Maryellen Butke (Photo courtesy of RI-CAN)
Maryellen Butke’s campaign for state Senate will raise an interesting debate about the relationship, or lack thereof, between the so-called education reform movement and the progressive movement. While in name they may sound like close cousins, in practice they are often not.
Education reformers (or deformers, if you don’t like what they do) often push for charter schools at the expense of existing public schools, and charter schools often don’t allow its teachers to bargain collectively, putting the movement at odds with organized labor and often attracting big money from union-busting corporations.
By running for state Senate – especially for legendary progressive legislator Rhoda Perry’s seat – Butke’s campaign will become ground zero for this debate in Rhode Island for the next few months.
Yesterday, in a post about Senator Rhoda Perry retiring, I mentioned that Butke is a liberal who supports charter schools. Two of RI Future’s regular contributors, who follow education issues closely, quickly took umbrage with my description.
“I think a more accurate description of Ms. Butke’s positions would be pretty politically liberal on some issues and extremely conservative on others, particularly labor and education (her primary focus), where she and her Wal-Mart and Wall Street-funded organization have championed right-wing policies that have and will do major damage to public education in RI,” wrote Aaron Regunberg.
Pat Crowley, who works for the state’s largest teachers’ union, followed suit: “Got to agree with Aaron here. Labor issues can’t simply be shoved to the side. Especially when so many teachers are women, and so many retirees are women, the attack on their voice on the job is part of the national war on women. How liberal is that?”
Then, interestingly enough, Butke got a chance to respond with a guest post on Ted Nesi’s blog. She wrote:
I have never considered my views on education liberal or conservative. Though a lifelong progressive, it never occurred to me that teaching and learning in public schools was a partisan issue. At its core, education reform is about improving educational outcomes for kids. How could anyone – Democrat or Republican – disagree with that?
As it turns out, education is one of the most politicized debates we are having in this country today. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Those of us who believe in the tenets of change aren’t interested in partisan politics. We believe in accountability for the adults responsible for our children’s futures, in high-quality public school choices for parents regardless of demographics or geography, and in flexibility to let principals and teachers do whatever it takes to improve student achievement. This doesn’t mean we are anti-union and it doesn’t mean we have negative feelings towards teachers.
My feeling is that Regunberg, Crowley and Bukte somehow need to reconcile their somewhat disparate points if Rhode Island is to holistically improve the education it offers. We need to offer a better education to all students without making life any tougher for our hard-working teachers, who hold one of the most important jobs in our community. That’s the progressive solution to reforming public education.
I believe Butke when she says she isn’t anti-union per say, but some of the people that pay her salary and fund the organization she works for certainly are. That can be a tough dichotomy to reconcile.
Butke and I have long talked about getting together for a big picture discussion on how the charter school movement fits – or doesn’t – with the progressive movement. Here’s hoping that this post and her candidacy helps to make that happen … and that they can help Rhode Island to figure out how it wants to reform public education.
I have a solution that principled progressives in favor of individual empowerment, transparency, and checks and balances couldn’t *possibly* disagree with – allow teachers to decide whether they want to join a given union or not. But no, we have to by law FORCE all teachers to join highly questionable unions like the NEA because, as you explained on the Matt Allen show last month, unions are the “right” choice and when teachers make the “wrong” choices for themselves, they need to be corrected by government for their own good.
FYI quoting Pat Crowley on labor is like quoting Ted Nugent on gun control – people just roll their eyes and walk away. So all public school reformers at “at war” with women, including Burke, who hates herself apparently? Thanks for another deep insight, Pat. There is a reason why RIFuture lasted under year on his watch, so you should probably keep his propaganda out of your articles as much as possible.
RI-CAN is to education reform as EngageRI was to pension reform. Corporate money, sometimes anonymous, always with an agenda, couched in well-tested but misleading messaging, trying to influence public policy against the interests of working families.
If you removed the word “corporate” from your statement, I would have thought you were discussing unions like the NEA. Shall we examine some public campaign finance reports and see where the real money behind the General Assembly is coming from? It’s Local this and Local that all down the campaign donor lists. So much for your “corporate control” narrative.
If NEARI is so transparent about where its money is going and its benevolent motive to “help families,” then why don’t you post the salaries of your leadership here for everyone and God to see? It will never happen because if the teachers and the public actually knew what you were paying your borderline-illiterate, rabble-rousing leadership, who throw their weight around like prohibition-era gangsters and are frequently in the news for their outrageous and sometimes criminal behavior, there would be riots.
Ok, stop.
See, this post is the classic example of buying the corporate reformers argument before the debates even starts. It starts with accepting the premise that one can be anti-union and liberal. It starts with accepting the premise that limiting the scope of the collective bargaining and ending teaching protections isn’t somehow anti-union. It accepts the premise that the corporate and Wall Street Wal-Mart funded folks want you to start with.
There is no “progressive solution,” Bob, in silencing the voice of working women. The is no “progressive solution” is pitting students against their faculty ( a common RI-CAN tactic, if you have every witnessed their testimony at the state house ). There is no “progressive solution in reforming public education” when the agenda of the so-called reformers is clearly designed to take some of the participants in the debate out of the conversation.
