Perhaps we can start by looking at a most recent effort to solicit parent input driven by the Bellevue PTSA Council. All PTAs of Bellevue schools are hosted under the Bellevue PTSA and in turn, the PTSA's of all cities in the state of Washington align themselves with the priorities set by the WA State PTA. This in turn is a part of the National PTA thus compelled to follow its lead.
Parents of Bellevue got an email from their respective school PTAs around March 4th 2011 that said:
"The Bellevue PTSA Council requests that all PTA members and Bellevue public school parents complete the following survey. The purpose of the survey is to gauge the level of support for a Community Values statement that is currently being developed. The intent of the statement is to provide a data point to both the district and the union about what is important to Bellevue public school stakeholders."
This wording makes it clear that this survey is not the independent effort of the school PTA. The school PTA was simply the messenger. The message of the survey was - we are led to believe - crafted by the Bellevue PTSA.
The survey, unfortunately, is no longer available. It was largely asking the community whether it agrees with having "effective" teachers in schools and whether we support the implementation of various performance driven measures for teachers.
Since then, there has been a large enough backlash on PTA's efforts that the leadership decided to not publish the detailed results of the survey. I met with Linda Mui, Kristen Edelhertz, Carolyn Watson - President, Legislative Director, Secretary of the Bellevue PTSA respectively on May 31 2011 where they clarified that the survey has created a difficult climate specially with regards to teachers and they were trying to "put it behind them" - hence the reason to not publish the survey results.
Kristen Edelhertz presented me with a folder where the council members had "summarized" the comments of the community. Before the meeting, I was promised I could see the comments but that turned out to not be the case. This is the email I got from Linda Mui before the meeting that alluded to being able to go through the comments:
However, it was clear from my subsequent meeting with Linda, Kristen and Carolyn Watson that a large number of teachers correctly viewed the survey as an attack on their profession. Teachers felt - I was told - that parents would likely not be aware of the depth and breadth of issues around the public school system and that their answers to the survey could not but reflect that limited understanding.
This is of course true. What may seem as a simple system - the public school - is anything but. I have been researching the many aspects of the public school for the last two years and there are areas I have not yet begun to explore. Many of the policies driven by the Obama administration - which is really a continuation of the Bush policies with more punitive/incentive measures - are highly debated in intellectual circles. High stakes testing - where punitive measures are tied to the results of a test - has been critiqued by many scholars. Whether tying student scores to teacher evaluations could help student "performance" is another highly debated topic. Understandably, large numbers of parents do not understand these issues well, but the PTA survey quite clearly attempts to use the limited knowledge of parents to advance an agenda that deserves closer study.
It may come as a surprise that the PTA organization - that is widely viewed as the democratic voice of the community - has fallen behind the Obama administration's insistence that it is not chronic underfunding but "bad" teachers that is at the heart of the problems confronting the nation's schools. Many of the PTA membership loves our teachers - they spend countless numbers of hours helping teachers in the class room, on field trips, on special projects, conducting teacher appreciation efforts etc. So it is clearly not this wide membership that has decided to advance an agenda to hurt teachers. The agenda for the PTA has been borrowed from the state - it is clearly not the democratic voice of an informed membership.
As we have already seen, the survey was not designed by the individual PTAs of schools. While the wording of the initial email by the Bellevue PTSA serves to misguide us that the survey was the independent idea of the Bellevue PTSA, a barrage of negative feedback to the survey later compelled them to expose more of the role they played in the form of a letter to the community.
The Bellevue PTSA decided to respond to the negative feedback it received on April 17, 2011 by publishing a letter to the community where they admit that the survey was not even their independent idea. In this letter, Linda Mui explains that "We are bringing aspects of the State PTA legislative platform to the local level and following the lead of other PTA Councils in our area who have also engaged in local advocacy to gather and share parent voices with their negotiating parties."
So what is happening here is simply the extension of the state's agenda under the guise of representative democracy. The Washington State in turn - in their insistence on not allowing tax subsidies for big business to expire and hence claiming that there is a funding crisis in education - carries on the agenda of the Obama administration. By hiding behind groups like school PTAs - that at first glance seems to be democratic - these scoundrels implement their dictatorship on us and further insult us by calling it democracy.
