It’s been a busy day, so I’m just now getting back to that bizarre AP story I read this morning about Inez and the Education secretary job. It said, in part,
Teachers’ unions, an influential segment of the party base, want an
advocate for their members, someone like Obama adviser Linda
Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor, or Inez Tenenbaum,
the former state schools chief in South Carolina.Reform advocates want someone like New York schools chancellor Joel Klein, who wants teachers and schools held accountable for the performance of students.
Say WHAT? Inez is the one who led the nation in implementing accountability. And where on Earth did that stuff about "teachers’ unions" come from?
Something I meant to mention in my Sunday column, but it was just too complicated to get into, was the fact that it’s hard, if not impossible, to place Inez in the simplistic terms that David Brooks used to describe the conversation within the Obama transition over the Education Secretary nomination:
As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms…
He went on to suggest that potential education secretaries are being assessed according to where they fall on that spectrum.
Mind you, I’m not accusing Brooks of being simplistic. Rather, the problem is that NATIONALLY, that’s the way the whole issue of public education plays. And it just has nothing to do with Inez’ experience — or anyone else in South Carolina’s experience — of dealing with public education.
That’s because we don’t have a teachers’ union in South Carolina. In case you hadn’t noticed, teachers don’t engage in collective bargaining here, and that’s a GOOD thing. We don’t hold with
it here. Yes, we have an organization affiliated with the organization
that in other places constitutes a union, and that organization does
wield some influence at the State House. But not being a union takes
some intensity out of the conflict we see elsewhere.
This might doom her chances, for a number of reasons. First, she simply lacks experience dealing with unions, which are such a big factor elsewhere. Also, if Brooks is right, the two camps are each determined to have someone who is ONE or the OTHER (fer or agin the unions). But the fact that she doesn’t fit neatly on that scale speaks to another reason why I’d like to see Inez in that job: Maybe she could change the subject from this titanic ideological battle to one of dealing pragmatically with the challenges facing kids in our public schools.
That’s what Inez would bring: The pragmatism that Obama has sought in his nominees up to this point.
Sure, Inez has some experience dealing with entrenchment in the education establishment — she had to overcome a lot of that in implementing the EAA. But it was less fierce than you might find elsewhere. And in any case, she got the job done.
Also — and my colleague Cindi Scoppe has written about this — when folks in other parts of the country talk about "school choice," they mean charter schools as often as not. Well, we have charter schools in South Carolina. This newspaper has supported them from the start. That is NOT the case with the wacky stuff that "choice" advocates push, with out-of-state money, here. Charter schools are about innovation; vouchers and tax credits are about undermining the entire idea of public schools — accelerating the process of middle class abandonment that began with post-integration white flight. (And before you have a stroke and say you’re for vouchers, and you don’t want that, I’m not talking here about YOUR motivation — I’m talking about what the effect would be.)
So the vocabulary doesn’t really translate. What I’d like to see is a South Carolinian in the main national education pulpit changing the conversation, and therefore the vocabulary, to something that matches the reality that we see in our schools here.
Has Inez been a reformer? You betcha, on the grand scale — she’s the one who implemented the Education Accountability Act, which put us out ahead of most of the country on that point (and then came NCLB, which has been really discouraging because it compares how well South Carolina meets its HIGH standards to how well other states meet their LOW standards, and acts as though they’re the same thing).
Was Inez in the vanguard demanding the EAA? No. It was passed before she entered office. But she was the one who implemented it, and got high marks for how well she did it.
Note that of the three main sorts of reform Brooks mentions above — "merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards" — South Carolina is ahead of the pack on numbers two and three, and Inez has had a lot to do with the accountability one.
Merit pay is one of those things that we haven’t done much on, and we should. In fact, that’s one of the reforms we keep trying to push here on the editorial board of The State, along with school district consolidation and giving principals greater flexibility and authority to hire and fire.
But we don’t get much traction. Why? Because of this completely unnecessary, incessant battle over vouchers and tax credits, which consumes all the oxygen available for talking about education policy. The "choice" advocates yell so much, and defenders of public education yell back so much, that you can’t hear anything else. And it’s a shame.
Elected officials such as our governor will give lip service to favoring school district consolidation — and then put no appreciable effort into making it happen. And of course, his out-of-state allies who fund voucher campaigns have NO interest in pushing consolidation, because they have no interest in anything that would actually help public education in South Carolina. They don’t want to make our public schools better; they just want to pay people to abandon them, and the whole strategy depends on portraying the schools as being as bad as possible.
