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| "Charters run like a business - and business doesn't always have a heart," says Dixie Johansen, a fourth-grade teacher at Green Oaks Elementary School and past president of Ravenswood Teachers Association. |
The campaign to dismantle public education has already adversely affected students and teachers in some communities, say CTA members who have experienced the impact.
Privatization has already taken hold in East Palo Alto via several charter schools, severely impacting the Ravenswood City School District — a Program Improvement district that was recently targeted for severe sanctions by the governor.
“The district’s main source of revenue is state money, and an influx of charter schools is siphoning off what little the state gives us,” says Dixie Johansen, a fourth-grade teacher at Green Oaks Elementary School and past president of the Ravenswood Teachers Association.
“East Palo Alto is a low-income community with a large percentage of English learners. Private companies tell us, ‘We can do a better job.’ But when they take over our schools, they don’t do a better job. And it makes districts that are already poor hurt even worse, because it takes away money from the students of greatest need. Our district even has to pay transportation costs to take children to privatized charter schools.”
Charter schools pick and choose students, and tend to take the cream of the crop in her community, observes Johansen.
“The bottom line of privatized education is money. And the bottom line of public education is students, and how to move them up and improve their lives. It’s not right to look at things in terms of profit and loss when you’re dealing with human beings.”
Attacking teacher unions is another tool heavily used by these privateers.
Camille Zombro, president of the San Diego Education Association, describes the attack as nothing less than relentless.
“Enemies of education kept on hammering and hammering their message until people moved toward their way of thinking. If anybody had told me 20 years ago that Title I money would be used to support private tutoring centers and that in San Diego, 40 charter schools would be operating in the district with 10 percent of our student population, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
Zombro blames Alan Bersin, former San Diego Unified School District superintendent, who attempted to polarize parents and the community against teachers with anti-union rhetoric.
“For example, he sought to eliminate all transfer rights of teachers. We refused, and so he turned around and said that schools had to become charter schools and that it was our fault, because we were not willing to budge on our contract. Had we done what he wanted, we would have been denying the most basic rights to hundreds of our own members.”
“They then created a distorted ‘mystique’ about teacher unions that is far from the truth,” Zombro continues. “The mystique is that we block reform and that we teachers are in it for ourselves and not for children. So people blame the union, when in reality all we are doing is representing the working conditions of teachers, which means better conditions for students.”
In fact, studies show that unionized teachers have a positive impact on student learning. A 2005 Harvard Graduate School of Education study found that collective bargaining for teachers led to higher teacher salaries, which help attract and retain high-quality teachers; lower class sizes; and more professional development and preparatory time for teachers, which improve learning conditions for students.
A second study released by Stanford University in 2007 shows that union contracts help attract credentialed teachers to lower-performing schools.
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| Burbank Teachers Association member Kim Allender puts some energy behind his lesson at Miller Elementary School. |
Smear campaigns can alter the perception of teachers, their unions and public schools in terms of how they are portrayed in local and national media.
Says Zombro, “We had a whole news crew in San Diego for ‘The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer’ that was supposed to be about Program Improvement schools [schools facing sanctions under No Child Left Behind]. They interviewed me for hours. But they came in with the premise that charter schools are better than regular schools. They profiled how great the charters were versus the other schools and had sound bites of Alan Bersin blaming the union for problems in the other schools. During the interview I refuted every single point they made and contradicted the story they wanted to tell. And I ended up on the cutting-room floor.”
In all school districts the crusade to portray public schools as failing has, to some extent, been successful, says Kim Allender, a teacher at Miller Elementary School in Burbank.
He points to excessive testing, unrealistic academic content standards, endless assessment and paperwork, “teacher-proof” scripted instruction, state and federal money for hiring private consultants, and a high school exit exam that tests special education students.
It is, says Allender, tantamount to “programmed failure” for schools.
Schools have come under attack since A Nation at Risk was published during the Reagan administration, says Allender, paving the way for other “flawed research” such as the National Reading Panel’s report, which served as a stepping stone for the ultimate accountability measure: NCLB.
Attacking public education wasn’t always the norm, recalls Allender, a member of the Burbank Teachers Association who has written about the attack on public education in his chapter newsletter.
Until the last 25 years or so, public schools were considered one of the great institutions in America.
By providing education to all children, public schools were considered a means of achieving the American dream for rich and poor alike.
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| Students listen up in Dixie Johansen’s class at Green Oaks Elementary in East Palo Alto. |
“When public education fails, what will take its place?” asks Allender.
"Will it be the free market system? And if so, will it work better than the privatization of health care? I don’t think so.”
