The Fox and the Hounds: Hanna Skandera and the Attack on New Mexico's Schools

Copy of an e-mail I sent February 17, 2014 to the New Mexico State Senate Rules Committee concerning the confirmation hearings for New Mexico Secretary Designate of Education Hanna Skandera.

Honorable Senators:

My name is David Aram Wilson.  I was born right here in Santa Fe, just a few short blocks north of this great building.  I am speaking to you this morning as a teacher of 34 years; a 27-year veteran of New Mexico's public schools; a Tier III teacher for 12 years; a PhD student in Bilingual Education at the University of New Mexico; a part time instructor in UNM’s College of Education; a husband of a teacher; a brother and son of a teacher; a brother-in-law and son-in-law of teachers; and the father of two public school students.  In a word, I was born New Mexico and I am a qualified, licensed, and experienced educator. 

The same cannot be said of the secretary designate.  As you know, she possesses not even the minimum credentials for this office.  State law mandates the secretary of education be highly qualified and experienced.  She is neither.  She does not have a degree in education.  She has never been a teacher.  She has never been an educational assistant.  She has never been a school administrator.  In fact, she has never worked in any school in any capacity for any meaningful length of time.

Yet, despite these astonishing lack of credentials, she has been in Santa Fe for the last three years, unconfirmed, making educational policy as if she knew what she was doing.  Honorable Senators, she does not know what she is doing.  And for that reason the students and teachers in our public schools suffer more each day due to the misguided and damaging policies she promotes, often by circumventing the legislative process. 

Last year you heard testimony from the secretary designate’s advocates in the business community.  They claimed that everyone, including her, is essentially a teacher, and therefore has the right and even the duty to determine education policy in New Mexico.  Senators, I am a teacher and I know teachers.  The secretary designate is not a teacher. Instead, she is an impostor whose illegitimate actions should not be validated by an affirmative vote of this committee.  

The secretary designate has stated recently that, contrary to the perceptions of thousands of educators in New Mexico, she is not their enemy but their friend.  Senators, she is not a friend of education and here are some of the reasons why:

No friend of public education would advocate assigning letter grades to schools based primarily on invalid and illegitimate test score data.  Some schools considered excellent by their students, parents, and teachers received Ds and Fs while others, considered no better or worse by their "constituents," received As and Bs.  What’s more, many of the A schools tend to have extremely low rates of poverty while all the F schools have the highest rates of poverty in the state.  The B, C and D schools tend to have rates of poverty commensurate with their letter grade.  If this isn’t blaming the victims, I don’t know what is. 

No friend of public education would advocate the wholesale retention of third graders who, according to dubious and subjective measures, are deemed "below grade" level in reading.  Nor would any friend of education deny parents the right to challenge a retention based solely on whether their child reads on grade level at an arbitrary point in time.  

No friend of public education would base teacher evaluations primarily on their students' standardized test scores.  The test companies themselves have emphasized that their tests were NEVER designed to evaluate teachers and should never be used for that purpose.  

No friend of public education would instruct principals to artificially evaluate teachers lower in the fall and higher in the spring in order to demonstrate growth over time and to prove that the growth occurred because of the evaluation process. Nor would any friend of education instruct principals to place the teachers in their schools on a bell curve so that the results of the evaluations correspond to the erroneous and ungrounded assumption that most of the teachers in the school are either merely “effective” or “minimally effective.”

No friend of education would advocate for merit pay for teachers based primarily on student test scores.  In Tennessee, where the only large scale, longitudinal study of merit pay was conducted, researchers found that, after the first year of implementation, teacher effectiveness actually decreased in successive years as teachers realized that the process was rigged in favor of teachers who cared not about teaching, but about teaching to the test and gaming the system. 

No friend of education would neglect, ignore, and disparage the educational needs of New Mexico's Hispanic, African American, Native American, immigrant, and non English speaking students. In a state that was the first minority-majority state and has the largest minority population per capita, her negative attitude and damaging actions toward these majority populations is astonishing.

No friend of education would submit proposal after proposal that directly contradicts what the preponderance of research has concluded about education policy and practice in New Mexico and beyond.  

No friend of public education would kowtow to business interests, such as Pearson, Achieve, the Gates, Broad, and Walmart Foundations, and the various initiatives of Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change, of which the secretary designate is a member, that seek to siphon enormous amounts of public money destined for public schools and redirect that money to private or semi private educational institutions in which they may have a financial interest.  

No friend of education would hold artificial, "kangaroo court" -style hearings around the state with the express purpose of promoting her misguided agenda while categorically denying the public the right to speak publicly about their concerns.   