So, bottom line: Inez a reformer? Yes. Inez the candidate of "teachers’ unions?" Where did AP get that? Unfortunately, AP isn’t saying. But somebody at AP sure does seem to like Arne Duncan.
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There is plenty of oxygen.
You’re just hyperventilating every time tax-paying parents ask for control over their children’s education, and some choice about spending their money.
Your way doesn’t work.
Inez Tennenbaum’s way doesn’t work.
Dick Riley was a failure.
It’s time for you failures to step aside an let some serious reforms take place.
So she implemented EAA. What impact did that have? What were the results? Can you please, please, please give us one example of the ACCOUNTABILITY that resulted from her efforts?
It’s like championing the efforts of the McClatchy Human Resources department for implementing its medical insurance package. Would you say whoever did that did a job worthy of being responsible for a National Health Plan? They did their job implementing the plan, so that’s all that matters, right?
Really, do you understand what the word “accountability” means? Give us examples of the accountability in action. You know, like the principal in Charleston who altered all the PACT tests to boost the scores by unexplainable levels. She got awards from the Department of Ed before skipping out of state when anyone with half a brain would know she was cheating. There’s an example of accountability in action.
Doug, I don’t know why you ask these questions, because you know and I know that no matter what I say, you will dismiss it.
I listed several things that happened as a result of her stewardship in my column Sunday.
You can see more in Gina Smith’s story Monday. Of course, the progress noted there needs to be spread across the tenures of the last three superintendents, with Inez taking up most of the time.
But be honest, unless the state went from worst to first — unless she waved a wand and made generations of deprivation and failure, slavery and Jim Crow, disappear like Elizabeth Montgomery wriggling her nose on "Bewitched," you would refuse to be impressed. In fact, even if she did perform magic, you would refuse to be impressed.
Mere PROGRESS in the face of considerable odds, working with what she had before her and moving the needle a significant (but nonmagical) amount, will never, ever impress you, or deter you from trashing the schools and all those who labor to make them better.
So what, precisely, do you expect me to say to you?
Brad, you only write these columns on the Tenenbaum’s is because you’re so impressed by what each has done, unlike 99% of the rest of the city that you have you nose so far up their butts that we have trouble seeing your ears.
I have a theory, everytime Brad writes about Sam or Inez Tenenbaum in his blog… the Tenenbaum’s buy Brad’s breakfast the next day at the Capitol City Club.
Brad, Brooks doesn’t know enough about education as an issue to frame the discussion beyond simplistic. Your explanation that Inez doesn’t fit neatly into a category is a case in point. The issue is far too complex.
Regarding your depiction of how the debate is reduced to the choice issue, you have been an enabler. In the 2006 superintendent election, you focused on nothing else. From your pulpit in print and at the debate, you had opportunity to delve deeper but abstained.
Your evaluation of Inez is similarly lacking. As Doug astutely explains, what have charter schools and accountability accomplished and why is she credited for leadership when she performed managerial duties to enact the reform?
A major problem is the dialogue is based on such limited information. Floyd ran on choice because SC schools are worst in the nation based solely and ignorantly on SAT and drop out rates. In Connecticut, supposedly an education utopia, we are hearing that many companies are having trouble finding competent employees and therefore won’t settle here – sound familiar?
Until we get a better picture of what’s happening in the classroom, we’ll continue to spin our wheels. I’ll conclude with an example. We hear about the near epidemic of child obesity and government efforts to combat it. Ridge View HS started a Health Occupations magnet program. The School Nutrition Association of South Carolina held a conference at RV (unrelated to the magnet). At the same time in the school, cokes and honey buns were on sale for fundraisers and the vending machines were filled with junk food that had up to 25 grams of fat. My point is the perception from the outside and what’s happening in the schools don’t match – regarding nutrion or academics.
Brad, if you really wanted to make education a meaningful issue, you’d dig a little deeper into the reality that is public education.
