school districts, parents, and advocacy groups banding together to file the lawsuit back in 2014, but it was really kind of a no-brainer. 

It basically comes down to whether you can provide a mountain of funding to rich kids while throwing a few pennies at poor kids.

Spoiler alert: You can’t.

The reason? The state Constitution guarantees a “thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth” – and cake for rich kids while poor kids get crumbs just isn’t thorough or efficient or meets the needs of the Commonwealth.

The problem is that the state funds schools based heavily on local taxes – so rich neighborhoods can afford to pile on the monetary support while poor ones do the best they can but fall far short of their wealthier counterparts.

If the state paid more of the cost of educating Commonwealth children, this would be less of an issue. But Pennsylvania is 43rd in the country when it comes to the share of revenue for local school districts that it pays.

The result is one of the biggest spending gaps between rich and poor kids in the nation.  

Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer, a Republican, ruled that this was discrimination. In short: 

“…the Pennsylvania Constitution imposes upon Respondents an obligation to provide a system of public education that does not discriminate against students based on the level of income and value of taxable property in their school districts… 

The disparity among school districts with high property values and incomes and school districts with low property values and incomes is not justified by any compelling government interest nor is it rationally related to any legitimate government objective…

[Therefore] Petitioners and students attending low wealth districts are being deprived of equal protection of law.” 

 
Unfortunately, no mention was made in the nearly 800-page ruling of exactly how to fix the problem. 

The trial began in November 2021 and lasted more than three months. You’d think the judge had time to toss off a line or two about what to do next, maybe that it’s up to the state to take up the slack or something.  

 
But no. 

 
Which leaves room for right wing creeps like the Commonwealth Foundation to crawl out from under a rock and give their own nonsense solution.

 
Enter Nathan Benefield, senior vice president of the Harrisburg based conservative and libertarian think tank that pushes for the destruction of any common good – especially public schools. 

 
Benefield wrote a response to the ruling praising it for leaving the legislature and executive branch to find a solution, rather than “mandating more money to a broken system.” 

Um, Benefield? Buddy? It’s broken mostly because we haven’t paid to keep it in good repair.

But he goes on…

“The only way to ensure that ‘every student receives a meaningful opportunity’ is for education funding to follow the child. Students that are trapped in their zip-code assigned school — especially in low-income and minority communities — often have no alternatives when their academic or social needs are unmet.” 

So the solution to not having enough money is more choice!?

I can’t afford to buy breakfast. Having a choice between raisin bran and pancakes won’t make a difference. I CAN’T AFFORD EITHER ONE!!!!

If every district received fair funding, it wouldn’t matter what your zip code is anymore. That’s the whole freaking point!

But look for neofacists and libertools to start spouting this kind of rhetoric at every turn now that they can’t hide behind the old excuse that it’s somehow fair to steal poor kids lunch money and give it to rich kids.

The next step is not entirely clear.

Some think it likely that the state will appeal the decision to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. 

However, they would have a pretty weak case if they did, said Maura McInerney, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

“The record is very, very clear that local school districts are not adequately resourced,” she said. “I think it would be extremely difficult to be successful on appeal.” 

Judge Jubilerer wrote in her ruling that she hoped everyone would work together now to find a solution:

“The Court is in uncharted territory with this landmark case. Therefore, it seems only reasonable to allow Respondents, comprised of the Executive and Legislative branches of government and administrative agencies with expertise in the field of education, the first opportunity, in conjunction with Petitioners, to devise a plan to address the constitutional deficiencies identified herein.” 

It may sound naive, but it’s happened in other states – specifically New York and New Jersey. 

A suit filed in 2014 in New York argued that the state never fully funded a 2007 Foundation Aid program. The program was supposed to consider district wealth and student need in order to create an equitable distribution of state funding. 

The Empire State settled in 2021 and is now required to phase-in full funding of Foundation Aid by the 2024 budget. 

New Jersey tackled the issue way back in 1981. A state court ruled officials had to provide adequate K-12 foundational funding, universal preschool and at-risk programs. 

This made New Jersey the first state to mandate early education. The state also undertook the most extensive construction program in the country to improve the quality of school buildings in impoverished neighborhoods, according to the Education Law Center. 

Could such sweeping reforms be coming to the Keystone state?

