A few days ago I wrote that I’d try to suspend my disbelief and cynicism regarding the education proposals in Ducey’s State of the State address until Friday when he releases some budget numbers. Couldn’t do it. The generally positive reception of his ideas in the press has left a major hole in the analysis of his speech. I wrote that I liked most of what Ducey proposed, adding there are a few exceptions, but I didn’t discuss the exceptions. Those bad ideas are either cost free or can be accomplished by rejiggering the current education budget—specifically his ideas to relax teacher certification rules and to give more money to “high achieving” schools—which means the worst of his education plans can be implemented on the cheap. It’s time to look at them more closely.
Ducey laid out something like ten separate education-related proposals in his address. That leaves the impression that he’s given the topic considerable thought and has laid out a comprehensive package of changes and reforms, but it also means he can pick and choose which items he plans to emphasize and implement. After all, who expects him to tackle all ten items during this legislative session?
While making his grandiose education proposals, Ducey said we shouldn’t expect him to spend a lot of new money on education this year.
“Now, I’m not promising a money tree. There’s no pot of gold or cash hiding under a seat cushion.”
Realistically, for him to be serious about enacting some of his most important proposals, like increasing the funding of schools, raising teacher pay and expanding full day kindergarten, the cost would begin at $100 million and move upwards toward $400-800 million. Meanwhile, most budget projections agree the governor has about $24 million in loose money to play with — the rest is accounted for—with lots of places those dollars can be spent. I suppose Ducey could free up a few more dollars with draconian cuts to other government agencies. But $100 million? $400 million? $800 million? Hardly.
We’ll find out Friday, but I suspect Ducey will put a bit of money into the big ticket items as a down payment to show he’s serious, then he’ll push less expensive items he can enact with the willing support of Republican legislators.
The cheapest proposal in the lot is relaxing teacher certification rules. Ducey suggested the state should leave it to individual districts to decide what qualifications someone needs to be hired as a teacher. That can be implemented without taking a penny from the general budget. If anything, it could save the state a few bucks. Where the line would be drawn is unclear—would a teacher need a bachelor’s degree?—but Ducey made it clear, he thinks people without a teaching credential should be allowed to teach if a school district wants them. The idea of quickie certifications, even getting rid of the necessity of certification entirely, has been a conservative dream for years. It’s a terrible, destructive proposal for public education. It de-professionalizes the teaching profession. People with little or no knowledge of teaching philosophy and practice could walk into classrooms filled with the most challenging, difficult-to-reach students. It opens up the possibility of giving non-certified teachers a lower salary. And it could further weaken Arizona’s teachers union, which works to protect both teachers and students. In other words, relaxing teacher certification plays beautifully into the conservative world view of Ducey and his anti-regulation, anti-union, anti-“government school” cohorts.
The second funding-lite item is Ducey’s proposal to increase funding for “high achieving” schools. It sounds like that would take extra money, but it doesn’t have to. All it takes is a little creative financial shuffling to give more money to those “high achievers” and less to everyone else. After all, the faulty logic goes, why reward mediocrity or failure when you can reward success? This terrible idea has been knocking around Arizona for years. It’s been repeatedly studied and condemned. You might as well substitute “high parent income” for “high achieving” since they’re generally the same thing. Schools with a state grade of “A” are concentrated in the high rent areas, as are schools with high achievers around the country and around the world. No matter how many criteria you add to grading schools, those schools will always come out on top, with a few schools in lower income districts defying the odds, though usually only for a few years before they slip out of the “high achieving” category. The result of this plan will be to spend more money on privileged students and less on those who most need the extra enrichment, adding greater educational inequality to our increasing income inequality. In virtually every other industrialized nation, the opposite is true. Extra money and resources flow to schools where students are struggling and academic achievement is below average.
Ducey’s Friday budget release may not indicate that he wants to relax teacher certification rules and increase funding for schools with students from high income families. Both of those can be introduced later since they don’t have much budgetary impact. But if he low-balls his other proposals—and given the current funding situation and his aversion to tax increases, that’s likely—watch for those ideas to sneak their way into legislation later in the session and be promoted, of course, as ways to “invest in K-12 education.”
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2017.
You are absolutely right David! Giving districts the authority to relax teacher certification will tempt some districts to follow the path of least resistance and hire non-professionals who will not contribute to increases in achievement. Teachers today are forced to deal with a multitude of harsh realities that are challenging even for certified, highly skilled and seasoned professionals Expecting those with no expertise to do the same is crazy!
…and certification makes an attempt to complete an in depth training to prepare teachers for harsh realities?
Spoken like a true union member and/or educational elitists. Nobody else could possibly be smart enough to handle the rigors of daily life.
