As the school year begins, this recent speech by Texas Superintendent John Kuhn from the Save Our Schools rally in DC is worth reading (and watching) as a reminder of why the work of all our city’s teachers in teaching all of our city’s students is so important:
Let me speak for all public school educators when I say unequivocally: We will. We say send us your poor, send us your homeless, the children of your afflicted and addicted. Send us your kids who don’t speak English. Send us you special-needs children, we will not turn them away.
But I tell you today, public school teacher, you will fail to take the shattered children of poverty and turn them into the polished products of the private schools. You will be unacceptable, public school teacher. And I say that is your badge of honor. I stand before you today bearing proudly the label of unacceptable because I educate the children they will not educate. More »
…is it really naive to think that we should not be printing the names of teachers and the results they get on standardized tests in newspapers? Or is the naivete the notion that this might be a good path forward?
There’s no good manager I know, inside or outside of education, who would resort to printing the names of their staff members and their performance levels in newspapers as a strategy for organizational improvement. In refusing to publish the performance assessments of Teach For America’s corps members, we are treating our teachers with respect and endeavoring to build the kind of relationship with them that will give us the best chance of improving their performance over time.
Now we know what Kopp thinks of Joel Klein’s managerial skills.
Steven Brill entitled his latest column for Reuters, a long denunciation of teacher unions, “The School Reform Deniers.” Brill’s rhetorical purpose in associating the term ‘deniers’ with those in teacher unions who disagree with his vision of education reform is clear: it is a word most commonly associated with ‘holocaust deniers,’ those who deny that the Nazis carried out a genocide against European Jews during the course of World War II, killing six million.
Would that this rhetorical style was limited to the title of Brill’s piece, and not a constant thread throughout it and his book. A number of the flaws in the Reuters piece are laid out here by Deborah Meier, Diane Ravitch, and Jennifer Jennings, among others.
It is to the credit of the Fordham Foundation’s Mike Petrilli that he calls out Brill on the title of this essay. It is an easy enough matter to point out this sort of rank demagoguery on the other side of a debate; it is an altogether different matter to be willing to stand up to it when it takes place on one’s own side.
It is to the shame of Andy Rotherham that he commends the Brill piece as a “a must-read essay about the education state of play” without the slightest hint that there might be something wrong with that title, much less the rhetorical demagoguery that defines Brill’s essay and book.
In yesterday’s Fordham Foundation sponsored debate with Randi Weingarten, Rick Hess makes much of rhetorical attacks on Republican governors like Scott Walker and Chris Christie that compared them to Hitler and to threats of violence against them. As much as one can understand how passions are inflamed when teachers and other public employees see their fundamental rights to have a union and bargain collectively under attack by the likes of a Walker and a Christie, there is no excuse for the use of such language. But what is missing in Hess’ diagnosis is a recognition that the bullying behavior and demagoguery of Walker and Christie played a crucial role in initiating the cycle of destructive personal attack. There is something to be learned from the example of debate moderator Petrilli.
Civility in debate is not just good form, the sign of men and women who understand the responsibilities of citizenship in a democratic society. It is the foundation of meaningful debate. Reliance upon rhetorical demagoguery is a sign of the lack of substantive argument on the issues. (Think Whitney Tilson, and the way in which he targets for personal attack women educators with whom he disagrees, from Linda Darling-Hammond to Randi Weingarten to Diane Ravitch.) To the extent that we tolerate it, from our own side as well as the other, we diminish the quality of serious public discourse on education.
An actor you may have heard of, who is the son of a teacher and a product of public schools, headlined the Save Our Schools march in Washington this past weekend. He had a message for teachers, especially those feeling increasingly demoralized by the emphasis on testing and other aspects of education “reform”:
So, the next time you’re feeling down, or exhausted, or unappreciated, or at the end of your rope; the next time you turn on the TV and see yourself being called “overpaid”; the next time you encounter some simple-minded, punitive policy that’s been driven into your life by some corporate reformer who has literally never taught anyone anything, please, please, please know that there are millions of us behind you. You have an army of regular people standing right behind you and our appreciation for what you do is so deeply felt. We love you, we thank you and we will always have your back.
A recent New York Times story on former DOE Chancellor Joel Klein’s increasingly central role in responding to the fallout from the Rupert Murdoch hacking scandal included some interesting background about the origins of the two men’s relationship.
Apparently Murdoch and Klein initially bonded over their mutual support for the expansion of charter schools, among other education issues. More recently, Murdoch provided key financial support to Education Reform Now (chaired by Klein) it its efforts to influence New York State’s debates over teacher layoffs:
His eight years as schools chancellor formed the foundation for his unlikely friendship with Mr. Murdoch, who holds his own strong views on education reform, which the two began to discuss over regular lunches and dinners with their wives.
