Unfortunately, Goldy, your post title riff is on Max Weber, not Adam Smith. Perhaps you've read little of the work of either.

@1. Hmm. Hadn't occurred to me that one would read a connection between the headline and the Adam Smith reference. Actually, hadn't occurred to me that most people would get the Weber thing in the headline.

Linus was quite disillusioned when he found out that Miss Othmar drew a salary; he thought she was a teacher for love of the job.

Adam Smith warned us about the Merchants and their govt lackeys subsidizing inefficiency

1.9% is probably a grand, total, for most teachers. they'll live. i did, with far larger cuts.

this state has a structural revenue problem, to say the least.

Wow, the teacher's union is doing a bang up job protecting it's membership.

What's their slogan? "Without us it could have been worse!" Now that's a slogan to really get the membership excited for more!

@3, Yeah, I've had people tell me that we should be getting teachers who teach for the love of the job because they're better teachers. I agree, let's hire all of the people who will teach for the sheer love of teaching. After we've hired all of them we'll have to start paying more to fill the other 98% of the teaching positions.

Considering how many teachers I've known that have had to go on government assistance to pay for their rent or food stamps to feed their children (I know at least 3 teachers who right now are on food stamps to feed their children because teaching doesn't pay enough to survive) I think that maybe reducing teacher pay will not do anything good to our children's educational experience.

We will get what we pay for. It makes me sad to see the things we, as a society, value (hedge fund managers) and don't value (our children's teachers) as is evidenced by where we send our money.

I'm just going to teach 1.9% less.

Seriously though, I have no problem with the pay cut, i just wish everyone shared the burden. It's time to stop with the bullshit temporary budget patches (candy taxes, income tax on top earners) and fix our backwards ass tax system.

Modern capitalists obviously don't understand capitalism.

Even capitalist dickhead-supreme Henry Fucking Ford knew that you have to pay workers high wages if you actually want to produce something better than a steaming pile of dogshit.

So how is Obama on our side?

Teacher Adam Sanchez wants to know why his union endorsed Barack Obama.

May 23, 2011

IN A huge step forward for the labor movement, the International Association of Fire Fighters announced in April that it would suspend contributions to federal Democratic candidates [1] out of frustration with the party's lackluster fight against budget cuts and antiunion legislation.

When you look at budget fights from California to Oregon [2], from Illinois [3] to New York [4], from Massachusetts [5] to Washington D.C. [6], it should be apparent that not only are Democrats refusing to fight, but they are taking an active role in pushing austerity. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely the rest of the labor movement will follow the firefighters example.

I am a high school social studies teacher and a member of the National Education Association (NEA), the largest union in the United States. In 2008, the NEA spent more money and had more of our members working on the Obama presidential campaign than any other union. So it should be no surprise that on May 5, the NEA Political Action Committee voted to recommend endorsing Obama for reelection in 2012. The membership will be voting on this recommendation at the NEA Representative Assembly meeting in July.

In announcing the recommendation, NEA President Dennis van Roekel asked:

Will we allow Congress to gut Medicare, slash education and cut Social Security, and continue to make it just fine for hedge fund managers and corporations to sidestep paying taxes?...It is time to stand strong for what we believe in and what is right for students and families, schools and the nation. President Barack Obama has proven he deserves a second term."

Did I miss something? How does defending Medicare, education and Social Security and wanting corporations and hedge funds to pay taxes lead to a vote for Barack Obama?

Obama just helped to pass the biggest single-year budget cut in history--$38.5 billion--much of which came from education, labor and health care programs. These cuts will devastate low-income communities across the country. They include cutting $390 million from a program that provides heating assistance for low-income people and $600 million from community health clinics. Another cut ends Pell grants, which provide financial aid for college students, during summer school. Another eliminates $3 billion in bonuses to states that have increased the enrollment of uninsured children in Medicaid.

