By Valerie Strauss

Increasingly teachers are speaking out against school reforms that they believe are demeaning their profession, and some are simply quitting because they have had enough.

Here is one resignation letter from a veteran teacher, Gerald J. Conti, a social studies teacher at Westhill High School in Syracuse, N.Y.:

Mr. Casey Barduhn, Superintendent
Westhill Central School District
400 Walberta Park Road
Syracuse, New York 13219

Dear Mr. Barduhn and Board of Education Members:

It is with the deepest regret that I must retire at the close of this school year, ending my more than twenty-seven years of service at Westhill on June 30, under the provisions of the 2012-15 contract. I assume that I will be eligible for any local or state incentives that may be offered prior to my date of actual retirement and I trust that I may return to the high school at some point as a substitute teacher.

As with Lincoln and Springfield, I have grown from a young to an old man here; my brother died while we were both employed here; my daughter was educated here, and I have been touched by and hope that I have touched hundreds of lives in my time here. I know that I have been fortunate to work with a small core of some of the finest students and educators on the planet.

I came to teaching forty years ago this month and have been lucky enough to work at a small liberal arts college, a major university and this superior secondary school. To me, history has been so very much more than a mere job, it has truly been my life, always driving my travel, guiding all of my reading and even dictating my television and movie viewing. Rarely have I engaged in any of these activities without an eye to my classroom and what I might employ in a lesson, a lecture or a presentation. With regard to my profession, I have truly attempted to live John Dewey’s famous quotation (now likely cliché with me, I’ve used it so very often) that  “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.” This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching “heavy,” working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and “data driven” education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill.

A long train of failures has brought us to this unfortunate pass. In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars, our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education. The New York State United Teachers union has let down its membership by failing to mount a much more effective and vigorous campaign against this same costly and dangerous debacle. Finally, it is with sad reluctance that I say our own administration has been both uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian. This situation has been exacerbated by other actions of the administration, in either refusing to call open forum meetings to discuss these pressing issues, or by so constraining the time limits of such meetings that little more than a conveying of information could take place. This lack of leadership at every level has only served to produce confusion, a loss of confidence and a dramatic and rapid decaying of morale. The repercussions of these ill-conceived policies will be telling and shall resound to the detriment of education for years to come. The analogy that this process is like building the airplane while we are flying would strike terror in the heart of anyone should it be applied to an actual airplane flight, a medical procedure, or even a home repair. Why should it be acceptable in our careers and in the education of our children?

My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic “assessments”) or grade their own students’ examinations. The development of plans, choice of lessons and the materials to be employed are increasingly expected to be common to all teachers in a given subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than to the classroom. Teacher planning time has also now been so greatly eroded by a constant need to “prove up” our worth to the tyranny of APPR (through the submission of plans, materials and “artifacts” from our teaching) that there is little time for us to carefully critique student work, engage in informal intellectual discussions with our students and colleagues, or conduct research and seek personal improvement through independent study. We have become increasingly evaluation and not knowledge driven. Process has become our most important product, to twist a phrase from corporate America, which seems doubly appropriate to this case.

After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.

For the last decade or so, I have had two signs hanging above the blackboard at the front of my classroom, they read, “Words Matter” and “Ideas Matter”. While I still believe these simple statements to be true, I don’t feel that those currently driving public education have any inkling of what they mean.

Sincerely and with regret,

Gerald J. Conti
Social Studies Department Leader

[Ed. Note: Republished from The Washington Post, April 6, 2013.  CLICK HERE to read the original.]

By WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press | March 21, 2013 | Updated: March 21, 2013 6:50pm
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The head of the Senate Education Committee broke into tears Thursday as he promised to
fight for dramatically expanded “school choice” in Texas.
But Sen. Dan Patrick also announced he was softening his high-profile bill to allow an unlimited number of charter
schools to operate statewide, instead taking a more gradual, tiered approach to their expansion.
The tea party-backed Republican from Houston became emotional as students told his committee of dropping out of
school but then returning thanks to charter schools and other facilities specializing in at-risk youth.
They were supporting a bill by San Antonio Democratic Sen. Leticia Van De Putte, who is seeking to modify how
state accountability measures evaluate public schools to more accurately label facilities that specialize in helping
students who had previously dropped out.
Van De Putte argues that many such students aren’t currently included in the accountability system, which can hurt
the “completion rate” rating their schools receive.
Bertha Vasquez, an 18-year-old former dropout in Austin who returned to school is now set to graduate this year and
hopes to become a nurse. She cried as she detailed being raised by a single mother.
“I want to be the reason that she can smile every day, even though I made her go through a lot,” Vasquez said.
Patrick instructed a committee clerk to hand her a box of tissues — then said he needed them back as tears ran
down his own face.

“Today has been a tough day because everybody up here (on the committee) wants to support choice and options in
schools,” Patrick said, his voice cracking.
“Sometimes the adults get in the way with fighting and politicking in the adult world,” he continued.
Then, directly addressing Vasquez and another student who testified, Terrance Wigfall, Patrick added: “What you
have done has probably turned around some people’s thinking.”

“You have inspired me. I am going to fight for you and thousands like you,” he said. “We are not going to let politics
steal futures and dreams.”
Patrick calls himself an “education evangelist” and suggested during a recent committee meeting that anyone who
opposes expanding charter schools in Texas opposes students and families who weep when they try to attend
charter schools but are waitlisted because demand outpaces existing supply.
He has pushed for the most-dramatic overhaul of charter schools since Texas began allowing them in 1995. Patrick
called the witnesses, “perfect people, at the perfect time, with the perfect stories.”
“We’re going to try to change a lot of things this session,” he said.
Patrick is sponsoring two sweeping “school choice” proposals. One would lift the current cap of 215 licenses Texas
issues to operate charter schools and creating a special board to oversee a flood of new charter applications he
expects will follow. The other is a voucher plan that would allow businesses to earn tax credits for donations that help
poor and at-risk children leave public schools for private or religious ones — diverting public money to private schools.
During the hearing, though, Patrick also modified his charter proposal to call for 10 new charter licenses issued next
school year and 20 new ones given out in 2014-2015, as well as 35 in the 2015-2016 academic year and beyond. He
said he still supports an unlimited number of new charters, but understands that such a plan could be opposed by
some in the Legislature.
Patrick also altered his bill to give the state the authority to issue five new charter licenses for every one that is
revoked from an existing school because of poor performance. The Texas Education Agency says authorities only
close about three charters in a typical year.
The committee, which could have referred the modified bill to the full Senate, instead left it pending Thursday. It will
take it up against next week.
Democratic lawmakers, teachers groups and other educational organizations have strongly opposed vouchers — but
tend to be more mixed on charters. Still, opposition has come from both parties in the Texas House, where
lawmakers from rural areas too small to support charters are often wary of them.

[Ed. Note: Republished from Houston Chronicle,  March 24 2013, 6:54 AM http://www.sanantonioteaparty.us/?p=116485 [Ed. Note: Republished from TimesRecordNews, Wichita Falls, Texas, February 16, 2013. CLICK HERE to read the original article.]

Content he believed was plagiarized in the online CSCOPE curriculum documents emboldened Texas Rep. Steve Toth (Dist. 15) to file House Bill 760, which he hopes will bring oversight to elearning curriculums, including CSCOPE.

Toth also filed an Open Records request to obtain financial statements and meeting minutes of the CSCOPE board of directors, which currently meet behind closed doors and without posting meeting dates or minutes.

He intends to track the path of taxpayer money through the CSCOPE labyrinth and review financial statements to ensure accountability, his news release said.

The CSCOPE online curriculum is a Texas-only product that directs instruction in 70 percent of Texas school districts.

