Rich DeColibus to Lisa Pogrebinsky
March 7, 2014
Dear Ms. Pogrebinsky,
While I don't know the particulars of your Collective Bargaining Agreement,
nor the operational details of what exactly happens in "investment" schools, I
did check around and some of what's now going on fits into a fairly detailed and
scripted political plan to privatize public education. There have been
intervention clauses in the Agreement for years, but the intent was always to
increase the resources available to struggling schools; now, it seems, this
appears to have been transformed into a twisted attempt to blame teachers for
all ills, and use this philosophy as an excuse to dismantle the public school
system in Cleveland.
The overall strategy comes from the political right and strives to create
"portfolio districts." ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), a beloved
creation of the Reagan era anti-government and anti-union conservatives,
assembles and disseminates legislative initiatives, mostly state level, in a
variety of areas, not the least of which is a burning desire to privatize all
public education. Public schools are always described as "failing" whether or
not their test scores are, in fact, better or worse than local charter
schools. In Cleveland, it's no secret the public schools are considerably better
than most of the local charter schools; this data is clearly and easily
established by recent State of Ohio test scores.
ALEC's not-too-subtle agenda involves passing legislation focusing on five
ways to attack public education: (1) advocating vouchers; (2) advocating charter
schools; (3) breaking teacher unions; (4) discrediting public schools, and (5)
watering down teacher certification (for example, the Teach For America
program). After you dissemble the flowery language and the extensive claims of
how well this works elsewhere (it doesn't), the bottom line is focused on
eliminating public schools and replacing them with charter or otherwise
privately operated schools.
The portfolio approach is gilded in free market rhetoric and an
unquestioning faith in "competition" to solve all problems. It assumes a
successful manufacturing and marketing process of making and selling; for
example, toothpaste should be transferred completely to the way schools should
be run. Whether the overall education of Cleveland's children is really well
served by a free market approach is deemed irrelevant and subservient to the
purist ideology which drives the portfolio system of beliefs.
Here's how ALEC envisions it to work. Most administrative authority is
retained by the central office, which implements Student Based Budgeting (SBB)
at the building level. The beauty of this concept is, when student achievement
does not go up (remember, the goal is privatization, not better student test
scores), the central office can place all blame on the schools, ignoring its
responsibility to provide enough human and other resources to make whatever
improvements are really necessary to help students succeed better.
After the student achievement fails to improve in a given building, the
school is "churned" or, as pro-portfolio advocates like to say, undergoes
"creative destruction." (This is the actual term used in the literature!) The
current faculty and staff are dispersed elsewhere in the district (best case
scenario) or simply terminated. A new charter school is then allowed to reopen
in the empty building. Needless to say, for a "new" school comprised entirely
of teachers and others who have never worked together to be successful is rather
unlikely, but that's OK in the portfolio version because it will simply be
"churned" again after a few years.
This is not just my version of events. Kenneth J. Saltman of DePaul
University looked at the portfolio phenomenon a few years ago. Utilizing EPRU
(Education Policy Research Unit, Arizona State University) and EPIC (Education
and the Public Interest Center, University of Colorado), he analyzed some of the
portfolio literature and related school reform efforts. Similarly,
research-oriented peers in the field of educational statistics also have looked
at portfolio-variant districts. The author can speak more eloquently about it
than I can; here is an excerpt from his report [Urban School Decentralization and the Growth of “Portfolio
Districts”]
The published policy literature advocating implementation of the portfolio
model and its elements most often makes assertions without providing credible
evidence for its claims. For example, all of the relevant six articles available
from the scholarly database Academic Search Premiere write favorably of the
portfolio model, but none of them either constitute or reference careful
empirical study reviewed by a community of policy scholars. Much of such
advocacy writing published about the portfolio model and its constituent
elements is generated by authors housed in or connected to policy think tanks
that tend to have political and policy agendas. Lacking to date are studies by
independent scholars who are concerned with accurate information rather than
with a result supporting a preconceived policy agenda.
There is much more but you catch the drift. The portfolio structure has
nothing to do with student achievement, and everything to do with eliminating
public education, rendering ineffective the local teacher union, advocating for
charters and vouchers, and filling classrooms with enthusiastic and
well-intentioned recent college graduates taking the equivalent of an internship
until they figure out what they want to do with their lives for real.
I suspect your CBA needs some repair work if it allows the kinds of things
to happen as envisioned by the portfolio model. Teachers are not the cause of
poor student performance in any school I have ever visited; there is a
wide-ranging set of interactions involving multiple factors and individuals in
each case of student non-performance. The portfolio model simply ignores this
entirely and casts all blame on the only individuals who do the real work of the
system.
Sincerely,
Rich DeColibus
Rich DeColibus, retired educator, is
former president of the Cleveland Teachers Union. Ms. Pogrebinsky is currently
running for that position.