“For years, we have defunded our public schools at the expense of our students,” said state Sen. Lindsey Williams (D- 38th district), who is the minority chair of the PA Senate education committee. “[The ruling] is game-changing for our students across the Commonwealth.” 

Sen. Vincent Hughes of Philadelphia, the ranking Democrat on the state Senate’s Appropriations Committee, said the state can afford a big boost in aid to the poorest schools right now because we have billions of surplus dollars in the bank. 

This is exactly what is needed.

During the trial, plaintiffs presented evidence that schools are underfunded by $4.6 billion, an estimate that they said does not account for gaps in spending on special education, school buildings and other facilities. 

 Some organizations like PA Schools Work are calling on legislators to act now by adding approximately $4 billion in Basic Education Funding. They even suggest the increase be at the rate of one billion per year over the next four years to make it more feasible. Finally, they propose this money be distributed through the Fair Funding Formula and the Level Up supplement so that it is more equitably distributed to districts in need.

To make matters even more complicated, the state uses an “outdated” formula to calculate how to allocate school funding.  

The legislature developed a new formula based on enrollment numbers and how much it costs to educate students who are living in poverty, English language learners, or have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP).  However, a large chunk of money isn’t distributed using that new formula.

The way I see it, the Commonwealth has a lot of education funding issues to fix.

Hopefully, this ruling finally means we’ve stopped arguing over whether a problem exists and can start focusing on how to solve it.

That, itself, would be a huge victory!

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Like this post?  You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Congress May Raise Educators’ Minimum Salaries to Combat the Teacher Exodus

When it comes to teachers, America doesn’t mind getting away cheap.

The minimum salary for a teacher in Pennsylvania is $18,500 a year.

That’s not a lot of money – roughly $9.63 an hour.

It’s barely more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour ($15,080 annually).

But in many states there is no minimum teacher salary – so the minimum wage IS a teacher’s minimum salary!

You could probably make more as a dishwasher, cashier or parking lot attendant. So why take on a four-year education degree, mountains of student loan debt, and the added challenge of a (likely unpaid) internship?

Just pick up a broom and start sweeping.

Perhaps that’s why a group of Congressional Democrats have proposed a national minimum salary for teachers.

Rep. Frederica Wilson and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, (both former teachers) and six other members of the House have introduced The American Teacher Act establishing a minimum salary of $60,000 for all public school teachers working in the U.S. – the first legislation of its kind.

Though state minimums are less (assuming your state has one at all), the average starting salary of teachers nationwide was $41,770 in the 2020-21 school year, according to the National Education Association (which supports the bill).

However, even that number shows how poorly we reimburse teachers for their labor.

It means on average teachers make about 77 cents on the dollar compared to their peers in similar professions, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank.

So a potentially $20,000 base increase would help.

If passed, the bill wouldn’t simply force all states to comply. It would offer funding through federal grants encouraging states and school districts to raise their minimum starting salary to $60,000 by the 2024-25 academic year.

In the short term, the funding would pay to implement the new salary minimum but states would be responsible for sustaining the cost in the long run.

No cost projection for the program has yet been conducted.

The new minimum salary would be adjusted for inflation each year, beginning with the 2025-26 school year, and any grant funding would have to be used toward salaries and not to supplant any existing funding that goes toward schools.

Sponsors hope the bill would affect more than just minimum salaries.

The idea is that states would adjust their entire teacher salary schedules with $60,000 as the floor and all other salary steps increasing incrementally based on education levels and years of experience. So even veteran teachers should see their wages increase.

However, the bill doesn’t stop there. The authors of the legislation know that respect for the teaching profession is important to ensure salaries remain adequate.

In addition to wages, 4 percent of the grant funding would be used to launch a national campaign about the teaching profession, highlighting its importance and value as well as encouraging high school and college students to pursue a career in education.

It’s high time something were done because the US is losing teachers at an alarming rate.

After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers.

Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And that’s on top of already losing 250,000 school employees during the recession of 2008-09 most of whom were never replaced. All while enrollment increased by 800,000 students.

Meanwhile, finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.

Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

It’s no wonder then that few college students want to enter the profession.

Over the past decade, there’s been a major decline in enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs in education.

Beginning in 2011, enrollment in such programs and new education certifications in Pennsylvania — my home state— started to decline. Today, only about a third as many students are enrolled in teacher prep programs in the Commonwealth as there were 10 years ago. And state records show new certifications are down by two-thirds over that period.