In an irony not lost on Toth, CSCOPE has required its users since inception to sign nondisclosure agreements, with CSCOPE creators threatening legal penalties to anyone divulging its content for fear of copyright infringement.

“There are criminal acts of omission and criminal acts of commission. Plagiarism is an act of commission. It was done intentionally,” Toth said in a statement. “This is a blatant, willful act of using copywritten material. Teachers can’t access CSCOPE unless they sign a nondisclosure agreement. If they disobey, it can lead to prosecution or termination.”

CSCOPE insists that it is to ensure that the online curriculum is secure and ironically to discourage copyright infringement.

Toth’s news release reports that CSCOPE plagiarized some of its curriculum from textbooks and publishing companies.

He doesn’t fault online learning, but only the CSCOPE product, he said.

“The Texas Education Service Centers who created CSCOPE have given our children a product that carries no oversight, no transparency, no accountability and to make things worse contains plagiarized content, opening our state and school districts who use it to litigation. CSCOPE has shown by their decisions and policies questionable ethics and brings into question what role, if any, they should have in teaching America’s next generation.”

Despite the accusation, the Wichita Falls Independent School District continues to use and support CSCOPE, according to Tim Powers, assistant superintendent.

“If there’s plagiarism, it’s because it got past them,” Powers said after attending a two-day meeting in Dallas that addressed CSCOPE. “They’ll correct it and improve it and make it a better document. That’s the beauty of an online curriculum.”

It won’t take years to fix it like it would to amend a textbook, he said.

Locally, curriculum advisory teams cherry-pick what they believe is the best of CSCOPE and proven methods for classroom use, but teachers are expected to use CSCOPE — and continue to use it — “with fidelity,” Powers said.

“If a teacher says she doesn’t want to use CSCOPE and use a textbook? The answer is no,” Powers said. “A textbook is not a curriculum, it’s a resource. … What business or organization have you ever gone into where you’re told, ‘Here’s your job. You do it however you want to?’ ”

Schools are facing increasing accountability, “so we better have a system of delivery by design,” he said.

In WFISD, CSCOPE’s social studies lessons have not yet been fully implemented, Poers said. He always has allowed teachers to show parents the lessons, he said.

Toth’s House bill, titled “The CSCOPE Transparency Act,” would give the State Board of Education oversight of regional education service center services and products dealing with student curriculum.

If the act gets a vote of two-thirds of all members of each house, it would take effect immediately. “We must have literally hundreds of House members sign on to this bill to get it out of the House Public Education Committee and to the House floor for a vote,” wrote CSCOPE critic Donna Garner.

CSCOPE critic Janice VanCleave, who documents teachers’ criticisms on her website www.txcscopereview.com, said she has seen plagiarism in CSCOPE.

“A teacher sent me a (CSCOPE) lesson and activity this week that was copied directly from a textbook — the same textbook that their superintendent didn’t let them use this year because they wanted them to use CSCOPE. It’s word for word,” VanCleave told the Times Record News on Monday.

CSCOPE is the same entity that last year took legal action to prevent publishing companies — listing VanCleave specifically— from viewing CSCOPE, saying that they feared she would copy it.

The 875 Texas school districts that lease CSCOPE pay about $7 per child for the online program, which sends millions of tax dollars into the unaccounted-for coffers of the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative.

CSCOPE was originally produced in 2006 by the state’s regional service centers but in 2009 was quietly transferred — without state permission or oversight — into the private nonprofit entity of TESCCC that controls it today.

However, in an unprecedented decision Feb. 8, the TESCCC agreed to relinquish its nonprofit status and open its product to the public as two of several conditions of continuing to serve Texas schools.

The TESCCC acted after being pressured into a deal by Sen. Dan Patrick, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, and State Board of Education Chairman Barbara Cargill.

