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Who We Are »
Betsy Combier

Help Us to Continue to Help Others »
Email: betsy.combier@gmail.com

 
The E-Accountability Foundation announces the

'A for Accountability' Award

to those who are willing to whistleblow unjust, misleading, or false actions and claims of the politico-educational complex in order to bring about educational reform in favor of children of all races, intellectual ability and economic status. They ask questions that need to be asked, such as "where is the money?" and "Why does it have to be this way?" and they never give up. These people have withstood adversity and have held those who seem not to believe in honesty, integrity and compassion accountable for their actions. The winners of our "A" work to expose wrong-doing not for themselves, but for others - total strangers - for the "Greater Good"of the community and, by their actions, exemplify courage and self-less passion. They are parent advocates. We salute you.

Winners of the "A":

Johnnie Mae Allen
David Possner
Dee Alpert
Aaron Carr
Harris Lirtzman
Hipolito Colon
Larry Fisher
The Giraffe Project and Giraffe Heroes' Program
Jimmy Kilpatrick and George Scott
Zach Kopplin
Matthew LaClair
Wangari Maathai
Erich Martel
Steve Orel, in memoriam, Interversity, and The World of Opportunity
Marla Ruzicka, in Memoriam
Nancy Swan
Bob Witanek
Peyton Wolcott
[ More Details » ]
 
California Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (LA): Lowering Academic Standards, Increasing Union Control

Victim recitation
The education unions are fighting against making those poor little darlings learn the basics
By Jill Stewart, Sacramento News and Reviews, September 2, 2004

LINK

God, I love being right. But, having correctly predicted 10 months ago that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Education Secretary Richard Riordan were so green they ran the risk of being badly rolled by California's sophisticated anti-reformist education unions, I can feel no joy.

California's students, including 2 million to 4 million disadvantaged children desperate for an education, are under attack by the unions and their mouthpiece, Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg of Los Angeles. The attackers have launched a multiphased, long-term war to implement lower public-school standards in math, science, reading and English--as well as union control over what else our kids learn. And they have duped the snoozing Schwarzenegger already--twice.

The anti-reformers do not see children as small people who badly need solid information from adults. Instead, they see children as victims. Led by Goldberg, the anti-reformers promote their philosophy as fanatically as a religious belief.

Goldberg's view of students as victims must come from her own unhappy schooling as a child. But now, this former failed high-school teacher and disastrous member of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board is trying to turn the clock back on California's highly successful classroom reforms. In her world, such things as using memorization to learn the multiplication table are fundamental evils. Basic building blocks of learning are dismissed as "rote" and downright inhumane to the victim students.

When is the governor going to wake up to what is happening?

Goldberg, who wangled herself a position on the powerful state Curriculum Commission, once chaired the Los Angeles Unified School District Board. She left the Los Angeles school district so bereft of academic standards that I christened the district 'Los Angeles Mummified'--and the nickname stuck. Under Goldberg, a student could be failing class and still do sports. A kid could fail every test and get a solid C. To be kicked out, a student usually had to draw a gun. Skills like math and phonics were replaced by adult-driven, politicized subjects. Three-quarters of the kids were functionally illiterate.

Education Secretary Dick Riordan knows better than anyone the mentality behind Goldberg and the education unions. Yet, he failed to alert Schwarzenegger in time. Already, the governor has agreed to dumbed-down science books. Most recently, he buckled to the anti-English-immersion crowd, handing it a staggering $30 million to launch another failed bilingual program, of the sort resoundingly rejected by California voters.

As mayor of Los Angeles, Riordan took aim at Goldberg's dumbed-down academics, enraging her by pouring more than $1 million into campaigns to oust her longtime minions from the L.A. Mummified school board.

Riordan won, and an impressive array of pro-reform educators and business people took control of L.A. Mummified. The new board undertook a historic makeover of the sad-sack academic programs, and today, achievement at many of the poorest schools in Los Angeles ranks with that of middle-class suburban schools--a stunning development.

Now that I have given Riordan his due (Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I once worked for Riordan on an aborted plan to launch a newspaper), I must give him a well-deserved public whacking. Riordan let Goldberg slip into the state budget her long-stewing and very bad plan to create the massive $30 million program to divert Latino children out of English immersion.

