Thoughts upon Leaving New Orleans

I’ve just returned from nine days on the road attending the National Education Association Annual Meeting, which was held this year in New Orleans. If you’re reading this blog for the first time, or you have no idea what on earth the RA is or why it matters, I suggest you take a look at the first few paragraphs of my comments on last year’s RA in San Diego.

Full disclosure: I work for an NEA affiliate, and as part of my work there I post a daily journal from the host city, typically covering the last six days of the Annual Meeting, including the four-day Representative Assembly. While I hope that the journal is valuable for my members and delegates, I attempt to confine it to observations and leave my own personal opinions or reactions out of it. If my members and delegates want to write their own comments and have those comments appear on the blog, they can put them there; but my opinions there would likely to be seen either as official positions of NEOEA or as an attempt to misrepresent my opinions as NEOEA’s official positions.
So, like RMN, “just let me say this about that”: Nothing I write in the “Oh, Contrarian” blog is the official position of anybody but me. (Should it be? Obviously.) I’ve linked to the NEOEA blog above, but it’s not reciprocal: it doesn’t contain any link to this one.
So where are the opinions? They’ll be expressed in future postings. If you’ve received this message in an email, don’t expect that I’m going to be emailing to scads of people every time I post something here. (Bulk mail filters start to get activated when you do that.) Just stop back here from time to time.
The Contrarian

Pressure on Schools, Unions Misplaced

In “Ohio urges school districts, teacher unions to sign up for Race to the Top money,” Edith Starzyk writes in The Plain Dealer about the pressure being applied to school districts to enter the federal sweepstakes for additional funding under specific circumstances. Both school districts and teacher unions are right to consider carefully what they’re being urged to agree to.

For over twenty years now, Ohio education has been increasingly driven by high-stakes testing. Originally aimed at graduating students, it now drives instruction at every grade level in every public school.

It was wrong then, and it is wrong now. At a time when knowledge is multiplying, high-stakes testing reduces what is taught. While students need to learn material of greater complexity, it forces concentration on simpler, formulaic learning. As students need access to a broader curriculum, high-stakes testing restricts it. And perhaps most insidious of all, it diverts resources (time, money, and people) from instruction to measurement, making it harder to accomplish its well-intended goals.

Because high-stakes testing is flawed from the beginning, it’s especially wrong when it’s being used for purposes for which it wasn’t intended. The tests do a poor enough job of measuring student learning: they are even less appropriate for making salary, retention, and transfer decisions regarding teachers, the one group of people who can do something to mitigate the disaster.

In her recent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch points out that both Democrats and Republicans have subscribed to the myth of high-stakes testing as an accountability tool. How ironic that this pressure is coming from a President and a Governor who were supported by teachers!

Linus’s Law and County Government

On Tuesday, November 3, Cuyahoga County voters will face one of the most important county issues in our lifetimes. I’ll be voting for Issue 5 and against Issue 6. Here’s why.

If you live in Cuyahoga County, you almost certainly know that several government figures have been accused of corruption within the past few years. The FBI conducted raids in July 2008, and some of the smaller fish are already in jail; the suspected largest fish haven’t been indicted yet, but suspicions are numerous.

The corruption probe gave new immediacy to proposals for reorganizing county government, and that’s exactly where the mischief lies. In northeastern Ohio, new government reorganization plans are introduced about as often as Browns quarterbacks; so some prominent public officials met, dusted off some plans, added a few new features, and over 53,000 signers–looking, understandably, for anything that would change the status quo–put Issue 6 on the ballot. Issue 6 is a new county charter, all wrapped up and ready to go.

Issue 5, by contrast, isn’t a new charter: it’s a process for developing a new charter. I’m supporting it because a new charter should be developed by a public charter review commission whose meetings are held in public under sunshine laws. Years ago, I served as a member of the charter review commission for the City of Bedford; and although few residents knew or cared that we were meeting, the fact is that they could have known if they wanted to. That’s very different from a group of Great Men meeting to decide the county’s future, which is how we got Issue 6.

Hence my reference to Linus’s Law. Named by Eric S. Raymond in honor of Linus Torvald, the inventor of the open-source operating system Linux, the law states that “Given sufficient eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Ungainly as the phrasing may be, it applies to more than just software: “eyeballs” refers to the number of people involved in the drafting process. Since Issue 5 is an open process, the charter it would produce would draw plenty of eyeballs; Issue 6 is the result of a closed process, and the bugs are already evident.

The first bug is Issue 6’s lack of campaign finance reform language, which is pretty ironic, given that it’s touted as an answer to corruption. The second is that in its rush to throw out the bums, the new charter calls for special elections which The Plain Dealer reports would cost taxpayers an additional $4 million in special election expenses. What other bugs lay hidden in its 28 pages? (You can look for them here.)

If, after an open review process, it appears that the county organization plan embodied in Issue 6 is so good, the charter commission can submit it to a vote in 2010. If it’s not, they can submit something better. Cuyahoga County government didn’t get screwed up so quickly that one year will make that great a difference; but a rush toward an ill-considered change could make a very great difference indeed.

So I’ll vote against Issue 6 and for Issue 5. While I’m at it, I’m going to vote for the charter commission proposed by the Issue 5 group, “Real Reform.” Some 29 names appear on the ballot in one big group; they don’t appear as distinct slates, although that’s how they filed. The names of the pro-Issue 5 group are:

  • Harriet Applegate
  • Bill Cervenik
  • Mark Davis
  • Ann Marie Donegan
  • Mike Foley
  • Stuart Garson
  • Ron V. Johnson, Jr.
  • Dr. Gus Kious
  • Jazmin Torres-Lugo
  • Rev. Marvin McMickle
  • Nick (Sonny) Nardi
  • Betty K. Pinkney
  • Patrick Shepherd
  • Sandra Williams

On the face of it, Issue 6 seems to have the better chance of passage. It has the support of the Cuyahoga County business community, and a campaign budget about ten times that of Issue 5. It has the air time and the lawn signs. But it’s a bad idea. It was developed without sufficient eyeballs, and its bugs are deep.