A Surprising Alliance
Though Mr. Klein did not see eye to eye with Mr. Murdoch on many political issues, they agreed on a core set of education principles: that charter schools needed to expand; poor instructors should be weeded out; and the power of the teachers union must be curtailed. More »
If one lesson is to be taken from this study and from the literature on individual merit pay, it is that teachers do not answer to the economic calculus of stockbrokers and hedge-fund managers. This observation may not sit well with those for whom the rule of the market and individual financial incentives are an ideological first principle, established prior to logical argument and evidence, but it is the reality of our lives and our schools, and it is affirmed again and again by educational research on performance incentives. While we believe that our challenging and exhausting professional work should provide us with middle-class lifestyles, our primary motivation in entering the field of education is not economic gain, but to make a difference in the lives of the young people we teach. Educational policy must recognize this motivation to produce lasting, constructive change.
Graduation rates went up last year. Which is good. It is.
But when the State Education Dept. announced the 2010 grad rates on June 14, it put out a combined 139-slide PowerPoint presentation. There is a lot more than one sentence to say about the latest round of education data.
Here are 10 observations on New York’s data, just from perusing those slides:
1. A genuine uptrend….. New York City graduated 61% of its 2006 incoming ninth graders (Class of 2010) on time in June of 2010, a gain of almost 15 percentage points over the last five years. Before that, the city’s graduation rate was stuck at about 50 percent (using an older measure) for decades. There is a really significant uptrend here.
2. …..Or not? Whether this is genuine improvement or the result of a constricted focus on test-passing, heavy use of credit recovery schemes and/or easier Regents tests becomes is an urgent question. The state’s new “Aspirational Performance Measure” of college-readiness, discussed below, suggests that most students are graduating unprepared. On the other hand, we all know highly accomplished graduates and the teachers who worked their hearts out to help them. The answer may be a tale of two cities. More »
(This is the second of two posts written in response to Joel Klein’s manifesto, The Failure of American Schools, which was published in the June issue of Atlantic Monthly. In the first post, I addressed Klein’s attribution of an apocryphal anti-union quote to the late UFT and AFT President Al Shanker.)
The defining characteristic of a bad faith argument is not that it is wrong, although it certainly is that, but that the person wielding it knows that it is wrong, or with a minimal exercise of due diligence, would discover that it is wrong. Klein’s Atlantic essay is replete with bad faith arguments, so many that it would require a small pamphlet to respond to every such argument. Consequently, I will restrict myself to analyzing a number of the more central propositions he puts forward.
Using Value-Added ‘Teacher Data Reports’ To Evaluate Teachers
Klein declares that he is “still shocked” that the UFT opposed his efforts to use the value-added ‘teacher data reports’ he had developed for high stakes decisions on tenure and discontinuance. “As a result, even when making a lifetime tenure commitment,” Klein writes, “under New York law you could not consider a teacher’s impact on student learning. The Kafkaesque outcome demonstrates precisely the way the system is run: for the adults.”
What Klein avoids addressing, but what he certainly knows well, is that both his value-added “teacher data reports” and the New York State English Language Arts [ELA] and Math exams used to develop these reports had serious, fundamental flaws that prevented them from being a meaningful measure of educational progress. More »
An editorial and a “straight news story” in the New York Post are “six of one; half a dozen of the other.” The publisher’s opinions that should, according to Journalism 101, be restricted to the editorial page, infest their reporting, sometimes in ways as subliminal as they are insidious.
Being reactionary whilst being creative is a form of innovation too, apparently. It’s a rip to see these moral Luddites turn “progressive” when the concept is skewered to mean “progressing” back to a time before comforts were available to the rabble even if they paid for it with their labor.
But more egregious than this particular specimen of Post bias are two cited paraphrases of remarks allegedly made by city charter-school operators to the Post reporter, who says he was told that charter school “retirement packages aren’t just more effective, but they also better reflect the needs of the current crop of educators, who are less likely to commit to a lifelong teaching career in one city.” More »
Edgar Lopez was a self-described slacker during his 8th grade year at a small Manhattan 6-12 school. When the school took his grade on an early college visit, he saw the three-day trip as an opportunity to flirt, hang out and roll his eyes at all the advice he was getting. But something one of the college student guides said snapped him to attention: the guide said the hardest thing for him about going to college was not having teachers who were close to him.
Edgar quotes the guide’s warning to the group: “I went to a small school in Manhattan like you guys, where all the teachers were supportive and gave students that extra push to succeed. They don’t do that here. All they want is their tuition money.”
All the DOE seems to care about is hiring MBAs, lawyers who are good at producing more work for themselves, and designing systems to generate data that supposedly measures this and that, yet they never talk to educators. If they want to make work better, they’d better talk to the people who do the work.
Those observations, in slightly different words delivered with a tone of satire and indignation, had a powerful impact on audience members gathered at a recent UFT-sponsored event. They recognized themselves as victims of the DOE’s fixation on data that perpetually begets reports and more reports in an agonized dance of paperwork, a surrealistic nightmare that undermines morale and the integrity of the educational process.