Legislation like The American Teachers Act is absolutely necessary to stop the teacher exodus and ensure our children receive a quality education.

However, at present not a single Republican lawmaker has expressed support for legislation of this type, only support in individual states when it becomes obvious the whole system will collapse without help.

Moreover, even neoliberal Democrats want to use such measures to sneak in unnecessary and destructive policies like more standardized testing, evaluating teachers on student test scores and increased funding for charter schools and school voucher programs.

At present it seems unlikely that this legislation would pass in any manner that would be helpful if at all.

It may take further crumbling of the public school system and/or a change in political leadership and power for anything to be done.

On the bright side, it is encouraging that for the first time (ever?) lawmakers actually seem to recognize there is a real problem here.

It has finally come down to a simple matter of dollars and cents.

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Like this post?  You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

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Just CLICK HERE.

I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Workers Rights are Human Rights – Even If Our Government is Too Cowardly to Support Them

In today’s America, the more essential your job, the fewer rights you are allowed to exercise.

Teachers aren’t allowed to strike. It’s bad for the kids.

Nurses aren’t allowed to strike. It’s bad for the patients.

And – as we discovered just this week – railway workers aren’t allowed to strike. It’s bad for the economy.

None of these are actually true, however. It’s just union busting hidden under government sponsored propaganda.

Teachers strikes are inconvenient for students, families AND teachers. But having burned out, underpaid educators in the classroom does not help kids learn.

Nurses don’t want to strike. But going to the hospital and being cared for by an overworked, underpaid, unsupported nurse is not going to improve your health.

Railway workers would certainly rather get on with their jobs than contend with the bosses or Congress. But having no paid sick leave and a lack of adequate pay will not help move goods across the country any better, either.

Don’t believe the hype.

This isn’t about what’s good for society or the economy. It’s about protecting the upper class from having to respect people who do the most indispensable work. It’s about making sure workers will continue to labor in dangerous conditions.

That is all. It’s about who gets the power – the bosses or the people who do the actual work.

That’s why the Senate forced national freight rail roads and their unions to avert a strike and accept a contract which failed to provide workers with a component they aggressively sought: paid sick leave.

Congress passed the motion and President Joe Biden signed it. So both political parties are to blame.

Neither Republicans or Democrats have the backs of working people.

It’s no wonder that the U.S. is the only country in the developed world that doesn’t guarantee paid sick and family leave to workers.

Instead, we are at the mercy of employers to step up and do so. And when it comes to the poorest but most important workers – the ones without which our country would grind to a stop – employers are often extremely reluctant to do so.

Roughly a quarter of the private workforce — more than 33 million people — have no paid sick days so they can take care of themselves if they get ill. Even worse, more than 80 percent of private sector workers have no access to paid leave so they can care for a family member. 

And it’s indisputably a racial and class phenomenon.

Higher-paid, professional workers almost universally have paid sick and family leave. But, of course, most of these workers don’t just lack pigment on their collars, they lack it on their faces, too. Among the lowest-paid quarter of the workforce, the majority of whom are Black and Latinx workers, only half of them have any paid sick days, and just 7 percent have paid family leave.

So workers of color, the poor, and disproportionately women are much more likely to lack sick and family leave than those who are paid more, have white skin and are male.

And before you explode with indignation, let it be known that this could be rectified any day our government sees fit.

Our representatives could stop holding water for groups like the railway companies that pulled in $20 billion in profits last year alone. Our government could represent us, the people, instead of businesses that could afford to do better but don’t because we aren’t holding them accountable and our Congress and the President refuse to stop them or even let us force them to do right by subjecting them to a strike.

It is past time for the U.S. to pass a national law enshrining the right to paid sick and family leave.

It is past time for our government to begin respecting the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain for better treatment.

We just suffered through a pandemic where these so-called essential workers had to put themselves in the most danger just to keep society running while the rest of us stayed home and were unequally protected.

If these workers are truly essential, they at least deserve sick and family leave. Otherwise, it is all too obvious how bogus the term is.

The U.S. can no longer run on the unrespected work of an underclass of the poor and people of color.

This must change if our nation is to continue. And it must change today.

I stand with American workers. Do you?

