Bernie Sanders Explains Puzzling Education Vote – It’s Because Accountability
When teachers asked, Bernie Sanders answered.
Why, Bernie? Why did you vote this summer against everything you seem to stand for on education policy?
You stood against President George W. Bush’s disastrous No Child Left Behind legislation in 2001. Why did you vote for almost the same thing in 2015?
The answer is in from the Vermont Senator turned Democratic Presidential Candidate, but it’s not entirely satisfactory.
The short version: Accountability.
In education circles, it’s a buzzword meaning opposite things to opposite people. And determined in opposite ways.
Ask a representative of the standardized testing industry, and more than likely he’ll tell you accountability means making sure public schools actually teach students –especially the poor and minorities. And the only way to determine this is through repeated, rigid, standardized assessments. Let’s call that TEACHER ACCOUNTABILITY.
Ask a real live educator, and more than likely she’ll tell you it means making sure local, state and federal governments actually provide the funding and resources necessary to teach students – especially the poor and minorities. And the best way to determine this is simple math. Let’s call that LAWMAKER ACCOUNTABILITY.
These seem to be the central disagreements: Are lawmakers providing equitable resources to all our public schools or are teachers just not doing their jobs? Are student test scores the best way to measure accountability or should we rely on something as rock solid as elementary math?
TEACHER ACCOUNTABILITY is hard to determine. You have to spend billions of taxpayer dollars buying tests, scoring tests and on test prep materials. And then you have to ignore all the evidence that this proves nothing. You could instead just poke your head into any public school across the nation and actually see teachers workingtheir butts off. Heck! You could stop in after school hours and count the numbers of teachers still at work and tabulate the amount of their own cash they spend on class materials. But that won’t work – there isn’t an industry profiting off you using your own eyes and brain.
On the other hand, determining LAWMAKER ACCOUNTABILITY is easy. Justcompare school budgets. Greater than and less than. You’ll find that none of our lawmakers provide equitable funding. Rich kids in wealthy districts get Cadillac funding while poor and minority kids in impoverished districts get bicycle funding. Strangely, this is never discussed.
Moreover, none of this relies on opinion. All it takes is empirical evidence to see the truth. Lawmakers are not accountable at all. Teachers are accountable for too much and judged by unscientific and untrustworthy methods.
Unfortunately, few politicians have fully figured this out yet. Even you, Bernie.
This summer it’s all come down to a series of votes on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
The law the governs K-12 public schools was written in 1965 to ensure all schools received the proper resources – LAWMAKER ACCOUNTABILITY.
However, under President George W. Bush and throughout the Obama years, it’s become about punishing teachers and schools for low standardized test scores –TEACHER ACCOUNTABILITY.
And the champions of TEACHER ACCOUNTABILITY this summer have been primarily Democrats including liberal lions like Elizabeth Warren and Sanders.
LAWMAKER ACCOUNTABILITY? No one’s talking that.
Most troubling is the Murphy Amendment – an attempt to double down onTEACHER ACCOUNTABILITY. Keep testing and punishing because it’s working soooowell. Thankfully, the move was defeated by Senate Republicans. But Sanders and Warren both voted for it. Warren even co-sponsored it!
That’s why a group of respected education professionals and union leaders (including myself) wrote an open letter to Sanders asking him to please explain, himself.
We aren’t exactly a hostile crowd. We like a bunch of things that Sanders represents in his presidential campaign. We want to support him, but we need to know why he voted to keep the worst aspects of the current law.
And Bernie answered! Or his staff did.
I’ll reproduce the entire letter we received from staffer Phil Fiermonte below this blog. But first I want to focus on Bernie’s specific reasons for voting in favor of the Murphy Amendment:
As you mentioned, Senator Murphy introduced an amendment on the Senate floor that would have required states to hold schools accountable for the academic performance of low-income, minority and disabled students. Senator Sanders voted for this amendment because he believes states must do more to protect every student’s right to a quality education, and that from a civil right’s perspective, the federal government has an important role to play in protecting low-income, minority and disabled children. As you pointed out, the mechanism this amendment would have used to identify struggling schools resembles the failed policies of No Child Left Behind. This was a significant concern to the Senator, and one that he shared with the sponsors of the amendment.Senator Sanders cast his vote on this amendment to express his disapprovalBernie Sanders Explains Puzzling Education Vote – It’s Because Accountability | gadflyonthewallblog:
