ROLDO: Jackson Taking All the Wrong Roads

By Roldo Bartimole

When the Democratic mayor of Cleveland pushes a school reform program by talking with the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the foundations and the kill-all-unions Republican Governor but ices out the Cleveland Teachers Union something is woefully wrong.

Dreadfully wrong.

Mayor Frank Jackson seems to be taking lessons from former Mayor Michael White who treated Cleveland school teachers as trash. Indeed, I can’t believe he hasn’t been talking to the former mayor.

You may remember that White, as attack dog, wanted to destroy the Cleveland Teachers Union. His over-the-top approach labeled Cleveland teachers as “the inmates running the asylum.” Newspaper ads were run claiming falsely that teachers only worked 4.5 hours a day. It was a full-press, take-no-prisoner assault. As only Mike the Knife could do. He was BK (before Kasich) on destroying unions.

All area unions should come to the defense of the teachers if they have learned any lesson from the experience of Senate Bill 5. Jackson’s plan would do away with the collective bargaining rights of teachers.

Here’s what I wrote in September 1996 in my newsletter Point of View:

“Next the administration pulled an even bigger mistake… by hiring a security firm, Vance, to protect the schools in advent of a strike. Their arrival in the city appeared as the advance of an occupation force into the schools and came before the schools had actually emptied out on what might have been the last day of school before the strike. Therefore, they were spotted.

“The hiring of this force also represents convincing evidence that the administration, with White and Gov. George Voinovich, really were hoping for a strike, if not a war, with the school unions. This was to be a test case; it backfired.

“At a press conference, East High school students including the football team and their teachers decried the movement of these ‘troops’ into the school. One could hear the tone of ‘violation,’ in both the students and teachers voices. One 25-year veteran English teacher could just hold back tears. She exhibited the demoralized state of the classroom teachers I spoke with. Students counted 31 cots to be used by these uniformed security troops at East High. One student testified that he saw one of the security guards with an automatic weapon. It was also said that school equipment was used haphazardly by the security people who remained in the school over the weekend.”

The tough tactics didn’t work. But the past is prelude to the Jackson plan.

During the 1996 period, teachers threatened a strike. Cleveland Tomorrow, now Greater Cleveland Partnership, was to finance scabs to keep the schools open. This further angered dispirited teachers.

White wanted to break the teachers union. He demanded a 10 percent pay slash along with other cuts. White played it nasty, acrid and malicious. That was his charm. At the time, I wrote that “White played Saddam to the teachers in a volatile struggle over the school financing.”

The attacks on teachers – now epidemic among especially Republican political leaders – was so over-the-top by White that it indeed boomeranged.

In one speech, White was so far from reality in his attacks that he actually accused teachers of running around in Lexuses and Mercedes. Here’s what he said, “That is why when you go into the basement of the Cleveland School building you see all these Lexuses and all these Cadillacs, all these Ranger Rovers and all these Mercedes Benzes. If I made that kind of money I’d buy one, too.” That’s where school administrators park. Not teachers.

Jackson is much lower key than White. There was no slash and burn attacks. Jackson, rather than smashing teachers, has ignored them. Bypassed them.

In this different time the tactic may be more effective. Despite the public thrashing of Senate Bill 5 there remains an anti-worker climate among Republicans especially.

The times are different here also. In Jackson’s Cleveland it is a city without a pulse. He has anesthetized the city with his standard of apathetic sluggishness. Doing little has been effective. The Plain Dealer, our main outlet of public information, plays up activity – Public Square, the Waterfront – that have little chance of getting done. Then they call Jackson flashy. They’re boring us to death.

Meanwhile, the paper, which should lead the challenge for better stewardship out of city hall, has become charmed by rote over-coverage of the Jimmy Dimora trial. Hardly the test of our times.

The times have changed in other ways, too. But the subterfuge of attacking teachers hasn’t. Where White’s rhetoric was hot; Jackson’s remains low key, even mind-numbing. The style is much different; the distinctions the same.

The Teachers Union hasn’t been as forceful either. They may deeply regret their lethargy.

The real aims of Jackson and his business/foundation friends is the same: blame the teachers for the damaged Cleveland school system. Then they escape blame themselves.

In 1996, the teachers fought back by countercharging that tax abatement and tax exemption of the sports facilities had robbed the school system of revenues. Even former Council President George Forbes, who opposed White in this tussle, spoke publicly against tax abatements, ignoring that he and Voinovich had been totally generous is giving abatements to developers.

Similarly, there’s a movement for more public subsidy of these same sports facilities. The corporate community and Plain Dealer have been gearing up to get the public to extend the regressive sin taxes. They will seek another 10 years to this now 25 year tax.

Jackson failed to consult with the Teachers Union about his plan. This once again seems totally self-defeating.

He told the Plain Dealer, “We need to get something done. We’ve been in perpetual discussion about a lot of things. Our sense of urgency is such that something has to happen in a systemic way and it has to happen now.”

Although he didn’t consult with the teachers who will have to carry out any reforms Jackson did consult, he said, with the Cleveland Foundation, the Greater Cleveland Partnership and that they joined with him in presenting the plan to Kasich.

