Speech to CTA State Council
Wayne Johnson, President
June 2001
Good morning.
I want to start today by talking a little about the May Revision of the Education Budget.
On May 14, the Governor held a press conference to announce the May Revision of the California 2001-2002 budget. He cut $5 billion from the January proposal, but actually added $300 million to the education budget. He proposed $540 million to offset increased energy costs. The January 3.9% COLA was re-adjusted to 3.8%.
I give you this information for a reason. You go back to your districts and stand firm for a 3.81% salary increase, because programs have been funded - even funding increases - new programs have been added.
Don't let Ken Hall and School Services come in and say the COLA money is needed to fund and maintain programs. Don't let them use energy cost increases to beat you out of a salary increase. Fight for those salary increases next year. The money is going to be there, we don't know exactly how much yet, but salary money is going to be there.
We need salary increases because there is a growing teacher shortage. The April 9, 2001 edition of Newsweek reported that the U.S. will need 220,000 new teachers every year for the next ten years. The Chicago School District started this year short 1,000 teachers. In California, 50% of all teachers are 45 years of age or older.
Seven percent of California teachers are 55 years of age or older. Last year California had 32,000 emergency-permit teachers, this year we have 40,000. The New Teacher Institute of U.C. Santa Cruz tells us that California will need 287,000 new teachers over the next ten years.
NBC News in Los Angeles reported on April 10, 2001, sadly, a study of college graduates earning potential:
#1 were engineering majors
#2 were computer science majors
Dead last were education majors
Go back to your districts and fight for those salaries!
We are going to fight in Sacramento to make sure you get as much money in your local districts as you can get. And never, never forget. Teachers are the educational program.
Newsweek Magazine reported on October 2, 2000, "Teachers are the heart of the school, the single most important factor in a students success."
Many studies have shown that kids learn best in schools where teachers feel respected and feel connected to their colleagues and communities.
Public education in America is in crisis.
Secretary of Education Rod Paige spoke in San Francisco on March 1, 2000. He spoke to the group Empower America, started by Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp. He made three major points. He said:
1. The public school monopoly has been broken.
2. Public schools belong in the Smithsonian.
3. Wait three years and you will have vouchers.
Tim Draper was in the audience. So was Ted Forstman, the NY billionaire voucher advocate.
The problems of public education are child poverty and inadequate funding. Public education is now being judged based on the bottom 25% of our schools. Our public schools are not being judged on the schools of Beverly Hills, Hillsborough, La Jolla, and Rancho Santa Fe.
Public schools are being judged on the performance of Los Angeles, Compton, Richmond, and Oakland. Districts where a majority of the kids are poor and English language learners.
CTA is now trying to persuade the Governor to redirect more money into the lowest scoring 25% of our schools. Because only when we are able to improve these schools, will the image of public schools in California change. That change will come only with more funding in all of our schools but especially the lowest 25%.
The United States is the richest of the 16 industrialized countries in the world, yet we only rank 11th in K-12 funding.
California is the richest state in the union. Last year we passed Italy to become the 6th largest economy in the world, producing goods and services in excess of $1.2 trillion. We are now closing in on Great Britain to become the 5th largest economy.
Robert Levine of the Rand Institute reported last October (2000) that California ranks 24% below the national average in K-12 educational spending. When you combine that funding deficiency with the immense child poverty problem in California and the United States, you have a formula for educational disaster.
It is well documented that the USA leads the industrialized world in child poverty with 20% of America's kids 18 and younger living in poverty. Poverty is defined as an annual family income for four of $16,000 a year or less. The largest single group living in poverty in America are kids 18 and younger. New York and California lead America in child poverty with 26% and 25% respectively.
CTA had an independent research firm analyze last years Academic Performance Index (API) scores. As teachers, I don't think you will be surprised at what we found.
What we found was, the bottom 20% of API scores were clustered in the Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys and the urban centers of Southern California and the Bay Area. When we compared the bottom 10% of API schools to the top 10%, the differences were astounding.