We have a shortage of doctors in rural areas of the State. Let’s just relax regulations on doctors or allow Cochise or Mohave Counties to just write their own regulations on doctors. This will solve the shortage problem. Right, Kelli Ward? It’s similar to those who hated Common Core standards. When they were asked to specify which standard was most in error, of course none of them had ever read the damn things. So Arizona changes a couple of minor standards, slaps a new label on them and magically, Arizona Standards, none of those pointy headed standards from Obama. Works the same with doctors. What could go wrong.
You should allow a place for high achievers who will be competing in the global race. After all, they will be the ones subsidizing those who are not able to achieve.
60% of Households Now Receive More in Subsidized Income Than they Pay in Taxes – REDISTRIBUTION OF INCOME!
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-18/6…
And everyone balked at “47%”. Try 80% dependent on 20%. Do you really think that a country can achieve anything at that point?
Teacher training? They need to take a Non Violent Physical Intervention class so that a teacher knows how to handle “Special Behavioral Problem” students when she is attacked! I had such training and after retirement went back to Substitute. As a SUB (because of this training), I was required to “follow” ONE student all day long to keep him from attacking other students and teachers while holding onto my hair and scalp! Education has been reduced to this a dumping ground for parents who didn’t particularly want kids but needed the deduction!
I was with you, Frances, until you started pitching for Common Core.
Fully educated, fully professionalized teachers — the kind we should continue recruiting to staff our classrooms — do not need (and most I know do not want) a rigid straight jacket tying them to regulators’ vision of what is appropriate to teach to every same-age cohort of kids in the United States.
Ever heard of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development? You determine where a particular cohort is and gear instruction to meet that cohort where they are, taking them from point A to point B or from point B to point C. Leaping from point A to point Z is impossible and expecting it is abusive of both the teachers and the students in question. But it is exactly those kinds of leaps that are prescribed by rigid, top down, uniform standards like Common Core that are developed at a considerable distance from those on whom they will be imposed and do not acknowledge real and important differences between cohorts living in radically different circumstances throughout the US.
Children are not widgets, and their learning cannot be manufactured according to specifications determined by authorities with no direct knowledge of the characteristics of the groups in question.
“..the larger and more authoritarian an organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginative worlds.” Kenneth Boulding
The only problem, there, “yes, no,” is that these were standards, not straight jackets. And do opponents believe there should not be base information on math and science that should be universally known regardless of location? After all these ARE the base knowledge for every profession. The question I kept asking was should there be regional standards for math knowledge, biology and geology, computer science, English grammar, in a global society. The irony is that the same critics who whined about US students not competing with students in other countries then did not want universal, international standards “straitjacketed” on our students.
When I look back on my own K-12 education — which was an excellent one delivered in a blue state that, unlike AZ for the last couple of decades, BOTH funded AND oversaw public education responsibly — much of the content I learned, including physics, chemistry, trig and calc, was interesting but not needed in later life. It’s needed for people on STEM tracks, and doesn’t form a knowledge base the majority of our citizens will end up employing in their professions.
So no, there is no such thing as “base information on math and science” that forms a “base knowledge for every profession.” There is a humanistic / liberal arts base knowledge of critical thinking, reading and writing, needed for constructive citizenship in a democracy, and then there’s having the self-discipline and flexibility necessary to learn a new discipline or master a new content area when needed, which it’s projected we’ll need to be more able to do as the number of people able to make a living by staying in the same stable career throughout their working lives grows smaller, as most forecasters predict it will.
We don’t live in anything resembling a “global society,” whatever that may be. Even as our trade with other countries increases, local knowledge, local conditions, and local cultures persist. A teacher is someone who is fully educated themselves, knows how to assess the educational level of students and make intelligent decisions about how to help them progress in the content areas to the greatest extent possible during the time allocated for her to spend directing their learning. Much of her success in the endeavor will depend on her ability to engage their INTEREST, which has little to do with whether or not she is following the directives of a Common Core mandated from on high, and her ability to engage INTEREST can be destroyed by rigid mandates that certain topics or content be covered in a prescribed manner and in a certain time period and / or by the need to “teach to” standardized tests. If she is fully educated herself and understands child development and sound methods in the content areas, she does not need corporate / federal / state-level direction, and she certainly doesn’t need “scripts” that mandate what she says to students, which some debased educational programs are actually introducing into classrooms at this point. All of these programs — Common Core, standardized testing, scripted learning, etc., ad nauseam are associated with a massive and inappropriate condescension to and disrespect for K-12 educators, a distrust of their judgment, a notion that those who teach children are in some sense children themselves in need of direction from higher level authorities, and a desire to control them and the children under their care.
It’s true that you won’t get people who are fully educated and who understand child development and pedagogical methods without having the kind of professional standards the state of Arizona is now trying to abolish, and you won’t maintain them in your classrooms without paying them a professional wage appropriate to the investment they’ve made in their own college and master’s level education and to the ongoing requirements to maintain credentialing. But it’s also true that you won’t get them by turning a profession which had allowed creativity and individual discretion appropriate to fully educated professionals into a profession only fit for mindless automatons.