No friend of education would attempt to coerce the state's 89 superintendents into signing a "petition" that would oblige them to uphold her dubious “reforms” known collectively as Students First, New Mexico Wins.  Thankfully, only a handful of superintendents signed the document, which is more evidence of the fact that the opposition to her confirmation extends into the highest reaches of New Mexico’s educational hierarchy.

The secretary designate is no friend of education.  Rather, she is the fox guarding the chicken coop that is Public Education in New Mexico.  We need a secretary of education who is highly qualified and experienced—as per state law—and who, instead of standing in judgment of teachers, stands in awe of them and everything they do.  Senators, I ask you, I implore you:  vote no on her confirmation.

The Important Work of Frederick the Mouse

The following address was read to the fifth graders and their parents at the graduation ceremony at Zia Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.  

The Important Work of Frederick the Mouse

May 15, 2013

            Last year I read a story by Dr. Seuss.  It was called King Looie Katz.  It was an allegory about leaders and followers.  Of course the story stressed the importance of being good leaders.  Everybody says that, including Dr. Seuss.  But it also emphasized the importance of being good followers, informed and responsible followers, followers who recognize when leaders have run astray from good leadership and are no longer good leaders.   In these cases, good followers know how to muster the intelligence and the courage to call the leaders out and hold them accountable for their transgressions.  This essentially makes the good followers the new good leaders.  I love Dr. Seuss! 

            I also love Leo Lionni.  My favorite work of his is a little book about a little mouse named Frederick.  It is a work of fiction, a style of writing I hope you continue to enjoy despite current trends to reduce or eliminate it.

            [At this point Frederick, by Leo Lionni, was read to the audience.  In this book, Frederick and his four little mouse friends are getting ready for the long, cold, dark, winter.  While the other mice gather wheat, grain, and seeds, Frederick gathers rays of sunshine, stories, and words.  Of course, the other mice don't believe Frederick's work is real work, and they remind him of that at every turn.  But in the middle of the winter, when the food is nearly gone and the mice are anxious to get their minds off the cold, the hunger, and the desperation, Frederick astounds them with his ability to warm them with the rays of sun he has stored, entertain them with his stories, and comfort them with his poetry.  In the end, the other mice realize that Frederick's work, though somewhat unconventional, is as important as theirs.]

            Dr. Seuss and Leo Lionni don’t just write cute little books for children; they write lessons for life from which we readers might derive some wisdom.  The obvious lesson in this book is the value of work. 

            From kindergarten through 5^th grade you have often been encouraged to be like the other mice, especially when it comes to getting your work done.  Much of the work you have been required to complete has been designed and prescribed by adults you will never meet and who will assure you they know what’s best for you.  It is work that can be easily entered onto bubble sheets and evaluated by a computer, for their convenience.  This work is easy to recognize, validate, and reward.  This is the work of the four little mice. 

            However, as you now well know, there is other, often more important work you have completed over the last six years, work that is not so easily recognized or rewarded.  It is the work of creativity, cooperation, and caring; flexibility, fantasy, and fun.  And while there are no bubbles or computers that can evaluate this work, it is as important to your personal and academic growth as the more conventional and recognizable work you’ve completed so far.  This other important work is, of course, the work of Frederick.

            As you leave elementary school and go onto middle and high school, do the work of the four little mice and do it well. You will recognize this work by the little names they give it—DRA, SBA, PARCC, and CCSS—and you will be told your success in college and career depend on it.  But as you strive to comply with the demands of those who have the power to define this work, don’t neglect the work of Frederick.  Frederick knows best what work is most important for him and his community, and he does that work as best he can, regardless of whether or not it can be validated on bubble sheets by powerful mice he will never meet.  

Sticking It To The Man

Today I received an e-mail from William Lynch, the CEO of Barnes and Noble.  In addition to making some grammatical errors—which, as a teacher, I thought I ought to correct—he asked me for my business.  It seems that B & N has just acquired the Borders Books customer lists in some high level bankruptcy proceeding.  I don't know why he's so keen on seeking new customers.  Given the virtual monopoly the two booksellers had on brick and mortar outlets, Borders customers have almost nowhere else to go.  Here is my response to Mr. Lynch.

Hello Mr. William Lynch:

          Please check your grammar (below).  "Close proximity" is redundant, since the two words are synonymous.  Also, the error in "Our intent in buying the Borders customer list is simply to try and earn your business" should have been detected by your editors and changed to "Our intent in buying the Borders customer list is simply to try to earn your business."
          I am a 4th grade teacher.  As such, it pains me to discover that someone was able to reach CEO status of a major corporation with lackluster writing skills or without the means to afford a good editor.