Obama has also proposed a plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 12 years, largely through more cuts to essential services. As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out [7], this plan includes $360 million in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. How exactly is supporting a President who is championing cuts to Medicare and Social Security preventing those programs from being gutted? And how is endorsing a President who proposes draconian cuts to programs that help the most vulnerable standing strong for students, families and schools?

What about taxing corporations and hedge funds? While it's true that in a recent speech Obama promised to end the tax loopholes for corporations, at the same time, he proposed to lower the already absurdly low corporate tax rate from 35 percent to less than 30 percent and possibly as low as 26 percent. These proposals come at a time when U.S. corporations are making record profits [8]. Furthermore, why should we believe that Obama would actually close the loopholes when he has a long track record of breaking promises that would benefit ordinary people and not billionaires [9]?

Additionally, there is no evidence to indicate the Obama administration has any desire to curb the extravagant profits of hedge funds. Along with the NEA, hedge-fund managers were huge donors to Obama's campaign in 2008 [10]. In fact, Wall Street donated $10 to Obama for every $7 they gave to McCain. And while the hedge fund titans may be giving more to the GOP in 2012 [11], you can bet they'll also have plenty of cash left over for the "world's second most enthusiastic capitalist party." [12]

Unlike the NEA, Wall Street actually gets something for the money they spend on elections. The bailouts and the array of programs Barack Obama and his economic advisers continued or concocted as the first priority of their administration amounted to the largest transfer of wealth in U.S. history from taxpayers to Wall Street. Back when the Democrats had complete control of Congress (since it seems like we're trying to forget that they still control the Senate), they passed a financial "reform" bill that does nothing to prevent banks from making the same risky decisions [13] that led to the financial meltdown and subsequent bailout.

What should be apparent is that if we want to prevent politicians from gutting Medicare, slashing education and cutting Social Security, if we want them to change the regressive corporate and income tax structure and bail out Main Street rather than Wall Street, we will need a much better strategy than simply reelecting Obama and a Democratic Congress in 2012.

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IN ADDITION to these backwards priorities, Obama has presided over some of the harshest attacks on public education in decades. As education scholar Diane Ravitch has pointed out [14], when it comes to education, Obama's presidency has been like Bush's third term.

In fact, Obama's Race to the Top program [15], which asks states to compete for a limited pool of cash, is a neoliberal privatization scheme Bush probably wishes he had come up with. It dangles money in front of cash-starved state governments and only lets go if they end restrictions on charter schools (almost all of which are non-union) and tie teachers' pay to students' standardized test scores.

Arne Duncan, Obama's pick for Secretary of Education, made a name for himself in Chicago [16] by pushing the corporate agenda and privatizing schools at a rate of about 20 per year. As Secretary of Education, he has touted the wholesale privatization of public schools and the breaking of the teachers' union after Hurricane Katrina as "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans." He applauded, along with Obama, the firing of every single teacher at Central Falls, a high poverty high school in Rhode Island [17]. And he has backed the most power-hungry, teacher-hating administrators, like Robert Bobb, who has helped push the Detroit public school system to the brink of financial collapse and is now asking teachers and students to pay the price [18].

Duncan has partnered with the most influential pro-corporate foundations--the Gates and Broad Foundations in particular--in crafting his business plan for America's schools. As Joanne Barkan reports:

Duncan's first chief of staff, Margot Rogers, came from [The Gates Foundation]; her replacement as of June 2010, Joanne Weiss, came from a major Gates grantee, the New Schools Venture Fund; Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali has worked at Broad, LA Unified School District and the Gates-funded Education Trust; general counsel Charles P. Rose was a founding board member of another major Gates grantee, Advance Illinois; and Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement James Shelton has worked at both Gates and the New Schools Venture Fund. Duncan himself served on the board of directors of Broad's education division until February 2009 (as did former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers).

It is for all these reasons that when Duncan tried to show his "appreciation" for teachers in an open letter [19] praising our hard work, many teachers were appalled at the gap between his words and his actions. Teacher [20] after teacher [21] after teacher [22] after teacher [23] after teacher [24] after teacher [25] wrote brilliant, sarcastic and condemning letters in response. As Ravitch acutely observed [26], "Teachers reacted to the letter with outrage, as if it were addressed to the turkey community on Thanksgiving Day."