Shame on Dick and Arnold. Goldberg has a long, detailed list of other assaults she plans against the education-reform movement. Serious educators inside the Schwarzenegger administration are so upset at Schwarzenegger buckling to her that some have resigned. Rae Belisle, the deeply respected executive director of the state Board of Education, is leaving, and so is at least one Riordan staffer.

Yet, the person who should bow out is Goldberg's enabler in the Schwarzenegger administration, Board of Education member and Schwarzenegger confidante Bonnie Reiss.

In a hurriedly called meeting last week with furious members of the state Board of Education, Schwarzenegger reportedly told educators that he was 'slammed'--tricked by Goldberg, who has been cooing into Reiss' ear, into supplying the $30 million to anti-immersion factions.

But Governor Schwarzenegger, the excuse of being slammed is not good enough. If you don't get on top of the education wars right now, you are going to wreck everything. We will see more and more incidents in which anti-reform legislators like Goldberg, Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, Assemblyman Marco Firebaugh and Senator Martha Escutia try to sneak through obscure administrative changes, union-controlled 'review panels' and special funding aimed at trashing existing reforms.

How was Schwarzenegger blindsided by Goldberg? First of all, Riordan never has been too interested in battles about how and what to teach. Riordan was preoccupied with settling a massive lawsuit against schools for disadvantaged kids, figuring out better financing of disparate school programs, and his plan to give far more power to principals than he was in firing principals who don't do the job.

Riordan's ideas are admittedly intriguing. After all, it's almost impossible to fire a principal. (In Los Angeles, I wrote about one lemon principal who was infamously allowed to wear a court-ordered ankle monitor to school after recklessly driving into another motorist and killing him. It took years of battle to get rid of her.) But Riordan should have been paying attention and should have kept a lid on Goldberg's scheme.

Even worse was the behavior by Reiss, who was quickly duped by Goldberg. What else can you expect from a classic Hollywood liberal who is almost bound to buy into the 'victim' dogma about children? It's not Reiss' fault. How could she know there's an epic struggle under way between those who want kids to learn real things, like algebra, and those who believe that school is for insulating kids from such unpleasantness?

The research screams out that the reformers are right and the anti-reformers are wrong. Period.

Although Reiss did not return my call, it's widely known--and was detailed in a terrific piece by Peter Schrag of The Sacramento Bee--that Reiss has become something of a Goldberg protégé.

Now the emboldened Goldberg will seek far more concessions. She already is pressing hard to lower the bar in classroom mathematics, even as mathematics experts widely call for much more rigorous math in California.

Jim Milgram and H.H. Wu, two globally respected Stanford University math professors, were asked by California officials to figure out how California students and teachers could catch up to the highly advanced math that is taught, routinely, by teachers to all children in poor countries such as Poland and Bulgaria.

Milgram and Wu came up with a brilliant plan for California kids, and Goldberg and the unions stopped them cold. After all, it would require that teachers actually be trained in mathematics. How dare they? Goldberg demanded an entire rewrite, and the two math experts bowed out of the silly political mess.

Milgram explained: "The teachers would have to be actually taught mathematics, which they simply are not being taught in their [teacher training] colleges. The education establishment is fully insulated from what mathematics is, how to teach mathematics to others, and how to learn it themselves. We predicted that under the existing reforms, California math scores would rise and then level off. Those reforms were fine, but they went after the low-hanging fruit. Now, the teachers themselves must be educated, or they will continue to hold back the kids in California. We found out that is what is going on: Undereducated teachers hold back the kids. Jackie Goldberg is doing everything she can to stop us. What Jackie is doing is scary. We have to move California forward, but Jackie is very effectively pushing California back."

It all gets down to protecting the adults. It's so much easier on the adults in the classroom if you lower the bar and just dumb down the kids. How great for the adults.

As I wrote last year, Davis took an unusually courageous stand on education reform: He built on the Wilson reforms, ignored the unions and gave us tough subject-matter standards linked directly to textbooks and teacher training.

But now, Schwarzenegger must build on the legacy of Wilson and Davis. He must launch phase two, forcing the adults in the classroom to change even more. Now that research shows us that the problem in schools is the adults--not the kids--it's time the adults grew up. Equally important, Schwarzenegger should never again be stuck reacting after the fact. He also should try to find a way to halt or water down the $30 million for failed 'bilingual' education. And he should slap the Republicans back into consciousness: Their mantra of 'local control' merely will hand the schools back to the anti-reform unions and let the school districts slide again. Centralized control of the schools, by the state Board of Education, clearly is working.