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Like this post?  You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

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I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

The Teacher Exodus Continues Whether You Care or Not

Remember when federal, state and local governments actually seemed poised to do something about the great teacher exodus plaguing our schools?

With an influx of money earmarked to help schools recover from the pandemic, many expected pay raises and bonuses to keep experienced teachers in the classroom.

Ha! That didn’t happen!

Not in most places.

In fact, the very idea seems ludicrous now – and this was being discussed like it was a foregone conclusion just a few months ago at the beginning of the summer.

So what happened?

We found a cheaper way.

Just cut requirements to become a teacher.

Get more college students to enter the field even if they’re bound to run away screaming after a few years in.

It doesn’t matter – as long as we can keep them coming.

The young and dumb.

Or the old and out of options.

Entice retired teachers to come back and sub. Remove hurdles for anyone from a non-teaching field to step in and become a teacher – even military veterans because there’s so much overlap between battlefield experience and second grade reading.

And in the meantime, more and more classroom teachers with decades of experience under their belts are throwing up their hands and leaving.

Stop and think for a moment.

This is fundamentally absurd.

If you have a hole in your pocket and you keep losing your keys, wallet and other vital things from out of your pants, the first thing you do is sew up the hole! You don’t keep putting more things in your pocket!

But that’s only true if you’re actually interested in solving the problem.

Maybe you prefer the status quo. Maybe you even like it or see it as an opportunity to change your wardrobe entirely.

It’s a simple matter of cost.

The educators who have been in the classroom the longest are also the highest paid. So if we just let them go, we can save some money for other things.

Of course the problem of getting excellent teachers in the classroom is only compounded by such thinking. You don’t get more seasoned teachers by letting them leave and putting increasing pressure on those who stay.

And make no mistake – experienced teachers are incredibly valuable. That’s not to say new teachers don’t have their own positive aspects, but the profession’s expert practitioners are its heart and soul.

Think about it.

Like any other profession, the longer you practice it, the better you usually get. For example, no one going under heart surgery would willingly choose a surgeon who had never operated before over a seasoned veteran who has done this successfully multiple times.

But we don’t value the work teachers do nearly as much as we do surgeons. Or lawyers. Or almost anything else that requires a comparable level of education.

That’s really the core issue.

We don’t care about quality teaching. In fact, in many cases we actively don’t want it to occur.

Republicans are literally running a political platform on weakening teachers, schools and education because they need the poorly educated to make up their voting base.

When Trump was President, he actually praised the badly educated because they supported him more than any other demographic.

And even those who aren’t actively against education are more concerned with privatizing the public system for profit. They like it when public education fails because it gives them an excuse to push for more charter schools, more school vouchers, more cyber schools – anything where they can siphon away tax dollars earmarked for education into their own private pocketbooks (and no holes in there even to pay their own taxes)!

So the teacher exodus isn’t being fixed on purpose.

It is a political and economic plot against increasing the average intelligence and knowledge of voters, stealing government funding for personal gain and refusing to increase the quality of a government sponsored service.

In the meantime, more teachers are leaving every day.

A February 2022 report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics said the numbers of public school teachers had gone from approximately 10.6 million in January 2020 to 10 million — a net loss of around 600,000 teachers.

In August, the national Education Association (NEA) sounded the alarm that an additional 300,000 educators had left since the report was issued. And it’s only getting worse. An NEA union poll found that 55% of educators were considering leaving education earlier than they had originally planned.

In my own district, there are several teachers who have taken leaves of absence or are sick and had to be temporarily replaced with long term subs. We’re located in western Pennsylvania south of Pittsburgh, just across the river from a plethora of colleges and universities with teacher prep programs. Yet it was pretty difficult to find anyone to fill these positions or serve as day-to-day subs.

There is so much we could be doing to encourage seasoned teachers to stay in the classroom beyond increased pay.

You could cut all unnecessary tasks like formal lesson plans, stop holding staff meetings unless an urgent need presents itself, refrain from new and unproven initiatives, and/or cut duties where possible to increase teacher planning time. 

And that’s before we even get to the lack of respect, gas lighting, scapegoating, and micromanaging teachers go through on a daily basis.

What we have here is a crisis that cuts to the very heart of America’s identity as a nation.

What do we want to be? A capitalist experiment in school privatization whose only regulation is the free hand of the market? Or a nation supported by a secure system of education that took us to the moon and made us the greatest global superpower the world has ever known?