At the very least, the NEA should listen to the voices of teachers across the country and refuse to support Obama's reelection campaign until Arne Duncan and his corporate cronies are fired.

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YET I think the most compelling reason not to support Obama is the enormous struggle that erupted in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker's attack on public-sector unions.

Sparked by a teacher sickout in the capital of Madison that spread to other schools across the state, unionists, students and non-unionized workers occupied the Capitol for nearly a month. Not by electing Democrats, but by marching, by occupying the Capitol, by refusing to go to work, by building solidarity, Wisconsinites were able to shift the national conversation away from blaming public-sector workers. In doing so, they received support from workers across the country and around the world.

But the uprising in Wisconsin didn't just change the political climate, it changed people. As ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher Ann Marchant explained about her changing work environment in Stevens Point, Wis. [27]: "The big difference I've seen is in the community of the school. We have been marching in front of the school together every day for four weeks. I feel like I live in a community now instead of a bubble."

As many teachers and students, including myself [28], reported after visiting Madison during the uprising, you could learn more by participating in a few days of struggle at the capitol than years of schooling would teach you. New York City public school counselor Leia Petty described the atmosphere many of us observed in Madison [29]: "The sense of pride and dignity has returned to many who have never felt it in their life: proud to be union, proud to be a worker, proud to be standing up and knowing you're not in this fight alone."

All of this was accomplished with only vague and tepid comments of support from the Obama administration. Obama never visited Wisconsin during the protests despite having promised on the campaign trail to walk the picket line with workers [30] if collective bargaining rights were ever under attack.

What the relentless corporate assault during Obama's presidency has made clear is that we are in a fight for the very survival of public schools. In the last 12 months, nearly 100,000 public education jobs have been eliminated [31]. It's time to stop throwing away our money, time, and energy for candidates who turn around and attack us once they're in office. It's time to build a new political strategy for the labor movement--to draw our line in the sand.

If NEA President Dennis Van Roekel's statement of support for Obama reveals the inadequacy of labor's past, Wisconsin shows us the way forward. Rather than spending millions of dollars in union dues trying to counterbalance the massive sums of money Obama will be receiving from Wall Street, we should be using that money to hire laid off teachers as organizers. Rather than encouraging NEA members to spend countless hours phone banking and canvassing for Obama, we should be convincing them to initiate and help organize Wisconsin-style protests around the country.

I'm sick of watching the sinking ship that is organized labor desperately try to rearrange the deck chairs...and I don't think I'm alone.

First published at Schooling in Capitalist America [32].

"Egypt moment" for education

Brian Jones looks at those pressing for education "reform" and why their drive for charter schools is really about attacking teachers' living standards.

February 24, 2011

THOSE WHO favor the current wave of education "reform" like to dress themselves in the robes of the civil rights movement. In a previous article [2], I questioned the validity of their logic. Now they've taken to the struggle underway in Egypt.

Unfortunately, it seems that no freedom movement--no matter how diametrically opposed to their agenda--is safe from association with these people.

Former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein recently appeared at Teach for America's 20th anniversary celebration [3]. He asked the attendees, "Is this our Egypt moment?"

This was a rhetorical question. But the answer is "No."

The people of Egypt aren't just fighting for "change." They want democracy, independent unions and an expanded public sector. Meanwhile, the billionaires behind education "reform" (and their hired lieutenants, like Klein) are fighting against democracy, against unions and to privatize the public sector.

But Klein, oblivious to this extreme irony, continued: "Will we seize the moment? We will talk to each other and go home. I challenge this group to seize the moment."

Seize the moment and do what?

Egyptians overthrew a dictator and are pressing for a democratic government. They want to have a say in public affairs. As chancellor, Mr. Klein fought for less democracy in the governance of schools--for unqualified mayoral control (dare we say, "dictatorship") of education, in fact.

In New York, the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) officially makes decisions--but it is stacked with mayoral appointees who are summarily dismissed if they vote the "wrong" way. The public can offer testimony to the PEP all night (and have been known to do so until the next morning), but like every Egyptian election for the past 30 years, the outcome is never in doubt.

Furthermore, if the billionaires behind the "reform" efforts were really so democratic-minded, they would allow their wealth to be taxed. Then there could be a public, democratic discussion about how best to use it. Instead, their largesse comes with tremendous strings--privatization, charter schools, high stakes tests--that effectively determine education policy while bypassing any kind of democratic process.

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THE WORKING people of Egypt are demanding independent unions [4]. As I write these words, several strikes are in progress across the country with this central demand. And the fact that Mubarak finally stepped down at the very moment that strike activity began in earnest is not lost on many commentators.

Mr. Klein, and his co-thinkers, meanwhile, have a distinctly anti-union bent to their "movement." They have targeted teacher unions as the primary obstacle to progress in education. Their faith in this view is not shaken by the fact that non-union schools (such as those in the southern United States) are consistently outperformed by unionized ones [5]. Their biggest propaganda effort, the film, Waiting for "Superman", pointed to Finland as a model of educational progress, but forgot to mention that Finnish teachers are 98 percent unionized.

Many Egyptians want to expand the public sector. They feel that Mubarak's free-market oriented, neoliberal economic policies have destroyed their standard of living, and so they prefer to concentrate their resources in the service of people than of profit. As chancellor, Mr. Klein fought openly for privatization. He famously advised Americans to stop thinking of education as a monopoly and to start thinking of it as a "business." Charter school CEO Eva Moskowitz said of Klein, "If you're the U.S. Postal Service, you don't exactly embrace FedEx, but this chancellor has done that."

Today, Mr. Klein is the CEO of News Corp.'s education division, so he is seizing the moment to fight specifically for Rupert Murdoch's slice of the education market.

Some of us have long insisted that democracy could never come to the Middle East through bunker busting bombs. Rather, we argued that democracy comes from below--from the efforts of ordinary people to organize themselves to win a better life. The events in Tunisia, Egypt and now several other countries (including Iraq!) are a massive confirmation of that view.

Likewise, we have long treated with suspicion "movements" of the wealthy to fight for school "reform" (however benevolent sounding). Instead, we believe that schools will only improve when parents, teachers and students are given greater power and control over the educational process.

In our view, the real "Egypt" moment in education is happening right now in Madison, Wisconsin. There, teachers, students and parents are linking arms in the tens of thousands to defend (yes, defend!) collective bargaining. Camped out in virtually every square inch of the capital building, the protestors chant, "This is what democracy looks like!" and "What's disgusting? Union busting!"

Homemade placards are filled with references to the struggle in Egypt. "March like an Egyptian" and "One dictator down, one to go" have been popular.

Now, perhaps I will be accused of trying to "use" Egypt in the same way that Klein is, if only for the other side. To that potential accusation, I respond: let the people of Egypt decide who their allies are.

The other day I saw a remarkable picture of Egyptian workers on strike and marching [6]--in defiance of a military ban. Fighting for their lives, with the whole world watching, one of their number is holding up a sign that reads: "Egypt supports Wisconsin workers. One world, one pain."

I've also just learned that someone in Egypt called up a local Madison pizza shop to order pies for the protesters in the capital building [7]. Solidarity is delicious!

Make no mistake. For those of us who are determined to defend public education, this is our Egypt moment. Let's follow our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin and seize it.

First published at the Huffington Post [8].

The other name for school "reform"

When Karl Marx described the despotism of the modern workplace, he could have been describing schools in the era of education "reform."

February 2, 2011

FORMER NEW York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein recently compared teacher pensions to a Ponzi scheme, siphoning precious money from students. "Children currently in our schools," Klein wrote in the Wall Street Journal [2], "as well as future students, will be high among those paying the price."

And yet, after only eight years of work, and just before he published the above critique, Klein cashed in his own pension [3]: $33,000 a year for the rest of his life. Hypocrisy, thy name is Joel.