Finally, Arnold and Dick should tell Reiss to stop enabling the historically and chronically wrong Goldberg. Reiss can learn about the true needs of kids over lunch with California's most brilliant school-turnaround artist, the famed principal and reformer Nancy Ichinaga of Inglewood.

But that's assuming Schwarzenegger agrees with the fundamental view of reformers: Kids are not victims. They are pure, untapped potential. What's lacking is adults who have something to teach.

Jill Stewart's article on Governor Davis published in Nov., 2003:

Capitol punishment
Hey Dick, welcome to Sacramento
Riordan may want to rethink taking the education job once he's faced the anti-reformers
By Jill Stewart , Sacramento News and Reviews, November 13, 2003

LINK

I don't like Gray Davis. He's a weak leader who stuck his finger in the wind to decide what to think.

By contrast, I like incoming California Secretary of Education Richard Riordan, recently appointed by Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I know Riordan to be a leader with strong beliefs.

Because this is true, why do I feel so damn queasy about the prospects for California's near-miracle in the public schools to survive now that we have Schwarzenegger and Riordan in charge?

The answer is that for all his failure, Davis greatly succeeded in one thing: He stopped a high-pressure crowd of educators and politicos who are hellbent on reversing the big advances that have ended 25 years of academic freefall in California's public schools.

I realize this sounds insane. Who would want to end the historic wave of success we are observing, mostly in our elementary schools? What sort of people would oppose the first sustained, major improvements in achievement among children in California in more than two decades?

Davis understood this bizarre, multi-level chess game. So did his education secretary, the sharp Kerry Mazzoni.

Every year, opponents of reform would bring forth ugly, politically motivated legislation to roll back the improvements, and the Democrat-controlled Legislature would shamefully approve them. Every time, Davis vetoed these attacks on school reform.

Indeed, Davis went in the opposite direction.

Building on reforms adopted by the California State Board of Education under former Governor Pete Wilson, Davis' board of ed. adopted rigorous state academic standards that are the same for all children and that are tracked through testing so the public can see how well a certain school is teaching the subject matter in comparison to other schools near and far.

Districts like Los Angeles Unified School District saw student achievement levels skyrocket once they began teaching explicit phonics to grade-schoolers and English immersion to immigrants and once they re-trained teachers who had learned next to nothing at the state's teacher colleges. In roughly 70 school districts, tens of thousands of teachers have now been retrained under California's 'Reading First' program.

But at districts that fought those state reforms, such as San Diego Unified School District, student achievement is in the tank.

The most amazing thing revealed by statewide testing is that poor children--whom the California Teachers Association (CTA) and big teachers' unions insisted could not be taught because of "poverty"--are not being held back by poverty but by the teachers themselves. At reformed schools, less-privileged poor children now work at nearly suburban-kid levels in reading and math. All they needed was decent instruction.

Schwarzenegger and Riordan don't know these crucial issues the way Davis and Mazzoni do. They are so green they probably don't even know that a few days after he lost the recall on October 7, Davis finally buckled to the anti-reformers.

Sadly, Davis signed a law allowing California to ignore a requirement that federal "Reading First" money go only to programs teaching English. The new law allows the money to be diverted into the mostly Spanish "bilingual" program, from which children often emerge at age 12 functionally illiterate in English. When a new funding source is found for a program--even one like bilingual education, which voters killed--it means the program could come roaring back.

Schwarzenegger and Riordan have only a nanosecond of political time to get up to speed before unions and anti-reform politicos start slamming them with incomprehensible legislation freighted with backdoor ways to end grade-school testing, muddle phonics, insert chaos into the curriculum standards and water down school accountability.

And the unpleasant games start at the top in Sacramento, with people like state Senator John Vasconcellos, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, and include many beginners too, like junior Assemblywoman Lonnie Hancock of Berkeley.

They are among the very liberal Democrats fighting to end the testing of second-graders--tests that allow schools to identify struggling children before they enter third grade, when it's almost too late to help many.

Another obstacle to reform is the powerful 330,000-member CTA. The CTA keeps trying to push through a law that would force the state to revamp its content standards every seven years.