“Teachers will embrace change if they’re part of it,” David Quolke, President of the Teachers Union. That’s not much of a battle cry.

Jackson’s message to the teachers, however, is “Here’s the plan, take it or leave it.” It doesn’t bode well for cooperation. The teachers, of course, are the troops that have to carry out the actual work.

The Jackson proposal also looks for a levy. I wonder who he thinks works in the field to sell a levy besides school employees. Teachers and school employees do the hard work.

I don’t profess be well-versed in what needs to be done to vastly improve the Cleveland schools.

However, I get nervous hearing language as this from Jackson’s plan:

“In Cleveland’s proposed new portfolio system, the roles and responsibilities of central office will be significantly focused so it becomes flatter, more nimble, and more strategic professional organization that employs a differentiated management system and drives resources to the school building. These changes will require a fundamental shift in mindset, roles and capacity across the organization…”

Boy that sounds like a foundation bullcrap jargon to me.

There’s also plenty of pie in the sky stuff:

“The district will also identify ways to authorize the transfer of some locally generated tax revenues to charter-operated (read: profit operated) Transformation Schools that are sponsored by or have agreements with the district. This shift in funding to schools will incentives (oh, what a word!) schools to maintain excellence and grow enrollment; more pupils means more dollars. Schools will have to attract and retain students, which will require an intense focus on customer service, school safety, enrichment offerings and academic performance.”

How easy it sounds.

The plan also calls for creation of a Cleveland Transformational Alliance, “a public-private partnership charged with ensuring the growth of a portfolio of high-performing district and charter schools in Cleveland.” It says that this entity will not replace the Cleveland Board of Education, already under the heavy hand of City Hall and seemingly very, very quiet.

It just sounds as another mysterious body with no real public oversight – like it’s an un-voted agent responsive to whom? The Foundations and corporate people.

The one great omission in the school statement is the crux of the problem in Cleveland. It’s called POVERTY.

Poverty, of course, goes unaddressed. Not even mentioned in the 15 page “Jackson plan.”

Jackson’s plan, if anyone was really watching, came out at a most inopportune time. The problem is nobody much seems to be watching.

A week before Jackson’s unveiling Diane Ravitch spoke to the City Club and others in Cleveland. (You can listen to it via the City Club’s website here. She’s the former U. S. Assistant Secretary of Education under former President George H. W. Bush. Originally, she was a strong proponent of the No Child Left Behind and charter schools.

She’s changed her mind. And boy does she express her mind. She gives a no-nonsense talk.

She has said that the charter school and the testing reform movement was started by “right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation,” for the purpose of destroying public education and teachers unions,” as reported in Wikipedia. In other words, Jackson’s plan.

In Cleveland, her words strongly suggested, what Jackson and his corporate/foundation buddies are doing follow a “Republican agenda.” And it won’t work.

After acknowledging support for all the educational reform moves of recent decades, Ravitch said: “Now we know. After 10 years of No Child Left Behind, after 20 years of state level accountability, after 21 years of vouchers in Milwaukee now we know. This approach hasn’t worked. It didn’t work. It failed. This agenda is the status quo and it is crushing the spirit of innovation and learning in our schools.” She included President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top here.

“Why are you wasting your money and your children’s lives this way,” she asked of the Cleveland audience. She bashed the policy of merit pay, saying it “destroys teamwork” in the schools and doesn’t work.

Ravitch, a research professor at New York University, changed her mind 180 degrees on the so-called reforms now advanced by Jackson.

Why? Because, she said, all the research disputes what she and the No Child Left Behind/Charter School movement had believed about school reform.

She cited Poverty as a major factor for poor schooling.

It doesn’t take an Ivy League degree to figure that one out.

After she left Cleveland she wrote this in her blog:

“Cleveland has a level of urban decay that is alarming. Yet its municipal leaders have decided that their chief problem is bad teachers. Surely, I thought, the teachers didn’t cause the flight of employers from the city, the collapse of its manufacturing base, and the massive loss of home mortgages.

“But sure enough, Cleveland – and the State of Ohio – plans to attack its economic woes by creating more charter schools and supplying merit pay to teachers able to raise test scores. The leaders want to make it easier to fire teachers and to remove seniority. That’s the mayor’s plan to reform education in Cleveland. Mayor Frank Jackson, like Gov. John Kasich, thinks that school choice is the remedy for the education woes of Cleveland and Ohio. So, of course, they both want charters.

“Cleveland has had mayoral control since 1995, so if mayoral control was the answer to urban woes, it should have happened here. It hasn’t. Cleveland is one of the poorest, most racially segregated, and lowest-performing districts in the nation. According to data in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Cleveland’s school population is 85 percent black and Hispanic, and 100 percent of its students are eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch.”

Of course, Jackson and the Corporates say nothing about poverty nor do they mention they’ve been stealing money from the schools and giving it to the wealthiest developers and sports owners in town.

Finally, one veteran black teacher told me her deep disappointment in Frank Jackson. What he’s doing is “hurting mostly black males,” something she said the Frank Jackson she knows would never want to do.

 

He was a 2004 Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame recipient and won the national Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in 1991. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]

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