Randy is correct in pointing out that the issues in education are complex, even to the choice of a US Secretary of Education. There is a real “blind men and the elephant” scenario going on where many educators and many in the public want to make broad pronouncements based on narrow perspectives. Inez Tennenbaum did excellent work implementing programs that were not her designs. Under her leadership the schools improved performance as measured by both state and national tests, reversing a negative trend under her predecessor. She made mistakes and failed at some efforts. She is tenacious, but overwhelmingly positive. The US Sec of Ed does not set policy. He/she assists the President in formulating and promoting policy, and influencing legislation – where most policy is set – and runs the agency that administers federal programs. She would be a strong advocate for schools and children. She would oppose reform that threatens to divide our nation further by dividing our children. Whether she has the other attributes necessary to move the ball forward is the President’s call. If he wants a policy wonk, she’s probably not it. If he wants a tireless advocate, she’s on the mark. There is a lot of talent out there, but no slam-dunk choice in my view.
Wow. Randy and I agree about something. The distance between Inez Tenenbaum as state superintendent and real life in the school districts was a bridge too far. And that distance hasn’t shrunk. The state education hierarchy floats above reality like a dirigible, insulated from the truth that threatens to poke a hole in it.
PM, the floating occurs with the critics of public education as well. SCouRGe and their bedfellow, Sanford, offer up choice as a panacea. I liken this approach to the Bush-Warthern war on Terror. Surging in Iraq may mitigate violence in one area but is hardly a solution to terrorism in general (see Mumbai). Choice can be effective for some students but would have very limited effect. Deeper analysis is needed from all sides to get to the core issues.
Harry, I think a tireless advocate could be the deputy for a superintendent who can provide leadership. There’s a new super for the DC schools who is kicking butt and taking names. The teacher union isn’t happy with her because she fired a bunch of teachers. Accountability for teachers is a big key, whether it’s firing or merit pay.
Parents and the kids need to be held accountable as well. Let’s have a law mandating a parent meet with school officials each semester and create more alternative schools for the kids causing most of the trouble.
If we did get someone like Michelle Rhee (the supe in DC) as Superintendent of Education in SC, large parts of the public would be up in arms. One of her main focus areas is in demanding parental involvement in their kids’ education.
How are you going to “hold the parents accountable” when 70% of black students are born out of wedlock, and 80% at some time have only one or zero parents raising them?
Teachers Union Leaders Back Tennenbaum
Dec 8, 2008 Reuters and Huffington Post
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama has not signaled what he will do to fix the country’s failing schools, but his choice of education secretary will say a lot about the policies he may pursue.
Debate is simmering among Democrats over whom Obama should name.
Teachers’ unions, an influential segment of the party base, want an advocate for their members, someone like Obama adviser Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor, or Inez Tenenbaum, the former state schools chief in South Carolina.
Reform advocates want someone like New York schools chancellor Joel Klein, who wants teachers and schools held accountable for the performance of students.
The recent comments by Randy, Steve, pm, etc. are dead on in pointing out what appears to be Brad’s blind spot when it comes to Inez. He believes that Inez is responsible for any progress (and no blame for any failures) in the schools and deserves a big promotion for it.
However, there are many of us out here in the real world (parents, teachers, business owners) who have a different perspective. There are three things necessary for a successful outcome in public education: a student ready to learn, a parent willing to support the student, and a qualified teacher to instruct the student. For literally centuries that process was performed without significant government involvement — and guess what? — it worked.
For many of us middle aged parents, we look at today’s education bureacracy and say, “Why?” And then we look at the things our kids do in school and shake our heads. My kids high school is spending more time organizing FIVE different holiday charity programs than they are on on providing tutoring to kids who are at risk of dropping out. The kids who bring in cans of food get points added to their test scores. Every day this week is a “theme” day where the kids can dress up in some style to enhance their giving spirit capped off next Monday with a “dress up” day to “celebrate” how wonderful they are for bringing in a toy or ten cans of Spam.
Meanwhile, we have absolute chaos in many classrooms where teachers either have no control or principals are afraid to punish the thugs and miscreants because they don’t want to deal with all the paperwork required to prevent a lawsuit from idiot parents who think their kids can do no wrong. I don’t envy teachers today. My daughter told me that a student in one of her classes distributed a letter for the rest of the class to sign (she did not) listing all the faults of their English teacher which was then passed along to the administration. As a result, an administrator came and sat in the class to observe — wasting his time and creating the notion in these spoiled brats heads that they are in charge. And this is in what is considered a very good high school by today’s standards. It’s utter lunacy propogated by the transformation of public education to public relations — a process that was certainly expanded upon during Inez’s tenure in charge.
We would be better served to abolish the Department of Education than to put another “feel good” figurehead in office.
And Brad, you keep trying to push Inez’s implementation of EAA but have yet to show any examples of accountability. All you did was reference rankings of the tests by what could hardly be called independent organizations, not of the actual accountability related to the results of the tests. Do you see the difference?