CSCOPE has been growing increasingly controversial as education officials have viewed lessons that called the Boston Tea Party a terrorist act, taught Allah as God, called Christianity a cult, and praised communism as it directed students to design communist flags.

Stan Hartzler, a master math teacher who resigned in December from Luling ISD after being forced to teach CSCOPE exclusively, continued harsh criticism Tuesday for the philosophy undergirding CSCOPE, particularly its algebra course.

“Service center staff have stated that CSCOPE was written top-down, beginning with the end in mind and designed downward. Such a strategy works for planning but not for building. A house plan begins with the end in mind, but the building is (constructed) bottom up, all details being intertwined. The Service Centers would build an attic first and the foundation last, somehow tucking the plumbing and electric work in after the walls and ceilings are complete,” Hartzler wrote in an
email. “Every aspect of each CSCOPE course shows the madness of trying to upend nature. Service center leaders who admit to this designing idiocy should be laughed out of the profession.”

CSCOPE, a controversial statewide curriculum delivery system that has come under fire from critics for its prescriptive structure and a perceived anti-American bias, will undergo a sweeping review process and ensure better transparency, state Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, announced Friday.

As a result of a Senate hearing last week in which CSCOPE representatives faced tough questions from lawmakers, the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative, the state-funded group that designed the system, will review the materials included in the lesson plans and open all future meetings to the public, said Patrick, the chairman of the Senate Education Committee. The group will also post the curriculum content online and eliminate civil and criminal penalties for teachers for releasing lesson plans.

“The future of the program will depend on CSCOPE keeping its commitments they have made and gaining the trust of the Legislature, teachers and parents,” Patrick said in a statement Friday.

CSCOPE spokesman Mason Moses said Friday that the system would remain dedicated to “being a trusted resource” and that increased transparency will “create a greater reassurance in the public that [the curriculum] is the highest quality that it possibly can be.”

About 70 percent of Texas school districts use the system, which jumped into the national spotlight last November when conservative radio host Glenn Beck criticized a lesson plan that characterized the Boston Tea Party as an act of terrorism from the perspective of the British.

Social studies will be the first subject reviewed. “As was brought up in the hearing, that’s been where most of the concerns have been raised,” Moses said, “so it was most important to start with that subject.”

This past week, a Texas state district court declared the state school finance system unconstitutional. This is the result of litigation by liberals who continue to argue the need for “fairness” in funding public education in Texas. This argument sounds very appealing until it is properly analyzed.

The Texas public school districts are “independent” and their primary source of funding is the school districts’ ability to assess property taxes. This funding is based on the assessed value of property in the districts’ neighborhoods.

However, the court has claimed the system is inefficient, inadequate, and has created a statewide property tax which violates the Texas state constitution. The court said the system is unsuitable for providing the constitutionally required “general diffusion of knowledge” for low-income students and English-language learners, while districts with low property wealth are forced to tax at or near the state cap of $1.17 per $100 of taxable value and no longer have discretion to set their own tax rates. In
short, according to the court, neighborhoods with wealth discriminate against those without. This argument has been evolving for over 30 years.

In 1984, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) filed suit against state Commissioner of Education William Kirby on behalf of the Edgewood Independent School District in San Antonio, claiming discrimination against students in poor school districts. The plaintiffs charged that the state’s methods of funding public schools violated the Texas state constitution, which required the state to provide an “efficient” public school system.

The argument of “fairness” in school funding is based on emotion rather than logic. It assumes that American society is static and that the poor will never be able to move into better neighborhoods. Second, it assumes money can create better schools, and thus better students. Third, it assumes a centralized system which collects, controls, and distributes the wealth is better than one where the local community controls its schools.

Texas lawmakers and the Texas Supreme Court must overturn this lower court ruling because public school districts must remain independent and their funding must remain under local control.

If the state wants to help parents move their children from low performing schools, it should provide them vouchers so they can choose and move to better schools.