Because it takes years to develop these content standards--which dictate exactly what a child should know about everything from grammar to multiplication, and by what age--such a law would create permanent upheaval.

Another goal of anti-reformers is to revamp the statewide test known as STAR (Standardized Testing and Reporting). Though anti-reformers claim they want to make the test better, serious reformers don't buy this. If a new test comes out every few years, it makes year-to-year comparisons difficult and protects teachers from scrutiny.

In 2004, a massive war over STAR will occur. Riordan had better be ready to fight to the bone to make sure STAR is not messed with.

I spoke to Riordan about his new job, and though he is knowledgeable on general topics, he did not volunteer the kind of information I believe should be on the tip of his tongue.

I'm worried Riordan will be drawn to trendy uber-discussions on education while some in the Legislature turn back the clock. (A disclosure here: I worked with Riordan last spring and summer on his proposal to launch his own newspaper in Los Angeles. That work has ended, and the newspaper project is dead.)

Don't get me wrong; Riordan's no neophyte. He has a history in education reform. But his big successes have tended toward electoral victories and brick-and-mortar stuff. As Los Angeles' mayor, he pushed ideas to cut red tape and build schools more quickly to relieve student overcrowding, for instance.

Riordan's biggest education reform came when he upended the Los Angeles school board, whose seats were controlled for years by a union, United Teachers Los Angeles. The Riordan-backed candidates instituted sweeping curriculum reforms, including a widely criticized requirement that grade schools devote three hours per day to teaching reading.

Today, the minority-heavy Los Angeles Unified School District enjoys higher test scores than California itself--a major achievement.

When California voters backed Proposition 227 five years ago, requiring that immigrant students be immersed in English, Riordan was the only elected official I could find in California who had the cojones to go on record supporting Proposition 227.

Riordan also has spent a small fortune privately underwriting the nationally known Puente Learning Center, on Los Angeles' poor eastside, where immigrants from 6 to 80 years of age attend and graduate from well-regarded English-immersion classes.

But Riordan has been behind some awful flops in education, too. He has a penchant for arm's-length reforms that never hit the classroom.

In the 1990s, he enthusiastically backed an unproven plan called LEARN, in which student achievement was expected to improve greatly once teachers, parents and principals were allowed to co-govern their school. Never happened. The biggest result of LEARN was squabbling and union dominance over parents.

LEARN never changed what teachers did. So, the teachers kept right on using ineffective teaching methods, such as the old California standard of "go at your own pace; do your own thing" that has set children so adrift since the 1970s.

Riordan also poured millions of dollars into computers for poor schools. But poor children are not helped much by computers, which distract teachers from core goals like literacy.

Riordan will be a success only if he accepts the fact that Davis, a failure as governor, knew what he was doing in education.

Riordan should hire Mazzoni immediately, if she's willing to coach him on issues. He also should hire several former executive directors of the California State Board of Education, such as John Mockler and Bill Lucia, and current Executive Director Rae Belisle, who have played key roles in reform.

The one person Schwarzenegger ought to reappoint to the board, without a doubt, is Marion Joseph, the hero who tore the lid off California's "whole language" disaster in the 1990s. Joseph is the toughest education reformer around, a stickler for allowing no backsliding on the standards that are finally working for California.

Riordan should persuade Suzanne Tacheny, Joe Nuñez and Nancy Ichinaga to stay on the board, though the rumor is Ichinaga will step down. The bluntly honest Ichinaga is the most gifted school-turnaround expert in California.

He also needs frequent chats with reading genius Alice Furry, of the Sacramento County Office of Education, to learn which school districts are refusing to do the right thing. Bureaucrats in places like San Diego have no right to withhold proven education methods from failing children who deserve to learn. It's like withholding medicine from the sick.

The other day, Riordan was talking to me about possible ways of "empowering principals", a long-term reform idea discussed in a book by Riordan's longtime friend Bill Ouchi.

Hey, I agree it's a great idea to empower school principals. I'm all for it.

But there's no time, Dick.

Right now, he has to forget about untested ideas that swirl around education. He needs a battle plan for the sneaky legislation, constant attacks on testing and content standards, and God knows what else.

He may not realize it yet, but Riordan's new job is to fight people who, for reasons only they grasp, are intent on ramming California's education miracle right back into the dark ages of the 1980s and '90s.

So, Dick? You still want the job?

 
© 2003 The E-Accountability Foundation