          My wife and I are long time educators.  We used to make professional and personal purchases at Barnes and Noble in large part because of B & N's teacher discounts.   However, we stopped shopping at B & N ever since the clerks began interrogating us about whether or not the books we were buying were "for the classroom."  Let me get this straight.  You lure us to your store with what seem to be thoughtful and conscientious discounts, then question our purchases.  Shame on you.

          It doesn't matter if the books we're buying are for the classroom.  The point of giving teacher discounts should be at least two-fold:  1) to help poorly paid teachers purchase books that their salaries would normally prohibit them from purchasing, and 2) to enhance the intellect of teachers so they can in turn enhance the intellects of their students.  

          Because of this apparent policy to interrogate teachers, we have urged many of our colleagues to stop shopping at B & N and patronize our three local bookstores instead.  So far, many have.  These booksellers are happy to have teachers buy whatever they believe will make them better teachers or their students better students. 

          If, in the future, B & N decides to treat teachers as the professionals they are, perhaps my wife and I will do business with your company again.

Round Up the Usual Suspects

Teachers are the problem in education.  The press says so.  School districts say so.  State legislatures say so.  The federal government says so.  Political pundits say so.  The Department of Education says so.   And, yes, President Obama says so, loud and clear.  The sole holdouts are, interestingly enough, teachers, parents and students, the only groups that really matter.


If you, like the rest of the public, accept the argument that teachers are the problem in education, then everything else makes sense: standardized testing, punishing school for low scores, boxed and scripted curricula, narrowing of the curriculum, merit pay, elaborate and excessive accountability schemes, and so on.  If, instead, you reject this specious proposition and challenge it head-on, you will be able to see quite clearly how incredibly baseless it is.

The perception that teachers are the problem in education is an obscene exaggeration of one simple fact:  there are indeed some really bad teachers in our country.  President Obama said so recently when visiting my fair city:  "If some teachers are bad, they've got to go."  Even here the President of the United States suggests that there may be some bad teachers.   At the same time, however, he seems to imply that if they exist, they must be the sole reason for all that is bad in education.  After all, he made his statement in the context of how to fix what is broken in education.  Fix the teachers and you've fixed the problem.

What President Obama, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and other teacher bashers are not saying, even though they know it's true, is that the number of really bad teachers—those who might actually have a detrimental effect on the education of their students—is such an incredibly small percentage of the nation's teaching corps that they couldn't possibly constitute a group large enough to cause all the perceived damage to our educational system.  If some teachers are bad, that means most teachers are not.  And if most teachers are not bad—and many are very good to excellent—then we really don't have an educational crisis on our hands.  A minority of bad teachers does not a bad school or district make.  

It seems absurd but true:  we begin with a statement that virtually everyone can agree with—there are some bad teachers and "they've got to go"—and conclude that most teachers are bad and have to go or be radically retrained.  But the fact of the matter is, most teachers are not bad. There are good and excellent schools across the country with one or two bad teachers on every staff, but those bad teachers don't make the whole school bad.  Most of the nation's public schools are good to excellent because they have good to excellent teachers and despite the presence of one or two bad teachers.  

Even if we agree that there is a small contingent of bad teachers in America, we still have another problem:  defining "bad teacher"?  Is a bad teacher someone in whose classroom parents hope their children are not placed?  Someone who received a negative evaluation from her principal last year?   Someone who hates her job?  Someone who dislikes children?  Someone who focuses her energy more on retirement than on education?  Someone who doesn't seem to know the established curriculum, content and standards?  Looking at it from a different angle, is she someone who received a positive evaluation from the principal due to her adherence to program fidelity?  Someone who refuses to teach the boxed and scripted curriculum and dares to create her own curriculum and teach creatively?  Is she a teacher who gives equal weight to all subjects instead of teaching only reading and math in order to raise test scores?

The definition of a bad teacher probably depends on where you think public education should be heading.  In the end it doesn't matter.  All definitions but one are irrelevant in the minds of the critics of public education:  a bad teacher is one whose students receive poor results on state sanctioned standardized reading and math tests.  Period.  That's right.  Tests that are designed for the sole purpose of pinpointing a student's academic progress are being used to judge teacher quality.  Never mind the fact these tests were never intended to be used to evaluate teachers (or schools either, for that matter).  Beginning with the NCLB testing frenzy in 2002, schools and increasingly teachers have been evaluated based on student test scores.  Obama will soon attempt to sharpen the teeth of the accountability section of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, aka No Child Left Behind and soon to be Blueprint for Success) when it comes up for renewal before the end of his term.

