Pulling Back the Curtain

Dear Editor:

          The following disclaimer/explanation appeared at the end of an editorial published in the Albuquerque Journal on Friday, October 21, 2016 that ridiculed area teachers for taking part in a peaceful, symbolic protest in front of the Board of Education headquarters in Albuquerque:
  

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.

 
         First, I find the above statement lacking in clarity.  Who are the "members of the editorial board"?  There is an "Administration" designation that consists of the editor and five others.  There is also an "Opinion" designation that consists of four additional Journal staff.  However, there is no identifiable "editorial board" listed on the Journal web page. Your readers deserve to know whose opinions are being represented in the paper's editorials—and whose are not.

          Second, exactly who or what does the term “the newspaper” include?  All employees?  All staff?  A corporation?  If by “the newspaper” the Editorial Board implies all employees, how does the Board go about verifying that other Journal employees agree with the opinions expressed by the Editorial Board?  No Journal staff members I know have ever been consulted by the "editorial board" as to whether or not they agree with the opinions expressed in the paper’s editorials.

          Third, I find the disclaimer/explanation lacking in logic.  That editorials purport to represent “the newspaper” does not prevent the authors from signing them.  Why not sign editorials?  Doing so would go a long way toward enhancing transparency and accountability at the Journal.  It would also afford Journal employees the opportunity to either associate with or disassociate themselves from the opinions of the "editorial board." The teachers involved in the protest on October 19 proudly stated their names and their schools’ names prior to speaking.  This was akin to signing their names to an editorial.  They were not afraid.

          Finally, I counted 103 names on the list of employees at the Journal website.  This list does not seem to include the dozens if not scores of employees whose duties include printing, distributing, and delivering the paper, publishing the online version of the paper, cleaning the facilities, providing security, and so on.  Even if those employed by the Journal numbered only 103, the small number of Administrative and/or Opinion staff represent a mere 5.8% or 3.8% of those employed by “the newspaper,” hardly a majority or even a meaningful minority.  

          I urge the Editorial Board of the Journal to bear in mind the above points the next time they choose to minimize and marginalize the voices and opinions of large, medium, or small groups of teachers who have no problems with transparency, accountability, and courageous self-representation while engaging in peaceful, public events designed to draw attention to injustices endemic in our public education system.

Road Warrior

Note:  D'Val Westphal is an assistant editor and columnist for the Albuquerque Journal.  She is best known as The Road Warrior, a monicker she adopted for a column she writes about road conditions in the city.  After the departure of Leslie Linthicum, a front page columnist whose tastes and perspectives were often diametrically opposed to Westphal's, she (Westphal) was promoted to the front page and began writing about topics that had little to due with potholes, orange barrels, and traffic jams.  One of those topics was education.  The e-mail below was written in response to articles she wrote in March and May of 2015.  The most recent article was about a middle school teacher who was retiring in disgust due to irresponsible and misguided school "reforms" that Ms. Westphal supports.  The article appeared on the front page on the last day of the school year.  

Hello D’Val:

I wrote to you last week after your article on [retiring middle school teacher] was published.  My e-mail was returned, so I thought I would write to you again.

After reading the article, I called Ellen Hur to see if she was really a teacher, as you state in your article.  As it turns out, she is not.  She was a teacher from 2001-2004 in a private school in Colorado.  She never made it past what in NM is considered beginner, probationary teacher status.  I don’t believe she is certified to teach in New Mexico.  She was never subject to the punitive regulations of NCLB or RTTT and was never evaluated by NMTeach or anything like it.  She has a masters degree in education, but she also has an MBA, the latter likely being the degree that got her the job at the NMPED.  She is a product of Michelle Rhee’s TNTP, a right wing group that promotes private and charter schools, fast-track teacher certification, and other practices antithetical to public education in the U.S.  She also worked for McKinsey & Co., a global financial management company for which David Coleman, principal author of the Common Core ELA standards, also worked.  Coleman is associated with some of the most destructive elements of the “reform” movement, including invalid and excessive high stakes testing, teacher evaluations linked to that testing, school privatization efforts, the PARCC consortium, and so on.  

I inform you of this because I believe your statement that she is “also a teacher” is disingenuous, misleading, and deceptive, at best.  Instead of referring to her as something she is not, perhaps to lend her credibility she does not have, an accomplished journalist of your stature should have taken five minutes to investigate her background and include what you found in her story.  Five minutes is all it took me to discover the information above.  If you had done that, you could have presented a more honest portrayal of Ms. Hur to your readers.  

After your story was published, [retiring middle school teacher] wrote me an unsolicited e-mail.  In that e-mail he made it clear that he felt you twisted his story in such a way as to make him and other teachers appear less favorable and the PED to appear more favorable to your readers.  He stated that he had written a letter to the editor in which he was critical of NMTeach.  Instead of publishing his letter, the Journal decided to do a story on him that essentially turned his critique of the system into a validation of it.  He was not happy about it, and I don’t blame him.

In addition to telling the truth about Ms. Hur’s credentials, I believe it is incumbent upon you to tell the truth about your own credentials, especially as they concern the field of education.  You are known in Albuquerque as “The Road Warrior,” a self proclaimed expert on road conditions and traffic issues.  Indeed, over the years you have earned some credibility in that area.  However, your lack of credibility in the area of education becomes more evident with every column you write.  

This was perhaps most evident in the column you wrote for the March 13, 2015 edition of the Journal.  For that column, you cherry-picked letters written in English to the PED by Santa Fe high school students.  It seemed to me and many other bilingual educators that many of the student letters you chose were written by English language learners.  They therefore contained errors the students may not have made had their first language been English.  To many of your readers it was apparent you used your position and power to publicly humiliate these students and their parents.  Could you write as well in Spanish?  Other educators and I considered the publication of these selected letters a malicious attempt to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of New Mexico teachers and to make fun of hard working students even as they demonstrated through their letters their desire to be educated.  In their letters they made it clear that excessive testing, not their teachers, was impeding their access to a quality education.  

In an e-mail to me recently, Mr. Walz stated that the Journal editorial board was not anti-teacher; it was pro student.  What you did to these students and their teachers makes a mockery of his assertion. 

Furthermore, I would be interested in knowing if you obtained the student letters from the PED by means of a FOIA or IPRA request?  If so, would you please send me copies of the correspondences between you and the PED in which you requested the students' letters?  How many student letters did you obtain and read?  What were the criteria you used to select letters to critique and publish in your column?  Did you contact the students whose letters you reproduced in the article?  If so, what sorts of questions did you ask them?  Did you ask their consent to publicly display their letters in your newspaper?  

Finally, I urge you to issue a correction or retraction regarding your portrayal of Ms. Hur as well and [retiring middle school teacher] in the May 22 article.  I requested as much of Mr. Walz over the Memorial Day weekend.  He stated that no correction or retraction was in order.  Since you are a member of the editorial staff and must therefore bow to his authority, I doubt you can overrule him.  Nonetheless, he did promise me you would respond to me as soon as you returned from your vacation.

I await that response.

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.