The Bellevue PTSA letter to the community makes a strained claim - or suggestion - that teachers should sacrifice for the benefit of the children. PTA takes the claim made by the Obama administration that "there is no money" for public education as a given, an unquestionable first principle. In refusing to challenge this contemptuous lie, they can then do no more than pit teachers against students, pit younger teachers against the more senior teachers and divide the community all the while claiming that "working together we will continue to strengthen our schools." How such divisive efforts can help in their stated goal of collaboration with teachers is left unexplained.
Even assuming that there really is no money for education - which by the way is absolutely not the case - how can pitting teachers against students help? If my child's teacher has to finish school and rush to a second job, how can that help my child get a good education? If a teacher has to obsessively focus on tests and test results, would my child then be helped to inculcate a love of learning and how to be a life long learner? If younger - less expensive - teachers replace older teachers, would that not mean that these younger teachers would soon themselves leave, thus not being committed to teaching our children? Teacher attrition of this form is already quite clearly happening with Teach For America (TFA) recruits that are generally brought into replace more senior teachers.
As Linda Mui outlines in the community letter, the State PTA sought the input of two groups - "Stand For Children (Stand)" and the "League of Education Voters (LEV)" to come up with a values statement which was then submitted to the community as a survey. These two groups support legislative efforts aimed at stricter teacher evaluation. They support the privatization of public schools via charters, Stand quite openly and LEV with some ambivalence. They both have wealthy backers. A look into their annual reports as well as the IRS Form 990 of 2009 - required filing for non-profit groups - showed that a bulk of their funding comes from a few corporate sources. Thus - contrary to their claims, these are not grassroots organizations. [Since then, it appears the organizations - specially LEV - have tried their best to hide these sources, the 2009 report is not linked from their site and the donor composition has not been revealed for year 2010. Neither LEV nor Stand seem to have filed a Schedule B for the Form 990 - which must describe the largest donors and their contribution amounts - and I received no response to my subsequent query as to the missing Schedule B. But you can still find links from donor organizations that point their way. You may check on the 990's using this site.]
The turn to attack teachers by these well-heeled business interests is a reaction on their part to resolve the contradictions in the economy of their own making on the backs of our teachers, children and working families. While parasitic hedge funds gambled and lost trillions of dollars of wealth - social wealth, teachers struggled with increasing work loads and were asked to do even more. While big executives of Wall Street were bailed out handsomely, teachers were laid off and they were told that the nation needs "better" teachers to prepare for a "new" global economy. While hard working families in Detroit had their wages slashed with a turn to an even cheaper labor economy, teachers were told to deal with the "New Normal", the era of starving and getting by for the poor while the rich bloats themselves up to astronomical proportions. While not a cent more was used to alleviate the utter human misery that exists for millions of children - teachers returned home from their second job and corrected home work done under lamp light when utilities were cut off for hundreds of thousands of working class families. As Washington State Billionaires including Steve Ballmer, Paul Allen and Jeff Bezos spent $6.3 Million to successfully defeat I1098 - the initiative to tax the richest 10% - teachers dived into their meager savings to buy clothes and supplies for homeless students. When the comfortable upper middle class functionaries of the PTA sent surveys attacking teachers to trap unwary parents, teachers continued to teach our children and shelved their tears - for they knew through bitter experience that even walls had ears.
In stating that the negative feedback received from the community regarding the survey prompted them to revise the Community Values Statement, the PTA once more attempts to deceive us. This statement is meant to make us think that the PTA leadership took out the harmful aspects from the statement. In fact, a closer look at the final Community Values Statement reveals that no such thing took place.
The values statement was made shorter by lumping a few of the regressive measures together making no substantial difference from their initial draft. Evaluation systems for teachers and the attack on seniority rights are intact in the final values statement.
Kristen Edelhertz claimed that the survey revealed that large numbers of respondents supported the values and that is why no "major" revisions were made. However, the letter clearly states that the PTA received just 876 responses in a school district that is home to 17,870 students based on figures as of May 2010. Kristen takes the response of barely 5% of the community and decides that there is support for the views of the PTA leadership.