I’m asking you to provide evidence of accountability, not testing ability.
You have a line directly into Inez. Surely you can ask her to provide examples of people, schools, or administrations who were held accountable by the system she implemented.
Brad just likes being cozy with Inez and Sam Tennenbaum. Her actual qualifications and resume of accomplishments is irrelevant to Brad. He likes her, just like he hates Mark Sanford. Reality has nothing to do with it.
Oh, you mean "punished" when you say "held accountable." At least, that’s what I’m inferring here. Why didn’t you say so? That, of course, is not the sense of "accountable" that the EAA intended. What it intended, and what Inez implemented, was a system of high standards across the curriculum, with a test designed to measure whether a school — and by extension districts — were succeeding in teaching kids up to those standards.
That’s what Inez did, and she did it well.
Now, as to punishing, which seems to be what you’re after — I guess taking away the power of the Annendale County authorities to run their school system is one example of that. You screw up, and you lose the power to run your system.
The Annendale takeover didn’t suddenly make the kids in Allendale the world’s best students — thley were still who they were, and came from the homes they came from — but it IS a case of a system held accountable.
Over time, I’ve come to believe that we need more of that. And maybe with practice — the Allendale takeover was unprecedented, so the state Dept. was making it up as it went along — the state can get good at it. One of the biggest problems in our state is that we have all these tiny districts run by people who don’t have the slightest idea what they’re doing.
That’s one reason why we favor consolidation, along with merit pay and empowering principals. That’s OUR reform agenda, and we state it all the time. Trouble is, every time we state it, five more candidates funded by Howie Rich pop up intending to cram vouchers down South Carolina’s throat whether we want it or not. So we call attention to the fact, in order to stop them — and we’re almost always successful, because the voters don’t want what they’re selling. But we DO have to tell the voters, because they can be pretty quiet about it because the KNOW the voters don’t want what they’re all about. I call your attention to the trouble I had getting Ms. Floyd to admit, on live TV, that she favored it.
And then, because we do our duty and inform the voters, I take a load of garbage from you people for talking about "choice" too much. No win situation, you see. What I suppose y’all want (except for Randy; I can’t tell what he wants these days other than to complain about everything I say here) is for me to shut up about it so that Howie’s candidates can sneak into office and enact his agenda. Well, I’m not going to do that. Every time on of them pops up, or every time they try to amend a bill with vouchers (and they destroy EVERY effort do ANYthing related to schools that way), I’m going to point it out, and explain what’s wrong with what they’re saying.
So get over it. And get over that crap about me not having an agenda to improve schools. I do. I want merit pay. I want district consolidation. I want principals being fully empowered to hire and fire. And once we get those things, we’ll talk about what’s next. If I can ever get anybody other than US to talk about these things…
Accountability without repercussions for those who fail to deliver – meaningless “standards”.
The easiest and best way to implement merit pay is to open up education to free market competition. Then let the parents and taxpayers decide who they will hire for more money, not some bureaucratic scoring system cooked up by educrats – especially now that we know their definition of “accountability”.
“I want merit pay. I want district consolidation. I want principals being fully empowered to hire and fire.”
In eight years, did Inez do anything to try and achieve those objectives?
And you know that the Allendale was taken over and then given back when the takeover did nothing but waste even more money.
The voucher issue is a red herring. We don’t have vouchers. Our teachers have never have had to spend a moment thinking about them or their impact on their job.
Who besides you, the Department of Ed, and a couple anti-Sanford legislators have spent more than a few minutes even thinking about vouchers? It’s a lame excuse to try and even attach the most distant causal relationship between the public education system performance and the debate over vouchers. It doesn’t exist.
There is always the simple solution. Try vouchers somewhere on a limited basis with needs-based requirements. Then we all can look at the results and decide whether they are useful or not. But you can’t take that risk — because it just might prove you wrong.
The whole realm of the subject on whether or not our children are getting a quality education seems to have been pretty well covered in the opinion of the bloggers.
I would like to put one question out there and maybe someone will have a way of solving the problem.
We seem to have a large portion of students in certain districts in the state that are from one parent homes. The mother either does not work or works on a job that probably only gets the minimum wage so she and the children have to depend of the government to help them out. We are told that there are multiple children by the same mother but the father cannot live in the home with the mother and children or they would not be eligible for assistance. Is this true? How can you correct the educational standards of these children when there is nobody home to help them with the homework? This cycle seems to repeat itself with family after family. Consequently, we have generations of children that never have an education to get a job except for manual labor (which the Mexicans seem to enjoy more than the Afro-Americans).
We have people that worked in cotton mills all their life and have generations that never got an education to do any meaningful jobs. The owners of these mills did not want the employees to have a education because if they even graduated from high school they would have more sense than to go to work in the cotton mill to begin with.
So my question to all of you is this: What are you going to do about educating the next generation of these same families?
Allendale is the prime example of why we need vouchers. My children attend a private school that services Allendale County. (My children have been there by our choice; I expect to pay for it. I also pay for it because my Master degreed, state-certified wife teaches at our school, at about 60% of what she would make in public school.)
The state left Allendale because they couldn’t fix it. It’s no better now than it was. Vouchers would allow the parents who want their children to escape the cycle of failure to go to a private school. These are parents who could not imaginably pay $3500 or more a year tuition, but want better for their children. (Who gets vouchers? A means test can solve that.) What’s their only other option? Move out of Allendale County, thus furthering the county’s cycle of failure.
Or let that rich upstate district (from the news story) pay for an alternative school in one of the poorest counties in the state.
Hey, that’s the ticket.
The state has actually taken over schools in other counties, though Allendale was the first entire county to be taken over.
None of them did any good, because the students are basically inferior material to begin with. Their primary problems are the lack of a normal home life, and the failure to teach them to read at home, and develop the habits of reading outside school.
White students, Chinese, Indians, and Africans who far outperform the students in Allendale, Kingstree, Marlboro and Lower Richland can all read very well, and read for enjoyment outside school.
Here’s something I failed to notice until today. You know how I mentioned that Inez was on the short list of five moved by AP late in November, but then she was NOT on the updated version they moved on Dec. 4?
Well, on Dec. 8, the day AFTER my column (when I was no longer checking) they sent it out with Inez on a short list of four, as follows:
But then, that’s about the time they moved that idiotic story that said she’d be one of the favorites of the teacher unions, so what does AP know?
Bottom line: It’s still probably between Inez and Arne Duncan, with Duncan having the edge.
You tell us, Mr. Newspaperman – why do other reporters think Inez Tennenbaum is more acceptable to the teacher unions?
I think it’s a little tougher for Obama to bring in more Chicago people at the moment.
Simple question for you Brad: What has Inez supported that the NEA or SCEA would oppose? When you compare her to the more radical reformers, she offers half-measures.
Well, Obama just brought in the head of the Chicago school system as his Secretary of Education.
Well, it looks like Inez is going to have to stay home and Brad is stuck blogging for The State for four more years.
Here’s a perfect example of both the Department of Education’s “accountability” in action as well as the PR spin that is put on every piece of bad news that comes out.
From today’s The State article on end of course testing under the dubious headline of “Students show improvements in English, physical science”
“Student scores improved last year on state end-of-course exams in English and physical science, according to results released today by the South Carolina Department of Education. Scores on Algebra tests decreased slightly.
State Superintendent of Education Jim Rex said that while he was encouraged at the improvements, overall scores are too low.”
Now, buried down at the bottom of the article are the actual results:
“For 2007-08, grade distribution for English was 11.9 percent A, 15.6 percent B, 23.6 percent C, 17.3 percent D and 31.6 percent F. Grade distribution for algebra was 14.5 percent A, 16.8 percent B, 22.9 percent C, 24.1 percent D and 21.7 percent F. Grade distribution for physical science was 9.3 percent A, 10.6 percent B, 16.9 percent C, 18.2 percent D and 45 percent F.”
So here’s accountability in action according to the Department of Education.
After ten years of PACT testing, we have 48% of the students who get a D or F in English, 45% who get a D or F in Algebra, and a whopping 63% who get a D or F in science.
Are you kidding me? Seriously, is there anyone who is not being paid by tax dollars who could look at those results and wonder where the accountability is??
The headline for that article should have been “Ten Years Of PACT Testing Results Proves Worthless”
Inez Tenenbaum isn’t a collaborator of Teacher Unions but a subordinate of South Carolinians who desire accountability in public education. She’ll hold educators accountable and enact reform. During her tenure as Superintendent of Education – our state grew faster than any state in the nation when it comes to public education. We went from 50th and became 18th. I applaud this achievement and I hope she’ll return to the political screen one day.
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See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
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Your Piter