What do we want to be? A nation of dullards who can be easily manipulated by any passing ideologue? Or a country of critical thinkers who can accept new evidence and make rational decisions based on facts?

There is a cost to becoming a great nation and not just emblazoning the idea on a hat.

That cost is education. It is paying, supporting and respecting veteran teachers.

Are we still willing to pay it?

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Top Five Republican Nightmare Fantasies About Public Schools

Republicans are fighting against a version of public education that does not exist.

Critical race theory, pornographic school books, and other bogeymen haunt their platforms without any evidence that this stuff is a reality.

Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee for Governor of Pennsylvania, actually promises to ban pole dancing in public schools.

Pole dancing!

“On day one, the sexualization of our kids, pole dancing, and all this other crap that’s going on will be forbidden in our schools,” he says.

Mr. Mastriano, I hate to tell you this, but the only school in the commonwealth where there was anything like what you describe was one of those charter schools you love so much. The Harambee Institute of Science and Technology Charter School in Philadelphia used to run an illegal nightclub in the cafeteria after dark.

But at authentic public schools with things like regulations and school boards – no. That just doesn’t happen here.

Maybe if your plan to waste taxpayer dollars on universal school vouchers goes through you’ll get your wish.

But reality has never stopped the state Senator from complaining about a list of fictional public education woes.

On Twitter he routinely makes statements like this from August:

“Democrats are pushing woke ideology, racism, and sexuality on children in the classroom. As your governor, I will ban this on day one…”

Yikes. This is like promising to ban sorcery in school – another thing we don’t teach.

This isn’t the Republican Party I remember when I was growing up.

Instead of personal autonomy and free trade, today’s GOP solemnly swears to eliminate a series of racially and sexually motivated phantasms that are like shadows under a child’s bed. I suppose it’s easier to get rid of something that’s never existed than to fix the real problems we actually have.

But let’s be honest – for some folks this kind of unhinged messaging works.

Perhaps if we examine the most common claims against public schools, maybe we can see through the mist and electioneering to the very real fears the GOP is using in a desperate attempt to manipulate voters to their side.

So here are the top 5 Republican nightmare fantasies about public schools:

1) Teaching boys to hate themselves

“I believe that white men are the most persecuted identity in America.”

Georgia Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene actually said this – out loud – in an interview.

And the GOP attention-seeker is not alone.

Many Republicans claim anti-male discrimination is wide spread. Men are blamed for so many things in our society they’re forced to turn to porn and video games because they have no other options, Green claimed.

And women have become “… too weak and pathetic to take care of themselves. They want a great big giant government to take care of them. It’s such a hypocrisy. They claim they want the future to be female, but they aren’t capable of taking care of themself.”

How did we get here? Public schools that teach sexual politics.

But, Marjorie, the following ARE facts:

-The US is one of only eight countries in the world that does not provide any form of paid maternity leave by federal law.  

-Women earn 83 cents for every dollar a man makes.

-Despite being almost 60% of the population, women hold only 26% of the seats in Congress.

Should we teach such facts in school?

Contrary to Republican opinion, teaching about the many ways women are unfairly treated in the US does not turn men into victims or make women helpless.

Male students are not responsible for a world created by past generations but they ARE responsible for picking a side and doing something about it as they become adult members of society.

In a country where a GOP-controlled Supreme Court has usurped women’s bodily autonomy by overturning Roe v. Wade and men still have untold economic advantages, redefining men as victims and education as infantalizing is, itself, a fantasy.

2) Teaching kids to be gay

Republicans literally think public school teachers are turning kids gay.

That’s the impetus behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill and several copycat bits of legislation the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is pumping out across the country.

They insist that even mentioning LGBTQ people exist is grooming children into a sexuality they wouldn’t otherwise have.

First, believing this shows massive ignorance.

No one can really be coerced into a sexuality they didn’t already possess. As you grow and mature, you have sexual preferences. It’s not really a matter of nurture – it’s nature. People are born this way.

Second, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that there are other ways to express your sexuality is not going to make people ignore their innate inclinations. The idea seems to be that if kids never find out there are other options, they’ll simply be satisfied with heterosexuality – how they’re told to think and feel.

