The Ten Commandments of Public Education

I. Public schools are open to everyone. Thou shalt not call charter schools public because they aren't.

• Charter schools do not have elected boards that answer to the public 
• Charter schools are not subject to the same laws and regulations as public schools
• Charter schools can and do cherry pick the best students
• Through convoluted business deals many charter school operators make enormous sums of money but the schools perform on average, no better than public schools 
• Education is a right of every citizen in the US. Closing schools, and denying students access to a thorough and efficient education (New Orleans and Newark are 2 recent examples) takes away that right.
• 'Choice' does not equal 'Access'. A lottery does not guarantee every child who wants to attend a charter will be able to attend—and graduate.

II. Thou shalt not take the name of teachers in vain.

• No bashing, trashing, demoralizing or name calling
• We're not greedy, lazy or selfish
• We're not all inept or incompetent. As in any profession, there are some who are not doing a good job. It's the administrator's job to take all legal steps necessary to help the educator, or file tenure charges.
• We are not sitting around waiting to collect a pension
• We are not responsible for the physical, emotional and psychological baggage our students carry with them to school every day
• We are not responsible for poor parenting
• We are highly educated taxpayers, neighbors, citizens, voters and productive members of society who deserve to be treated with the same respect as any other profession

III. Keep holy the instructional time, the professional development time and yes, the down time.

• Our professional development time should be spent developing our craft, collaborating with peers and strategizing for our students—not doing meaningless busy work like data collection
• Many educators put in 60+ hours a week, so burn out is a real issue. If educators are burned out, they are less effective. With the increased emphasis on testing and test prep, the amount of work educators are now expected to do is simply unrealistic
• We want to teach to students—not to tests

IV. Honor thy educators

• We are the solution—not the problem
• We want a seat at the table
• Education 'reform' that is done to educators instead of with educators will fail. Just ask Michelle Rhee.
• Tenure is not a recipe for 'bad teaching'. There is no correlation between tenure and 'failing students'. Tenure means due process—'innocent until proven guilty'. The court of public opinion is not the place to decide the fate of an educator. It should not take years and enormous amounts of money to remove an ineffective educator from the classroom. States have already revised tenure laws to shorten the length of the process. NY and NJ are perfect examples. 


• Don't sugar coat us with compliments, praise and syrupy-sweet pronouncements, and don't tell the world that educators should be paid more while simultaneously trying to destroy basic job protections and slashing funding which will deter highly qualified and capable graduates from making a career in education. With all those dogs who ate all that homework, our b.s. radar is pretty high.

V. Thou shalt not kill public education

• Fund public education! Every dollar that is cut is another nail in the coffin. 

VI. Thou shalt not lie cheat on test scores

• Cheating is cheating. When you do it, everyone suffers—especially students. This goes for public as well as charter schools. 

VII. Thou shalt not steal mine student data 

• No selling to/sharing with for-profit education companies
• No selling to/sharing with people and businesses that have no educational experience
• No selling to/sharing with public media that will use it to attack educators

VIII. Thou shalt not bear false witness against public education

• The effects of poverty have been proven to impede brain function and a child's ability to learn
• The US has the second highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world
• When poverty is factored out, US students rank among the best in the world
• We do not have 'failing' schools. We have segregated schools in high poverty neighborhoods.
• We do not have an epidemic of 'bad teachers'. We have many educators who face enormous challenges working in high poverty schools that are underfunded and understaffed.
• Good prenatal care has been proven to help students perform better in school, yet the US has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the industrialized world
• We do not have a high school dropout 'crisis'. The US high school graduation rate for students who earn a diploma in four years is almost 80%; it's about 90% for those who earn it in four to six years.
• Some reasons students take more than four years to earn a diploma: military service, prolonged illness, moving either out of the country or for migratory work, going to work to help support the family
• Testing does not improve teaching or student learning
• Testing does not fix chronic poverty 

IX. Thou shalt not covet thy neighborhood public school's best and brightest students

• Charter schools skim the best students from the top and counsel out or simply do not provide services for the most challenging and therefore most expensive students, who are then sent back to the underfunded public schools

X. Thou shalt not covet thy neighborhood public school's resources

• Every child who leaves a public school to attend a charter school takes up to 90% of their per-pupil funding with them, but the public school's fixed costs don't decrease. This combined with unprecedented funding cuts to public education depletes valuable resources and renders public schools less able to do their job.

An open letter to Rowan University President, Dr. Ali A. Houshmand

Dear Dr. Houshmand,

I understand that you have invited Gov. Chris Christie to be the keynote speaker at next month’s commencement ceremonies and that you are bestowing an honorary degree on him. Why?

As you well know, Rowan University started out as a teachers college, and in fact in 1937, the school’s name was changed to New Jersey State Teachers College at Glassboro. Your school’s own website describes it thus:

"The college gained a national reputation as a leader in the field of reading education and physical therapy when it opened a clinic for children with reading disabilities in 1935... The college was one of the first in the country to recognize these needs and was in the forefront of the special education movement." (emphasis mine)

Correct me if I am wrong, but no other New Jersey governor has treated public education, students and teachers with such vile contempt as Gov. Christie. No other New Jersey governor that I know of has denigrated, demonized and tried to destroy one of the best public education systems in the country the way Gov. Christie has. He has cut billions from education funding, which has resulted in 10,000 educators losing their jobs. He has contributed to and expanded the racial and socioeconomic segregation of our urban school districts with policies like One Newark. He has accused teachers of being ‘greedy, selfish and disgraceful’ and using our students as ‘drug mules’. If you need more proof, here it is, and as blogger, TeacherBiz said in her post on this issue, if that’s not enough, just Google it.