This absurd phenomenon is an underlying theme in a number of movies, books and plays. “Brazil,” anyone? Please identify which work, regardless of genre, most accurately, in your opinion, captures the madness of the current bureaucratic landscape with all its tyrants and ideologies and scenarios. Share your comments with us.
And while you’re deciding, consider this blockbuster statistical revelation which may have an indirect bearing on the grim inanity of things: 1 percent of the population in this city of Bloomberg controls 44 percent of its wealth.
In a report on WNYC today, Beth Fertig described the plight of a promising young teacher who is waiting to find out if he will be laid off by the mayor. In the report she wrote, “Lee, 26, teaches third grade at PS 124 in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The union contract requires the least experienced teachers to be let go first meaning that elementary teachers with less than four years’ experience are most at risk.”
Unfortunately, this is not true. The UFT contract makes only one reference to layoffs which is to say that if they are necessary they will done in accordance with applicable state law. It is the law and not the contract that creates a seniority based system for layoffs. This is a small error in an otherwise well done report.
Seniority rules governing layoffs were first adopted in the early 1900s and then subsequently revised in the 1940s and 1970s. They were first established and then revised in direct response to abusive practices of basing layoffs on race, age, sex, religion, political affiliation, cronyism, family status, salary level or other non-objective standards. Lawsuits in the 1970’s challenging the criteria used in layoffs led to the state’s adoption of the current seniority law.
If the seniority layoff law were repealed today, there is nothing to suggest that we would not again have an era with layoffs determined by nepotism, racism, ageism, or any of the other isms or mere personal antipathy towards an otherwise qualified teacher. I don’t believe that anyone wants to go back to that era. More »
As educators, one of our defining beliefs is the principle that we do not use the students entrusted in our care as a vehicle for promoting and accomplishing our political agendas. We hold to this core value even when the political agendas we are pursuing involves causes that will better the lives of those young people, such as full funding for day care centers and schools. When communities and families send their young to us to be educated, they trust that we will exercise the authority given to us as teachers responsibly: we do not manipulate young people into political action they do not fully understand, but educate them into the skills and knowledge of democratic citizenship, in order that one day they will be prepared to make and act on their own informed choices of political action.
So when Eva Moskowitz and her Harlem Success Academies turned out students and parents to support the closing of district schools at the February meetings of the Panel for Educational Policy, many of us present were shocked at the way in which 5 year old and 6 year old children were sent to the microphones to speak words they clearly did not understand, put into their mouths by adults who called themselves educators, even as they ignored our most fundamental professional ethics. But if we were paying attention, we would have seen that this crass political exploitation of children is actually a consistent behavior of Moskowitz and Harlem Success.
Consider the way in which Moskowitz and Harlem Success organize the lottery for their schools as a public exhibition of ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ maximizing and then displaying for political effect the emotional pain of small children who are passed over and denied. There is nothing in the charter law’s requirement that admissions be done through a lottery that requires that it be done as a public spectacle; a lottery can easily be done — and with much less work — at a small gathering with a small number of community representatives present as validators of the fairness of the process. But while such an arrangement would be much more considerate of the feelings of children, it would not have produced the heart tugging event filmed for Waiting for Superman.
In their latest exercise in the political exploitation of children, Moskowitz and Harlem Success closed down their schools for part of last Thursday to get parents and children to attend a demonstration against the lawsuit of the NAACP and the UFT which would force the NYC Department of Education to follow the law, to provide support and resources to struggling schools and to end the discriminatory treatment of district schools co-located with Harlem Success academies. For Moskowitz, guaranteeing a modest turnout for their demonstration trumps providing a full day’s instruction for students.
Can you imagine the outcry from the editorial pages of the Post and the Daily News if New York City public schools were closed for a portion of the day to force parents and children to attend a political demonstration? But here? Silence. Deafening silence.
Is it possible to close the achievement gap, reach a 99 percent Regents diploma rate, be rated by Newsweek and US News and World Report magazines as one of the nation’s top high schools, serve a “motley crew” of students that includes,without regret, some who are learning disabled or economically hard-pressed, and accomplish all this without the need to rank a single teacher with a value-added score?
This should be a rhetorical question but alas these days it stymies and rankles a lot of people in high places.
In a brilliant piece on the Washington Post‘s “Answer Sheet” blog, principal Carol Corbett Burris, named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York, affirms that it can be done and explains how she and her school community managed it.
If she exemplifies in the field the values that she expresses persuasively in this essay, she must be an enlightened and inspiring school leader indeed.
As educators, one of our defining beliefs is the principle that we do not use the students entrusted in our care as a vehicle for promoting and accomplishing our political agendas. We hold to this core value even when the political agendas we are pursuing involves causes that will better the lives of those young people, such as full funding for day care centers and schools. When communities and families send their young to us to be educated, they trust that we will exercise the authority given to us as teachers responsibly: we do not manipulate young people into political action they do not fully understand, but educate them into the skills and knowledge of democratic citizenship, in order that one day they will be prepared to make and act on their own informed choices of political action.
