No Miracle in Texas

Someone’s got the money, and it isn’t public schools. We’ve all heard about state budget shortfalls and their impact: teachers, school nurses, and librarians losing their jobs, arts programs and physical education eliminated. It’s terrible, I know. It gets worse. I was skimming through the Daily Kos earlier this month when I came across a post by Laura Clawson (see 9/12/11). She wants to know why education reform groups aren’t fighting to help fund the schools, instead of raising and spending millions of dollars to finance their own reform agenda. (testing, data analysis, getting rid of ineffective teachers, etc.) Wouldn’t it be better to spend money giving schools and teachers the resources they need?

Consider this: in one school district in Texas, teachers didn’t lose their jobs, the custodians did. So the teachers in high school and middle school classrooms have to clean their own classrooms within fifteen minutes of dismissal. If it’s not done, “room numbers will be logged and reported to respective principals.” Forget about putting children first. If a student comes in while the teacher is cleaning, he or she has to either refuse the student, or risk being reported. These are the choices schools districts are forced to make, between clean classrooms and attention to kids.

How would we feel if Bill Gates was expected to clean the boardroom? Can he add that to his schedule and still be an effective leader? What if Obama had to dust the Oval Office, or congressional leaders had to empty the trash? If they didn’t finish by the end of the day, they could be reported to Fox News and CNN! Elected officials can make sacrifices too. Let’s get rid of their cooks, drivers, secretaries, and cleaning people if saving money and balanced budgets are so important.

Think about this: what if a surgeon also had to clean the operating room? Would you trust her to focus on you, and not be distracted by how long it would take to clean up the mess afterwards? What if museum curators also mowed the lawns and clipped the shrubs, or senior corporate managers cleaned out the department refrigerator and the coffee pot? How would we feel about this any place else? We would be outraged! So why would we expect this of teachers? 
          I called my friend Jan in Texas. She wasn’t surprised. “I’ve been cleaning the bathroom in my class for the past five years!”

“You have? Why?”

“The custodian refuses to do it. I’m dealing with five year olds here, and they make a mess. It’s just the way it is. If water is on the floor and a child falls, I’m in trouble. Susan, the literacy coach, walked in last week when I was wiping the floor. She told me to stop because I was wasting instructional time! I tried to explain but they don’t really listen…”

 So I started to say something, and then I thought, wait a minute. Teachers and aides have lost their jobs, but her campus has coaches? Where does the money come from for that? This is a consistently high performing school, yet Jan spends her money for toilet paper, because the teachers are told they use too much, for themselves and for the children. My God!

This morning she sent me an article in Texas Monthly by Mimi Swartz, a fascinating look at the Houston Independent School District. The superintendent has plenty of money for his personal agenda, even during a time of severe budget shortfalls and massive spending cuts at schools.

Terry Grier, the top dog in HISD since August 2009, brought in consultants from around the country to “assess everything from curriculum to hiring practices”. Yet there are schools within the district that don’t have textbooks! He also spent $269,000 to study the district’s magnet program. The magnet programs are a shining light in HISD since schools are able to offer specialized classes (fine arts, technology, math and science, foreign languages, and gifted and talented enrichment) to students across the community. Kids can apply and attend schools that speak to their talents and interests. However, Grier needed justification to slash funds, and the study produced the results he wanted.  Magnet programs, and the bus routes to get students to these schools, should be dropped to save money and improve neighborhood schools. Luckily, parents fought him, and the programs are still in place, at least for the current school year.

In August 2010, Grier fought for and implemented a “data-driven instruction” program dubbed Apollo 20. The idea is to bring intense assistance to four high schools and five middle schools in a three-year experiment to help turn these schools around. Not a problem right? Except for the cost: $19 to 26 million. And what about other deprived students in other neighborhoods in Houston? What about ProjectGrad, a similar program already in place? Grier also promised he wouldn’t use the district’s general fund, but he did because he couldn’t get enough from the feds and the local business community. All of this to fatten his resume! Schools and teachers and children have to pay the price for someone looking toward his next job!

How’s this for heartbreaking: The school board voted to pay large bonuses to principals who agreed to work in Apollo schools if performance goals were met. After four months, Grier wanted the board (November 2010) to approve a new formula allowing the program’s principals to include the bonus amounts in their retirement calculations. A teacher, a master teacher, got up to speak. He talked about how teachers’ salaries had been frozen the summer before. With the state budget in crises (legislators eventually cut $4 billion from education, even though they had $9 billion dollars in a “rainy day fund”) and more teacher layoffs predicted, he and his wife could not afford the 25% increase in their health insurance. He thought the money should be put toward teachers’ salaries instead. “You’re screaming poverty, and on the other hand, you’re paying forty-five-thousand-dollar bonuses, a starting teacher’s pay, to principals.” The measure passed.

I don’t really know what else to say. I think a quote from the comments section of the Daily Kos says it all: “The ‘reformers’ aren’t serious about improving the quality of schools and teachers. They are just using the issue to bash teachers, gut school funding, and destroy teachers’ unions. It will end with the complete demise of public education.”