If these tests are not designed to evaluate teacher quality and effectiveness, then why do we use them for that purpose?  Perhaps it is because we have objectified students to the point where they are qualitatively no different than a widget on the assembly line.  It is understandable that a factory worker be held accountable for and evaluated on the quality of her widget.  After all, everything about the widget can be controlled and manipulated by the worker.  The widget is an inanimate object whose ultimate form and function is determined solely by its maker.  Therefore, if the widget is defective or otherwise fails, it must be the worker's fault because it couldn't possibly be the wiget's.

But students are not widgets and teachers are not assembly line workers.  This image was cooked up and promoted by business interests such as the Chamber of Commerce who cannot conceptualize public education in any way other than the factory assembly line.  The image is false, misleading and damaging to our public school system.  Unlike the widgets in the  business world, students are living, breathing, dynamic, individual, multi-faceted, idiosyncratic, creative, spontaneous, unpredictable, free-willed beings who, despite what we may "do" to them, will likely "produce" results wholly inconsistent with the "worker's" desired outcome.  And since students are not widgets—or products—an evaluation of their worth cannot be based on the "productivity" of their "maker."

If the wrong measure is used to determine the quality of the teacher, the wrong fixes—merit pay, firing, meaningless accountability—will be applied to the perceived problem.  And if we are spending time and resources fixing the wrong problems and even problems that don't exist, we'll have a real mess on our hands.   Educational "remedies" based on measuring teachers with student test scores are inherently ill-conceived and will inevitably fail. 

This brings us full circle:  if you believe that most teachers are bad; that their "badness" is proven by student test scores; and that teachers are the main cause of the wholesale failure of the public schools, then the various and sundry educational solutions proposed by the critics of public education will seem wholly logical to you.  You will whoop and holler for the teacher bashers when you hear of their schemes to marginalize the role of the teacher in order to gain direct access to students.  That is precisely the role of standardized tests, standardized curricula, box and scripted curricula, school wide punishments, accountability schemes, and merit pay:  they are all attempts to circumvent teachers and get direct access to students so that teacher bashers can apply their simple minded remedies to the problems teachers have failed to fix.

If you have no faith in teachers' ability to evaluate their students, you imposed standardized testing.  If you have no faith in teachers' ability to teach, you force them to implement boxed and scripted curricula. If you have no faith in teachers' ability to account for their work, you dream up schemes that hold teachers responsible for the boxed and scripted curricula (this is known as "program fidelity").  If you have no faith in teachers' intrinsic value as trained and experienced professionals, you implement merit pay (based, of course, on their students' standardized test results).  If you have no faith in teachers, you blame teachers for all that is wrong in education and proceed to offer the wrong solutions to all the wrong problems.  

President Obama has no faith in teachers; otherwise he would not call his educational plan a Blueprint for Success—a title that invokes private industry ("blueprint") and implies failure ("success")—and he would send his daughters to public school.  The press has no faith in teachers; otherwise they would investigate other, more important factors of school "failure," such as language, parenting, parental level of education, parental investment in the education of their children, and of course the two big ones, TEST VALIDITY and POVERTY (see last post).  Policy makers have no faith in teachers; every fix they come up with, usually in the form of mandatory professional development, addresses the perception the only thing teachers need in order to improve student achievement is more training, more motivation, and an improved work ethic (lazy teachers; if they would only work harder!).  

Perhaps the most unfortunate reality of the teacher bashing is that the solutions to the bad teacher problem proposed by the nation's non educators lead to the production of more bad teachers and, consequently, more bad instruction.  When we dumb down the curriculum in order to make it accessible to the worst of teachers, and force all teachers—good, bad and in-between—to the lower standard of boxed and scripted curricula and "program fidelity," we may succeed in raising the effectiveness of the worst 25% among us, but we will also lower the quality and effectiveness of the 75% good and excellent teachers as they are pulled inexorably towards the new, lower standard.  

The subsequent dilution of the nation's teaching corps will inevitably accelerate the narrowing of an already narrowed curriculum to the point where only basic math and reading skills will be taught and tested.  When we reach that point—and many schools in the country already have—we will no longer be able to claim that what we are engaged in is education.  Instead, we will be engaged in a clinical and impersonal system of mass production wherein our teachers, like factory workers around the globe, will produce human widgets who can look forward to a life as a cog in the machinery of the global marketplace.  The absurdity of public education in America will then be complete:  we will have converted students into objects, teachers into producers, and a flawed system of measurement into the sole "truth" about education, the "truth" that convinced us that teachers are the problem in the first place.

And if you believe that, then everything else makes sense.