Virginia Postrel wrote in 2004, “public policy experiments rarely produce complete successes or total failures. Occasionally, however, there’s a policy disaster so catastrophic that everyone agrees that something has to change. California’s convoluted attempt to deregulate electricity was one example. Texas’s decade-long experiment in school finance equalization — universally referred to as Robin Hood — is another.”

Texas does not need a centralized bureaucracy that controls wealth and curriculum. If liberals want “fairness,” they should support vouchers for students who want to learn. We should fund students’ education, not educational systems.

[Ed. Note: Reposted from February 3, 2013, San Antonio Express-News.  CLICK HERE to read original article titled "Senators weigh 'Anti-american' curriculum."]

State senators at a committee hearing in Austin on Thursday grilled education officials over a curriculum system used by most Texas school districts that they said promotes anti-American values.

Teachers have criticized the curriculum, known as CSCOPE, as too rigid, and some testified to that effect at the hearing before the Senate Education Committee. School superintendents at the hearing and in San Antonio said the system is widely used because it’s flexible and affordable.

But lawmakers zeroed in on the social studies component of CSCOPE, citing a lesson plan conservative organizations and pundits have seized on in recent months — an optional discussion of the Boston Tea Party that invites students to include the perspective of Britons who might have considered it an “act of terrorism.”

The panel also showcased the view that CSCOPE promotes Islam over Christianity. One witness Thursday compared the system to “mind control,” and an algebra teacher wept as he described quitting because he felt he was “aiding and abetting a crime” by using CSCOPE.

State-sanctioned educational organizations developed the online program, used in more than 70 percent of school districts statewide.

It offers lesson plans and exams to help teachers follow state requirements on what should be taught — standards set by the State Board of Education that themselves have been blasted by liberal critics as promoting a triumphalist version of American history that minimizes the nation’s flaws and marginalizes minority contributions.

Districts can pick what they want to teach from CSCOPE’s 1,600 lesson plans, and some school superintendents who testified Thursday lauded its overall quality.

Smaller districts in Bexar County, such as Lackland ISD and Somerset ISD, use it. The area’s larger ones — Northside, North East, San Antonio and Harlandale — design their own.

“For us, CSCOPE is a lifesaver,” said Dina Webb, Lackland’s executive director for curriculum and instruction, who did not attend the hearing. “We don’t mandate how teachers use it and certainly, as a military district, wouldn’t teach anything anti-American. But we certainly don’t have the money or staff to be able to write new curriculum every time the state standards change.”

Webb has heard of only one complaint from a parent, regarding the lesson plan on Islam. Somerset ISD Superintendent Saul Hinojosa said he hasn’t heard any. A few Somerset teachers went to Austin to support CSCOPE in preliminary testimony collected a few weeks ago.

“If there was something controversial or something we think might not fit our kids, the teachers have the ability to modify their lesson,” Hinojosa said.

Wade Lebay, director of state CSCOPE at the Region 13 Education Service Center in Austin, said CSCOPE offers about 1,600 model lessons districts can access for a fee of $7 per student. Region 13 is one of 20 centers statewide that serve as liaisons between school districts and the Texas Education Agency, which oversees public schools.

Senators asked Lebay to read from a sixth grade lesson plan that showed international flags and asked students to “notice that socialist and communist countries use symbolism on their flags” and asked them what symbols they would use if designing a flag for a new socialist country.

Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, asked, “Does that sound like we’re sympathizing with those types of countries?” When Linda Villarreal, director of the Region 2 Education Service Center in Corpus Christi, responded, “We have 1,600 lessons, so to take just this one is —” Taylor cut her off, asking, “Who is reviewing these 1,600 plans?”

Regarding the Boston Tea Party lesson, committee Chairman Dan Patrick, R-Houston, said, “It’s amazing that when you all called our founding fathers terrorists, in Texas, that you thought that wasn’t going to cause problems.”

The panel took no action. Patrick said he’d like to revisit the issue.