It would be bad enough if this were an isolated political bent, but it’s not. Gov. Christie’s attacks on public education are part of a well-organized, highly funded nationwide campaign to privatize public education, destroy teachers unions and turn the teaching profession into a low-paid, high-turnover test proctor service. If you are not aware of this, then again, I must ask, ‘Why?’ As an educator and president of one of the state’s premier teachers colleges, how can you not know what is happening in K-12 education, how can you not be up in arms about it, and how can you bestow honors on someone hell-bent on destroying one of the bedrocks of a democracy, and something that New Jersey does better than almost every other state in the country?  

To bestow an honorary degree on Gov. Christie would be a slap in the face to all the hard working education majors graduating that day, not to mention all the alumni of the school of education, every education professional working in New Jersey, and every single child who attends a New Jersey public school. It also sends a powerful message that you support his destructive public education policies. Do you really want that as part of your legacy?

Christina and Joseph Nappi have started a Change.org petition calling on you to reconsider your decision. Mr. Nappi also wrote a letter to the South Jersey Times imploring you to reconsider. The petition and letter are picking up steam on social media. I urge you to please reconsider this decision. I urge you to take a stand for public education and against the corporatization of one of the last vestiges of a strong democracy. Unless and until educators stand up against the privatization juggernaut, our children don’t stand a chance. You can lead the way.

Thank you.

The school to prison pipeline just got a whole lot shorter

Listen… do you hear it? CLICK! Buzzzzz... Whirrr… Do you see it? Locks! Cameras! Action!

All across America public schools are looking more like prisons. With every school shooting more and more security measures are being put in place, and that effort ratcheted up exponentially after the massacre at Newtown. But who pays, and at what cost?

My school district is spending $300,000 on security upgrades, including hiring a security consultant to do a top-to-bottom review of our entire district. This isn’t unusual. The new normal in American schools is more cameras, more monitors, more locks, more check-in procedures, and more—and new—security drills.

$300,000 is a lot of money to a school district. Where does it come from? Well, when Gov. Christie slashed education spending and called back school surpluses in 2010, my district laid off about 8 teachers and outsourced all 62 of our special education aides. Many of the aides were certified teachers who had worked with our neediest students for years, and all were making a modest salary with benefits. Almost all left rather than work for half the pay and no benefits. Turnover is high now because $10 an hour is not a sustainable wage for someone looking to make a career in education.

My point is not to dredge up the past. At the time I was very critical of my school district, but that’s water under the bridge. My point is that we all pay with the continued loss of staff and services at our schools because these security upgrades are not required by the state. But no superintendent in their right mind wants another Newtown. And parents must have the peace of mind knowing their children are safe for 7 hours a day. But with Gov. Christie slashing school funding by billions, and a 2% property tax cap now the law in New Jersey, school districts are scrambling to find the money to pay for all this. In the meantime the day-to-day operations of our public schools have suffered: teachers, classes and after school activities have never been fully restored, and fees to parents for things like bussing, sports and clubs (aka shadow taxes) remain.

Every act of gun violence in America has an equal and opposite reaction in our schools: they are becoming more and more like prisons. All Baby Boomers and some Gen. X’ers remember a time when anyone could walk into a school without being buzzed in. There was never a fear of a gun-toting lunatic destroying lives. But those days are long gone. The new normal in many schools is unlock the door to enter a room; lock the door when you leave. Period. No exceptions except for places like the office or nurse. This goes for storage rooms, copier rooms, faculty lunchrooms and bathrooms. In many schools teachers can now be written up for leaving their classroom door unlocked. In addition to fire drills, school districts have new drills for active shooters inside or outside the building.

Yes, these are all necessary things in a nation that can’t and won’t pass meaningful gun legislation because, as the illogical NRA rhetoric—and campaign money—goes, criminals don’t obey laws so we can’t have more of them. And if there’s anyone out there who believes that, I want you to explain it to my first graders when we have a lockdown drill and I’m trying to keep them quiet while they pepper me with questions and scenarios:

“Ms. Corfield, what if there’s a real gun?”

“Ms. Corfield, they can just shoot through the glass.”

“Ms. Corfield, they can find us!”

“Ms. Corfield, what if the police don’t come?”

Children know. And they’re scared.

Now that the US Supreme Court has ruled on McCutcheon vs. Federal Election Commission, the floodgates have been opened for more “first amendment” money—including powerful NRA money—to be poured into political campaigns, and it’s going to be harder to get any kind of meaningful gun legislation like universal background checks, closing the gun show loophole and updating the National Instant Check System passed. So instead of NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre calling for a ‘national database of lunatics’, why doesn’t the NRA give grants to school districts for these security upgrades? As he said, “If I’m a mom or a dad and I’m dropping my child off at school I’d feel a whole lot safer” if there were trained armed security guards or police protecting the school. I’m sure many parents would agree. But that costs money—money that school districts do not have.

Personally, I wouldn’t feel a lot safer. But that’s just me.

The school-to-prison pipeline just got a whole lot shorter because all across America our schools are turning into prisons. Is yours?