But in truth, the former chancellor is just a servant. Today's education "reform" really originates with a group of billionaires. Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton Family (owners of Wal-Mart) have decided that the number of zeroes in their bank accounts qualifies them to remake the nation's schools in their own image.

As Joanne Barkan's research shows [4], all those zeroes buy a lot of press, a lot of "research" and a lot of energy spent to promote free-market oriented "solutions" for the schools. So it's no surprise that the latest buzzwords in education (especially "data," "accountability" and even "value-added") are recognizable as yesteryear's corporate-speak.

Teachers, parents and their allies have called these trends out under various titles: privatization, deregulation or neoliberalism. But 160 years ago, an educator (by avocation, not profession) gave it another name: capitalism.

If today's educational "wisdom" is a product of capitalism, then perhaps it's time for teachers to investigate the ideas of the man who subjected that system to rigorous examination: Karl Marx.

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EDUCATION HISTORIAN Diane Ravitch calls Gates, Broad and their ilk the "Billionaire Boys Club." Marx called them "the bourgeoisie."

Whereas the kings and queens of yesteryear lived and ruled on the basis of tradition, the bourgeoisie embodied a much more restless social system. "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products," wrote Marx in The Communist Manifesto, "chase the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere."

So we shouldn't be surprised to find this set drooling over the prospect of "nestling" in the public sector, particularly the K-12 education "market." As Jonathan Kozol wrote in Harper's [5]:

Some years ago, a friend who works on Wall Street handed me a stock-market prospectus in which a group of analysts at an investment-banking firm known as Montgomery Securities described the financial benefits to be derived from privatizing our public schools.

"The education industry," according to these analysts, "represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control" that "have either voluntarily opened" or, they note in pointed terms, have "been forced" to open up to private enterprise.

Indeed, they write, "the education industry represents the largest market opportunity" since health care services were privatized during the 1970s...From the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, "the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada."

It is precisely for the purpose of helping Rupert Murdoch to his bite of the education "enchilada" that Joel Klein slid easily from the chancellor's chair to his new role as CEO of News Corp.'s educational division.

But what of the teachers? Aren't they more "professional" than "proletarian"?

"The bourgeoisie," Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto, "has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers."

After 2010, we must add to the list of halo-stripped occupations: the teacher.

As critics of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation, and of Barack Obama's version ("Race to the Top"), have so clearly articulated, the trend toward higher stakes testing and other "accountability" measures inevitably narrows the curriculum, increasingly threatens any sense of the intrinsic joy of learning and stifles the development of creativity and critical thinking (which is precisely why schools for the wealthy avoid the mandates like the plague).

After a long day of jumping through various "accountability" hoops, a co-worker of mine's lament reminded me of Marx: "It's a sad thing when you turn teaching into just a 'job', but that's what they're making it," she told me. "They're taking the heart out of it."

"The bourgeoisie," Marx noted, "cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society."

In those words, Marx put his finger on precisely what's happening in education--the relationship between teacher and student is being revolutionized. The student is, increasingly, evaluated not by the human being he or she speaks to every day, but by a harried, low-wage test scorer (sometimes hundreds of miles away) paid per test or worse, by a machine that scans the student's bubble sheet.

From distance grading, it is only a short step to distance learning. We're not just talking about streaming lectures and virtual classrooms, but even teacher robots! [6] For those flesh-and-blood teachers who remain, there is a distinct feeling that we are forging our own metaphorical chains.

Think about the drive to promote mayoral control of schools to destroy teachers' unions, the pressure to teach to standardized tests and the growing problem of micromanagement as you read Marx's 160-year-old description of the changing nature of work:

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants.

Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

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OF COURSE, that's not the end of the story. Marx didn't just describe despotism of the modern workplace. He saw the potential of the workers to do something about it:

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men [and we should add: women] who are to wield those weapons--the modern working class--the proletarians.