At this point, I'm sure that the famous "unconcerned parents" cry will be raised quite loudly. However, has the PTA done a single thing to make sure that more parents were aware of the issues concerning our public schools so that they will be inclined to respond to the survey? In a school district where 9% of students study English as a second language and 30% of students speak a first language other than English, was any attempt made to translate the survey to other languages? In a district of vast inequality highlighted by 22% of its students using Free and Reduced Priced Lunch services, was any attempt made to send the survey in non-electronic form?
The answer to all those questions is a resounding No. A teacher confided in me that the survey had the feel of a "push poll" and thus she did not take it. Push-poll is a technique that attempts to influence or alter the view of respondents under the guise of conducting a poll where the data gathered is of secondary importance. I myself did not take the poll for similar reasons.
Unfortunately, this is not the first instance that the PTA has shown its hidden agenda of backing the undemocratic policies of the state to the direct detriment of the community.
Last year, the PTA was strictly opposed to any form of community education regarding school budget and its inequitable allocation. Once I understood the issues in March 2010, I appealed to the PTA to make this information available to parents. Carolyn Watson effectively blocked this initiative by kowtowing to the elite of the city that controls much of the local school policies. Ms. Watson put me in touch with such pleasant personalities like Janet Suppes - the former president of the Bellevue PTSA Council. Apart from Shirley, none of these people were in our local PTA, but it was quite clear how the local PTA was supposed to kowtow to their point of view which wasn't enthusiastic about educating the community. The main view of this group was that I should work within their reactionary organization - the PTA - and help them with their various legislative efforts and get my voice "heard" by "important" people in legislature and so forth. There was no need to educate the community, as far as they saw, but apparently we must spend large amounts of time educating these "important" people who should know more about these issues than us, as that - in fact - is their well paid job.
Here is how Ms. Watson at that time showed her allegiance to this elite set while marginalizing an issue of paramount importance - that of educating the parent community on school related issues:
This year, while the district has run from the community fearing questions from informed parents, effectively delegating this work to a civilian police that calls themselves "Parents Alliance For Gifted Education (PAGE)", what indeed has the PTA done to make the district hold the necessary public meetings where the public can educate themselves on the wrecking job of the district? What has the PTA done to expose the sham that goes on in the Community Engagement Forums conducted by the district?
Of course the PTA claims that the state has no money for public eduction and that teachers are not doing a good enough job - which are nothing but the parroted lies of the Obama administration - are easy enough to see through. The harder problem is then to figure out how to move forward as concerned parents. How do we ensure that this reactionary organization does not hijack the community's desires for a decent public school system?
Parents clearly see lots of issues confronting their children in the class room. But there is not a single voice that tries to educate us about them in an insightful way. Instead we are left to grope around our immediate concerns amid a set of increasingly loud voices that tell us that teachers are the problem - get rid of the "bad" ones and things will be better, they insist.
And this presents us - the average parent who wants to do the right thing - with a rather difficult problem. If the PTA is advancing the agenda of the state without critique, how do we start learning about the reality of the class room, what teachers face daily and how it affects our children? We cannot expect an organization that uncritically tows the line up and down the education food chain to help us understand these issues. We must turn to our rank and file teachers for this understanding.
But here again, we are faced with another perhaps even more difficult problem. Teachers - like any persecuted group - are fairly hesitant to openly discuss the issues they face. Sometimes they are mandated to teach in ways that they know is not the best for our children, but they must do so if they are to keep their jobs. Teachers need all our support and one way we can support them is by an unflinching critique of the policy work of the PTA. A lack of critique would make teachers think that most parents are behind the PTA agenda and that is not the case.
But that is not all that we need to do. If we wash off our hands by critique, we are no worse than those elected officials that insist we must write yet more pointless letters to the same crooks that are hell-bent on destroying the last vestige of a decent public education system. Moving forward, there is an urgent need to come together as a concerned group of parents, teachers and students to organize and develop our independent plan for a sound public school system. We started this work in the Bellevue Public Library recently. Much remains to be done. I ask anyone interested in developing this critical understanding of the social process happening around the public school to please contact me so we can continue to develop our own informed plan for a sound public school system for Bellevue.
thank you.
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