And why is it that the teachers are the ones that have to compromise their rights to the corporate wishes of groups like RI-CAN? Wall Street? Really? We think THESE people should have a say about how our schools should be run?
Insert common retort: oh, you are just defending the status quo….
We have had 20 plus years of corporate encroachment in education. Are things improving? These are the folks that spawned “health care as we know it”, NAFTA, and the corrupt banking system. But hey, why not trust them to run education too. It’s worked out so well for the economy.
No Bob, there is no reconciliation with those that seek to privatize education.
As someone who has followed RI-CAN’s work over the last 3 years, I have to agree with Crowley and Regunberg. Under Ms. Butke’s leadership at RI-CAN, we received:
RI-CAN School and District Report Cards, which assigned letter grades to RI schools. The methodology of the report card ratings strove to boost the rankings of specific schools that RI-CAN favors. Scores were based on only one year of data, and even that was inconsistently selected and poorly averaged. How does that put students first (as these reformers love to say)? And will these same willfully deceptive political strategies be brought to the State House?
The Achievement First schools. Cranston residents were organized and informed enough to run AF out of town, but the educationally-aware in Providence didn’t have the big bucks to keep up with RI-CAN’s astroturf. I’m not going to run through the many reasons why AF is bad for all of our children in detail — the loss of democratic control of schools, AF’s well-documented repressive discipline policies, the marginal diversion of funding from “public public” schools into unaccountable CMOs, etc. are among them.
And more recently, if RI-CAN wants all students to learn, then why has it been pushing behind the scenes to keep AF “opt-in”, rather than “opt-out”? As is, parents will have to submit their child’s name to a lottery to have access to the new school. This is in contrast to an opt-out model of registration, which would bring more poor and disadvantaged children into the lottery net and give every child in the school’s area “a shot” at going to one of these “great schools.” An opt-out model would seem to be what’s best for all students, if we follow reform rhetoric. But of course, an opt-out model would also mean that AF gets less than the cream of the crop of students, and RI-CAN needs AF to over-perform in order to maintain a semblance of legitimacy. Look for this to be a discussion in next year’s legislative session.
Look, I live in what was Sen. Rhoda Perry’s district. While I am yet to meet the other candidates for Senate, I can say now that I am not content to be represented by Ms. Butke, because of her education positions. I can only hope that this election serves to educate about the tactics of RI-CAN and other education reformers. Once people take a serious and informed look at these policies, I’m sure they will reject them.
“My feeling is that Regunberg, Crowley and Bukte somehow need to reconcile their somewhat disparate points if Rhode Island is to holistically improve the education it offers.”
I disagree here, Bob. Look at what Butke proposes, it’s not “let’s involve all stakeholders and do whatever it takes.” It’s “we believe in accountability for the adults responsible for our children’s futures…” Unfortunately that’s counter to what actually works in process improvement! You can have “accountability,” or you can have process improvement, not both (see “Total Quality or Performance Appraisal: Choose One”).
– Quote –
TQM requires customer-consciousness, systems-thinking, an understanding of variation, an appreciation of teamwork, a mastery of improvement methods, and an understanding of the process of personal motivation and learning. These very requirements of TQM are subverted by performance appraisal. TQM requires us to understand, control, and improve processes for the benefit of the customer. Performance appraisal aims at controlling an individual’s behavior to the satisfaction of his or her manager. The two approaches represent a fundamental choice for leaders: one or the other; not both
– End Quote –
Reconciling what’s beneficial with what’s detrimental is a fool’s errand. For progressives, this isn’t about charter schools, or unions, or supporting the status quo. It’s about supporting what works. These faux reformers either don’t understand process improvement, or they have another agenda being masked with the language of process improvement.
The public school system can indeed be prodded to do better, and though suspicion of corporate “reformers” is quite understandable, those opposed to charter schools and other “reform” efforts are failing to articulate much about what alternatives they are propsing to improve education.
It seems to me the teachers union leadership was for a long time content to go along with a system that did little to reward excellence, little to encourage rank-and-file input, little to communicate with the public, and little to build coalitions with other community groups. Now the consequences of this are undermining the union movement as the problems can no longer be ignored, the rank and file is generally uninvolved, and the energized right-wing, fed by corporate bucks and relentless talk-radio type messaging, is moving in for the kill. Even if this candidate Butke loses, I think outside the East Side districts like this, the public is likely to support the “reformers.”
I would like to see progressives discuss how to make the charter school movement work for improving education without hurting conditions for our hard working teachers.
“I would like to see progressives discuss how to make the charter school movement work for improving education without hurting conditions for our hard working teachers.”
The charter school movement was a progressive idea, now co-opted by the corporatization movement. It’s funny that folks don’t realize the idea came out of the same teachers union leadership you claim was content to go along with the status quo. For those who don’t know…
— quote —
Charter schools were first envisioned in 1988 by two men who didn’t know one another. Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, had the idea, as did Professor Ray Budde of the University of Massachusetts. Both of them thought that public school teachers could get permission from local authorities to open a small experimental school and then focus on the neediest students. The school would recruit students who had dropped out and who were likely to drop out. It would seek new ways to motivate the most challenging students and bring whatever lessons they learned back to public schools, to make them better able to educate these youngsters.