In the bottom 10% of API elementary, middle and high schools averaged 86% of kids lived in poverty, compared to 7% in the top 10%.
When it came to English language learners, the bottom 10% API schools averaged 47% English language learners, compared to 2.6% in the top 10%.
State Senator Deborah Ortiz told me on April 19 that 71% of Latino students scored in the bottom 30% of STAR9 test scores.
The ethnic diversity in the bottom 10% of API schools was also very different from the top 10%. The non-white population of the bottom 10% of API schools averaged 96.5% for elementary, middle and high schools, compared to 31.7% for the top 10%.
Forty-five percent of California students are Latino. The 2000 census told us that the Latino high school dropout rate was 30%. That is an educational disaster for this generation of Latino kids. It is a disaster for California.
Emergency permit teachers made up 24.3% of the teacher force in the bottom 10% of API schools, compared to 6.3% of the top 10%.
Year round schools constituted 41% of the lowest 10% of API schools, compared to 3% of the top ten.
CTA is saying the bottom 20% of California API schools need special help. They need more help or their educational quality will never improve.
We are asking the Governor and legislature to redirect state funding to the two million kids in the 20% of the lowest scoring API schools in California.
This same phenomenon exists on the national level as well.
On April 10th, the 4th grade reading test scores on the National Assessment of Educational progress were released. These results on the national level tell pretty much the same story as the API rankings show in California. Thirty-seven percent of America's fourth graders tested "below basic."
Below basic kids cannot understand even in a general sense the meaning of what they have read. In short, they cannot read.
A breakdown of the test results revealed:
47% of urban students scored below basic
60% of poor children scored below basic
58% of Latino students scored below basic
63% of African American students scored below basic
I read a recent study that concluded that if a child is not reading on grade level by the third grade, the odds are very high that they never will.
American education is in crisis. It is a crisis of poverty. It is a crisis of under-funding. It is a crisis of poor kids not getting what they need. It is a crisis of mismanagement. It is a crisis of running out of teachers.
The educational crisis in America and in California:
Is in schools that have the largest concentrations of poor children;
In schools with the largest concentrations of English language learners.
Public education is being made the scapegoat for child poverty and inadequate funding. They blame public education and teachers for the states failure to meet 25% of our children's health, housing, nutritional, and educational needs. Then when they don't do well in school, it is our fault.
They don't give us credit for successful kids in wealthy areas like Beverly Hills, San Marino, Hillsborough, and Rancho Santa Fe. Politicians who have control of educational policy, simply advocate more assessment and teacher accountability; hold the teachers more accountable is the solution.
Teachers are not the problem, teachers are working as hard as they can under miserable conditions and being a lot more successful than conditions would dictate.
Governor Davis is threatening to have the state take over low scoring schools. That idea didn't work in Compton or Richmond and it won't work any place else either.
We never hear:
Let's get a fully credentialed teacher in every California classroom.
We never hear:
Let's reduce class size to 15 to 20 in every school with low-test scores.
We never hear:
Let's make sure every kid has all the latest textbooks, materials, and supplies they need.
We never hear:
Let's make sure that all of our kids have all the latest technology they need.
We never hear:
Let's fix up all of these old slum schools as U.C.L.A Law Professor Gary Blasi calls them.
The ones with leaky roofs, broken windows, backed up toilets, and no air conditioners.
We never hear:
Let's make sure our teachers have all the materials and supplies they need to teach.
We never hear:
Let's give college trained professional teachers the control of their classrooms and get the administrative bureaucracy off their backs so they can teach.
In fact, we hear the opposite.
We hear:
The state will take over low-performing schools.
We hear:
The threat of school vouchers.
They never ask teachers what we think. They bring in any "expert" to propose a solution. This solution always carries a huge consultant price tag. Any opinion from any outsider is better than teacher's opinions. What an insult to us and our profession. We have to fight to make the public understand what all of our kids need.