The embittering assault on public education has created a response. All over the country, education workers are discussing these "reforms" on their lunch breaks, are writing articles and blogging, organizing conferences, pickets and protests.

But if capitalism is the problem, what are we to make of Marx's alternative? "Communism" has come to mean command economies run by a bureaucratic state machine. But for Marx, it meant something altogether different.

Marx imagined a world where the workplace was organized and run, not as a "perfect hierarchy" but as a democratic, cooperative enterprise. "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms," he wrote, "we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

Imagine schools run and controlled, not by billionaires, distant bureaucrats and magazine publishers, but by teachers, parents and students. Instead of "enslaved by the machine," teachers would be co-managers of their own workplaces. In isolation, this would mean only limited progress. But imagine that every workplace was organized this way, and the Pentagon's budget was at our collective fingertips.

It boils down to this: things would be better if they were run by us, not by them. Not because we're better people (although you could make that case), but because we actually do the work--we don't have anyone to oppress or exploit.

"All previous historical movements were movements of minorities," Marx argued, "or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority."

That's a simple idea, but a dangerous one. Teachers of the world, unite!

Answer No. 1: Stop scapegoating teachers

September 27, 2010

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As part of its "Education Nation" summit, NBC invited New York City teacher Brian Jones to participate in a panel discussion on the future of the teaching profession. Joining him on the panel are Michelle Rhee, the Schools Chancellor of Washington, D.C.; Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone Project, a network of charter schools; Allan Golston, president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association; and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

The title of the panel is "Good Apples: How do we keep good teachers, throw out bad ones and put a new shine on the profession?" The discussion will stream live at MSNBC.com [2] today at 4:45 p.m. (Eastern time).

First, though, Brian has a few thoughts to share before the bell rings.

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I DON'T know how much time I'll actually have to say what I need to say. So what follows is what I would like to say--if I get the chance--this afternoon.

Cue fireworks.

How do we keep the good teachers?

The first thing we need to do is to stop vilifying teachers. Much of what passes for "reform" nowadays is really just a way to attack teachers. Even the blurb I received about the discussion on NBC begins with the following claims:

Research and school-based evidence around the country now confirms that the most important variable affecting the success of the student is the effectiveness of the teacher, and the second most important variable is the effectiveness of the principal. Those two factors far outweigh the socioeconomic status, the impact of parental involvement or class size.

Really? Teacher effectiveness outweighs socioeconomic status? Behind words that sound like they praise teachers and extol our importance lies a line of argument that essentially scapegoats teachers.

Hunger and homelessness are less important than the quality of the teacher? We're living in a moment of mass immiseration. Millions are unemployed. Millions are facing foreclosure. Whole blocks and neighborhoods and communities are being destroyed.

Yet the very people who created this mess--the speculators, the bankers, the hedge fund managers--are the very people who, we're led to believe, are to be the saviors of education! And instead of talking about creating jobs or lifting people out of poverty, they want us to believe that teachers should accomplish those tasks. It's hardly fair. But I digress.

So: How do we keep good teachers?

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LET'S START by acknowledging that we should keep teachers. By my count, at least three of our panelists today represent the view that schools are best staffed by a perpetually rotating crop of new teachers.

From a business perspective, this makes perfect sense. After all, newer teachers are cheaper teachers. But this logic spells disaster for education.

As education historian Diane Ravitch put it to me: "Would you want to be treated at a hospital staffed entirely by interns and residents?" Of course not. Rather than make teaching into a job that you do for two or three years on the way to law school--or becoming chancellor--I think our kids are worth the expense that is necessary to retain experienced teachers, especially in schools where the need is greatest.

To develop and promote great teaching, we should look at models where great teaching is going on. I think that means, by and large, that we should not be looking at charter schools. For one thing, nationwide, charter schools have a 132 percent higher teacher turnover rate than public schools--that's according to a study performed by Columbia University's Teachers College. Charter schools, by and large, are not training master teachers.

The second reason is that the vast majority of charter schools are not outperforming public schools. I know most people would find that shocking to learn, if it would ever get reported. The most comprehensive and rigorous studies--I'm thinking here of several performed by Stanford University--show that only a small percentage of charter schools outperform public schools.

But charter schools have a hype machine that is greatly disproportionate to their actual merits. We've seen that with the new film Waiting for Superman, which portrays all public schools as failures and all charter schools as successful. The idea that's been created in the public mind is that children who couldn't get a decent education in public school are moving to charter schools, where teachers are turning their lives around.

In my experience, however, the reality is exactly the opposite. The students who are the most successful in the public schools are moving to the charter schools, and those who have the hardest time in school--either because of behavior problems or because they are just slower learners--tend to be "counseled out" of charter schools and wind up back at a public school.

My school, PS 30 in New York City, receives such children from charter schools every year. They often arrive in the middle of winter--right before it's time to take the standardized tests by which we all increasingly live and die.

I spoke to one parent who transferred her child to PS 30 after she got the feeling that her child wasn't welcome in a charter school. This lovely child is not a behavior problem, just a slow learner. "I think they were looking for a particular type of kid," she told me. "A gifted and talented type."

This parent explained that she was really excited about the charter school at first, but when there were so many new teachers--and even new administrators--year after year, she became discouraged and eventually stopped counting.

Waiting for Superman follows four students who leave the public school system and enter a lottery for charter schools. But what about the kids who win the lottery and then lose it? What about those who are encouraged to leave charter schools? Are they waiting for Batman?

No, by and large, the people who are working to turn around the lives of the kids who are having the hardest time are teachers in the public schools. Those who are seeing the most success at that work need to be sought out and studied.

We never hear the question asked: What makes great public schools great?

I have a friend who is an excellent teacher. He used to work with me in East Harlem, and now teaches in Scarsdale, which is a wealthy suburb. He really feels like he's growing as an educator, and when I ask him why, he says it's because of the support he receives.

He doesn't face merit pay schemes of any type. In case you missed it, a comprehensive study by Vanderbilt University released this week demonstrated that merit pay has no effect on student test scores.

Rather, my friend is incentivized to develop himself as an educator. He has great financial incentive to take more classes, get more education and seek out more professional development. So the school system is making a long-term investment in him. Furthermore, he has a beautiful campus, and an abundance of resources at his disposal.

I should mention that he also has tenure and is a member of a union.

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WHICH BRINGS me to the next point--how to "get rid of the bad apples."

First off, I want to say that in the current context, this question is really a red herring. Despite what Oprah might think, teachers do not have a "job for life." Tenure means we have due process. It means we can't just be fired at a whim.

And despite what you may have heard, the fact is that not everybody gets tenure. That's another myth. Getting rid of so-called "bad teachers" is hardly the problem. Consider the fact that nearly 50 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years. The real issue is that we're not doing enough to keep great teachers.

The whole clamor about "bad teachers" is really about attacking teachers' unions and creating a view in the public mind that these unions are themselves the source of the problem. It creates an atmosphere in which teachers feel targeted, not encouraged.

My teacher friend from Scarsdale agrees. "It should be about encouraging and inspiring people," he told me, "not trying to get rid of them. You would never do that with a child." Unless, that is, you're a charter school...

Of course, teachers aren't children. But we are human beings. That means we're greatly influenced by our environment and by the conditions in which we live and work.

And of course, there are some people who really don't belong in a classroom. But that's a very tiny number of people. And it doesn't make sense to blame the union for their presence--that's a question of administration. Who hired this person? Who gave them tenure? It wasn't the union that did either.

I think unions are duty bound to insist that every employee receive due process if there's a question of competence. Frankly, I think everyone should have such due process at every job. No one should be able to be fired at the whim of a supervisor or employer.

It's quite noticeable that we don't have the same tough talk about the people at the top of the school systems. When it was revealed recently that test scores across New York City were actually dramatically lower than originally thought, there was little discussion of even the idea that the school chancellor should be held accountable.

We can have all the high-minded talk about the importance of education all day, but the bottom line here is that people in charge of running the education system are employers. Therefore, as employers, they are going to be more enthusiastic about certain proposals for reform and less enthusiastic about others. If a reform strengthens their position as employers, then it's going to be cheered. If it strengthens the position of the employee, then it's going to be dismissed.

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THIS PANEL is framed by the idea that reforms like decreasing class sizes don't matter. But that's nonsense. Of course, class size matters. At my school, we have a teacher who was temporarily assigned to our building after being "excessed" from hers. In the local lingo, she's an "ATR." For lack of another position, she wound up in my classroom.

I have eight years experience teaching, and so does she. But I also have one student who can't read. He spent last year in another country, and we suspect he didn't attend school during that time at all. He knows the alphabet, and that's it. But this excessed teacher sits with him all day, and because of her, he's learning to read. When kids are reading aloud to the class, he wants to join in.

When this teacher gets a permanent assignment and has to leave our class, I'm going to try to continue to help this student, but there's no way I can do for him what she's doing without neglecting my duty to the other students.

From a business perspective, the current setup in my classroom is very expensive. Two teachers in a general education classroom, each with eight years of experience? Unheard of. But it's very effective. It's making a huge difference, and I think we should spend the money to have that kind of setup all over the city. We really could transform kids' lives with a reform like that.

But that would mean more union members, and a stronger union, so that reform can't be considered.

Instead, New York City is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to set up merit pay schemes in just some schools. Again, these schemes are proven to have no effect on student achievement. But that doesn't matter, because merit pay is a reform that greatly strengthens the position of the employer over the employee.

Similarly, the "value-added" model, which claimed to be able to quantify the effect of a teacher on test scores, has basically been debunked as far too unsound to form the basis of any kind of policy. Yet this unproven, unscientific model for rating teachers is touted as the next great thing in education.

There's a racial dimension to these questions that can't be ignored, either. It irks me to no end to hear hedge fund managers refer to the charter school cause as the "civil rights movement of our generation." Education Secretary Arne Duncan says that Waiting for Superman is a "Rosa Parks moment."

Interestingly, Black voters in Washington, D.C. and in Harlem recently--and overwhelmingly--rejected pro-charter school candidates. That's why I think it's more appropriate to call this a Glenn Beck moment. That is, a moment when we should realize that these people are wrapping themselves in the mantle of a movement to which they bear no relation.

Dr. King once said, "The forces that are anti-Negro are by and large anti-labor." Apparently, Black voters are beginning to think that the reverse is also true.

But folks from the business world have an extremely hard time shaking off their faith in free-market principles and their hostility to unions. Evidence and research be damned.

There is more than a slight element of hypocrisy here. To hear the billionaire school reformers tell it, class size doesn't matter, resources don't matter, and experienced teachers are standing in the way of success. But when these same people spend five figures to send their kids to private schools, what do they insist on? Small classes, excellent resources and experienced teachers.

How can we make every public school a great school? Those three things--the things that the wealthy demand for their children--would be a perfect place to start.

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Columnist: Brian Jones
Brian Jones is a teacher, actor and activist in New York City. He is featured in the upcoming film The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman [3], and his commentary and writing has appeared on MSNBC.com [4], the Huffington Post [5], GritTV [6] and the International Socialist Review [7]. Jones has also lent his voice to several audiobooks, including Howard Zinn's one-man play Marx in Soho [8], Wallace Shawn's Essays [9] and Noam Chomsky's Hopes and Prospects [10].

Thank you Zepol; food for thought.

the goal is to destroy public schools across the country. it's been a conservative goal for decades. they are using the recession as a lever to do what they've wanted to do all along. and while the republicans are (and have been) leading the charge, the democrats want the same thing, just a little slower. great democracy this america.

The fallacy that this budget actually cuts teacher pay is very frustrating. Salaries are collectively bargained at the local level. School districts are going to have to bargain the effects of this funding reduction with their teachers, and in most cases these negotiations are not going to result in one less penny being paid to teachers. The cuts will come elsewhere.