The original vision of charter schools was that they would help strengthen public schools, not compete with them.
By 1993, Shanker turned against his own idea. He concluded that charter schools had turned into a form of privatization that was not materially different from vouchers. From then until his death in 1996, he lumped vouchers and charters together as a threat to public education and a distraction from real school reform.
— end quote —
Progressives aren’t against charter schools focused on the neediest students and as a way to strengthen our existing public schools. What we’re against is the movement to use them to destroy local control of schools, unions, and public education.
Russ hit the nail on the head with this… Whatever happened to charter schools being used to test ideas for curriculum changes to improve education, then scaling those ideas throughout the public school system? Unfortunately, charters have become a way to replace the public school system with an alternative system that sometimes functions better, but sometimes functions worse. When was the last time anyone heard, “hey, here’s a great idea that’s working well from the Cuffee School…”?
My frustration is that we have two systems: one for wealthy communities, and one for poor communities. Generally, the one commonality among public schools in each is that unionized teachers teach in both. To argue that the union is the problem for all those “horrible” test scores at Barrington High School is disingenuous at best. Or put differently, why don’t we ever hear people sing the praises of unionized public school teachers in Barrington and Little Compton?
We need to think about the structural and systemic problems of the delivery of education, which is often left off the table when thinking about educational changes. To me, far too many deformers are far too focused on easy solutions that ultimately fail (just test students more), and that is a huge disservice to low-income students who are essentially destined to live a life of poverty because they attend the worst schools in the country. And that’s just shameful and disgusting.
I have repeatedly stated (in a concept that I borrowed years ago) that charter schools should be tugboats moving public education in a better direction, not lifeboats for just a few students – especially when many of those lifeboats have leaks.
If charter schools have successes that can be replicated, then it is worse than a crime to say that we can only afford to offer those programs to just a few students. It is especially galling when those successes are the results of changes long supported by unions – all day kindergarten; smaller class sizes, especially during the learning to read years; extra intervention to bring critical skills up to grade level; etc., etc.
In addition to all of that, it does everyone a disservice that the corporate-backers of many of the new charter schools cause their advocates to shy away from discussing the impact of childhood poverty on educational achievement because they don’t want their taxes raised to address those issues.
Corporations thinking that urban educational outcomes can be improved without also addressing poverty is as crazy as using a corporate-board laden homeless shelter to launch an attack on teacher and public employee retirement security. It is even crazier when those purporting to be Democrats fall for either argument.
“And more recently, if RI-CAN wants all students to learn, then why has it been pushing behind the scenes to keep AF “opt-in”, rather than “opt-out”? As is, parents will have to submit their child’s name to a lottery to have access to the new school. This is in contrast to an opt-out model of registration, which would bring more poor and disadvantaged children into the lottery net and give every child in the school’s area “a shot” at going to one of these “great schools.” An opt-out model would seem to be what’s best for all students, if we follow reform rhetoric. But of course, an opt-out model would also mean that AF gets less than the cream of the crop of students, and RI-CAN needs AF to over-perform in order to maintain a semblance of legitimacy.”
Really? So you want the school to select children that wish to stay where they are or haven’t enough initiative to submit their own name? Sorry but there are lot of legitimate issues to debate about charter schools such as choice, funding, union v. nonunion, and regulation but that one is just dumb.
No DD, no. I want it to be like any other neighborhood school. I think this policy has been in flux, but as I understand, the closest neighborhood school is the primary consideration for student placement. If, when parents rank their preferred schools, the neighborhood school is ranked low on the list, then perhaps accommodations can be made to allow the student to attend a school across the city. People that know more about the registration process, please correct me.
If only families with “initiative” sign up for AF, and all other schools are “opt-out” as I understand above, then AF will find itself teaching students with the most active parents and perhaps with the parents who can easier afford to transport their children across the city each day. I can picture it now — a year after opening, AF touting its scores and claiming they are the solution from on high to RI’s education woes, when actually they were working with an unrepresentative population of students.
Bob, I don’t think that anyone necessarily needs to reconcile their views with RI-CAN if we’re going to get to the real reform we really need. RI-CAN has one vision of education (which is, incidentally, greatly dictated by their funders, and is also, interestingly, not agreed with by many of the most successful charter schools in the state). It is fine for Ms. Butke to say this vision is non-partisan, but the positions she advocates for remain classically right-wing in every way.
The way we do public education needs to be transformed, I believe–that’s why I do what I do. But to say that real, democratic reforms need to be reconciled with the right’s attack on public education is not just silly, it’s dangerous.
Look no further than Massachusetts to see what Butke’s corporate reforms are up to. http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/140448-as-schools-struggle-to-get-better-is-selling-out-/?page=4#TOPCONTENT
Regarding above: not Butke’s reforms per se, but the same reforms/ donor groups.