We must start by putting more money into the schools with our lowest scoring students. We don't want to take away money from any school. Take the $1.4 billion that is being proposed to extend the year in every middle school in California and put that money into the 25% of the lowest scoring schools. Take all of those teacher bonus' that Davis loves to hand out every year and put that money into the lowest 25% of our API schools.
We must fight to get a fully credentialed teacher in every California classroom.
Lou Harris did a poll last September and found that 87% of Californians want a fully credentialed teacher in every classroom. Not more programs, like Ken Hall and School Services preach!! And not more administrators, but fully credentialed teachers in every classroom.
We must start now to see to it credentialed, experienced teachers have professional control of our classrooms. Like doctors have control over the practice of medicine. Like lawyers have control over the practice of law. Teachers must have the control over the practice of education.
We must end the teacher proof - lock step - administrator controlled curriculum and teaching practices!
If free public education is ever going to improve, we must stop the administrative bureaucrats from telling teachers, but especially experienced teachers, what, when, where and how to teach! Teaching is not an assembly line job. And until we gain teacher professional control of the classroom, public education will never improve.
We can make these changes, but we must stand up as a profession and say enough is enough! We must demand our professional rights.
They will never be handed to us because it is the right thing to do. We have to organize and demand our rights!
Public schools are the cornerstone of American democracy. Public schools are the essential institution. Thomas Jefferson said, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects that which was and never will be."
Free public schools have created the greatest democracy in the history of the world. Free public education has created the greatest economy and the richest country in the history of the world. And if we want to keep both, we had better protect our free public education system and make sure it gets even better.
And that means giving all of our children a quality education, but especially a quality education to our poorest and most disadvantaged kids.
We can do it!
We haven't done such a bad job as it is!
In fact, when you look at the conditions of our schools, and when you look at the conditions in which you teach, what you do on a daily basis is amazing. Let me give you some evidence of how good you really are.
In 1999 the United States ranked 3rd in the world in high school graduation rate with 86.7%. Number two is Germany with 88%. Number three is Japan with 90%.
In 1999, 44% of our high school dropouts went back and graduated or passed a high school equivalency.
In 2000, 65.6% of our high school graduates went on to college. 42% went on to four-year schools. That's number one in the world.
In 2000, 31% of all Americans age 25-29 were college graduates. That's number one in the world.
And our statistics are getting better every year. Free public education has produced these amazing results.
People from all over the world want to come here to access our education system, especially our higher education system.
That's all you have been able to do with low pay, no professional control, and miserable teaching conditions. And we can even do better. But we must take control of the system, and public schools must be funded better.
We cannot allow 25% of our poorest and most disadvantaged kids to continue to slip through the educational cracks.
As John Kennedy said in 1961, "If we can not help the many who are poor, we can not save the few who are rich." We have to take a stand and stop that inequity from continuing. We have to do it because most politicians don't have a clue. We have to do it because Boards of Education don't know how to do it.
We have to do it because administrators don't have the guts to do it. They are afraid to do something that puts their careers on the line and they are more concerned with their turf, perks, and power than they are about kid's education!
We have to do it, because the bottom line is no one lese really understands the problem or how to fix it. We do, and we can do the job!
Pat Dolan, corporate re-organizational specialist, said "If you want to know what is wrong with a school, ask a teacher. Not only will they tell you, they will tell you how to fix it. The problem is no one ever asks."
In this crucial point in the history of free public education, it really depends on us. And again, make no mistake about it, we can do the job! 1.5 million poor kids are depending on us. They don't even know it, but their futures depend on us. We can't let them down.
As Gandhi said, "Without struggle there is no movement." We have to lead the movement to improve our schools! 300,000 teachers have been struggling successfully for years to make our schools work far better than they should.
There is no doubt in my mind we will lead the educational reform in California and make our schools work for all of our kids.
The future awaits our struggle. Thank you very much and God Bless you all! |