And finally, it is extremely unfair to LGBTQ people. We already live in a culture that celebrates cis hetero-normativity. Trying to erase everyone else causes real harm and trauma to both people who are different and to those who are not but never get to fully understand the entire spectrum of humanity.

Teachers are not making kids gay, but they are telling kids that gay people are real. We are trying to stop bullying and homophobia. And let’s be honest – that’s really what Republicans are objecting to here.

They want it to be okay to hate gay people.

Sorry. Not in public school.

3) Teaching kids to be trans

This is where the backlash against using appropriate pronouns and recognizing trans people is coming from.

As much as Republicans hate gay people, they absolutely despise and fear the trans community.

Once again they conflate acknowledging the existence of the other with coercing students to become the other. Just knowing that trans is an authentic way human beings can live is seen as a threat. But if this kind of knowledge makes you trans, you almost certainly were trans already.

It hurts no one to call another person by the pronouns they would prefer you use. That’s just respect – treating others like you would want to be treated.

It hurts no one to see the world as bigger than just one way of living. This is reality, after all. And that’s what Republicans are rebelling against.

Far from teachers coercing students to become trans, the GOP wants us to bully children not to be. They want to constrain difference, punish and hide it.

This cannot be the mission of public schools. At its best, it is for everyone and must respect each child on their own terms.

It’s not easy. Recognizing such differences can be messy and challenging, but that’s life. Deal with it.

4) Teaching kids to hate white people

This is one of the most common complaints of Republicans everywhere.

Thy say public schools are woke. Public school teachers talk about racism and prejudice. They teach what was, what is and encourage kids to act to dismantle systems of injustice against people of color that persist.

Yeah. We do that.

I make no apologies.

It’s not Critical Race Theory (which is a legal framework) nor do we teach anyone to hate white people. But we do teach what whiteness has done and continues to do.

It’s called history and current events.

White kids today are not responsible for slavery, Jim Crow or a host of evils perpetrated throughout our collective past. But that doesn’t remove their responsibility to do something about it today.

Republicans, though, try to flip the script and call this teaching, itself, racism. That’s absurd! It is not racist to show kids injustice.

For example:

-Median household income for Black people, at $43,862, is 37 precent less than that of white people, at $69,823.

-Census data shows Black couples are more than twice as likely as whites to be denied a mortgage or a home improvement loan, which leads to just 59 percent of the median home equity white households have, and just 13 percent of Black wealth.

-A Black child born today can expect to live four years less than a white one.

-Black people have been more than twice as likely as white people to experience threats or uses of force during police encounters, and three times more likely to be jailed if arrested.

These facts matter.

They shouldn’t make children hate white people, but they may encourage them to hate white supremacy.

And that’s what Republicans are really against.

5) Teaching kids to be sexually active

This may be the strangest fantasy the GOP is trying to spread about public school.

They say we’re making kids engage in sexual activity. Which is strange because according to the Centers for Disease Control, fewer US children are choosing to engage in sexual activity.

An estimated 55% of male and female teens have had sexual intercourse by age 18, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

However, these percentages have declined since 1988 when 51% of female and 60% of male teens had engaged in sexual activity.

If public schools are teaching kids to bump uglies, we’re doing a bad job.

Are kids more sexualized today than in the past? Probably. But that’s a result of the culture. When you sell teenagers shorts with the word “juicy” on the butt, don’t complain about public schools.

Some schools offer sex education classes, but they are focused on health and wellness. There is no encouragement to have sex. In fact, many such classes are still teaching abstinence only instead of safe contraception.

The idea that public schools are teaching sex is just dog whistle politics. It is Republicans trying to scare parents that public schools are instilling values they don’t share. It is blaming public schools for social ills that the schools didn’t cause and don’t control.

Looked at calmly and rationally, all of these fantasies are just scare tactics to get the gullible to react emotionally on election day.

They want to terrify responsive voters into giving GOP candidates the power to stop a host of things that never really existed. They want an excuse for doing nothing to solve the actual problems of the day.

There’s a reason they spend so much time railing against woke education – they want to ensure America remains asleep.

A fitful sleep – tossing and turning in various Republican nightmares.

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Like this post?  You might want to consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. This helps me continue to keep the blog going and get on with this difficult and challenging work.

Plus you get subscriber only extras!

Just CLICK HERE.

I’ve also written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!