Playing at AMC Empire 25 234 West 42nd St. in Manhattan October 1–6: 10:40 a.m., 1 p.m., 7:15 p.m., 11:45 p.m.
Oscar winner Matt Damon narrates this eye-opening look at the American education system, as viewed from the perspective of four dedicated teachers and seeks to counteract popular misconceptions about the teaching profession by showing, in a style of close-up realism, what teachers actually do and what their lives are really like — and how continued neglect of the profession may be jeopardizing the nation’s future.
Directed by Academy Award winner Vanessa Roth and produced by Dave Eggers and Ninive Caligari, American Teacher: A Documentary aims to address the difficult questions about the broken public school system through honest dialogue with the people who strive to give our children a proper education. The film is part of the Teacher Salary Project and is based on the book “Teachers Have it Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers.”
The film portrays five K-12 public school educators from across the country as they navigate the daily challenges of balancing their teaching career with their personal lives. Every day, Jamie Fidler, Jonathan Dearman, Erik Benner and Rhena Jasey each preside over a classroom full of children with unbound potential. But due to the fact that funds are in short supply and the hours can be grueling, it’s a constant uphill battle. Perhaps even more troubling is the revelation that over three million American teachers will be eligible for retirement in the next decade, and that the current crop of college graduates are turning away from the profession in droves due to minuscule wages and a complete lack of prestige. Realizing that quality teachers are the key to a good education, Roth profiles four educators who have devoted their careers to the betterment of today’s youth but recognize that the entire system could collapse at any moment.
Anthony Cody’s recent reflection on this year’s Education Nation program on MSNBC offers an important caution to those trying to develop “multiple measures” for student learning and effective teaching. If the decision to use a given measure is determined solely by whether or not it’s linked to higher standardized test scores (as with the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching study), then you don’t really have “multiple measures.”
Tracking test scores can be an important tool in helping students make progress, and it is useful to know which elements of classroom practice have a significant impact on students’ performance on end-of-the-year tests. For example, teachers in Chicago who had high ratings on Charlotte Danielson’s framework for evaluating effective teaching have also been shown to have higher value-added scores. However, when test scores are used as the sole measure of effective teaching and learning — or when valuable aspects of effective teaching and important types of student learning are discarded or ignored because they don’t align with standardized test results — our students are the ones who ultimately pay the price.
Do you notice what is bothering me? Mrs. Gates begins by acknowledging that good teaching cannot be reduced to a test score — or at least that this is often said. She then asserts that the half billion dollars they have spent on research in this area have uncovered a number of things that can be measured that allow us to predict which teachers will have the highest test scores. A great teacher is defined over and over again as one who made sure students “learned the material at the end of the year.” More »
StoryCorps — a national oral history project whose interviews you’ve probably heard on public radio — kicked off its National Teacher Initiative earlier this week with AFT president Randi Weingarten participating at the White House event.
The project, which launched Sept. 19, celebrates and honors the courageous work of public school educators nationwide. “This is a fantastic opportunity to hear from teachers — the people who are closest to the kids,” said Weingarten. “Their stories will be a window to the world on today’s public education — what’s working, what’s not, and what we can do better to prepare our children for the 21st-century knowledge economy.”
StoryCorps is looking to partner with schools, districts, teachers unions, community groups, and others to conduct an on-site recording day, and will send their staff and equipment to schools or events if the local or state federation can guarantee that at least eight interview pairs that include at least one teacher are available to participate. Each interview takes 40 minutes, and the participants will receive a CD of their interview.
Interview pairs for the National Teachers Initiative may consist of two teachers interviewing one another, friends discussing the impact an exemplary teacher had on their lives, a student or former student interviewing a memorable teacher, or other relevant pairings. The National Teachers Initiative will focus on these heroic teachers from a variety of ethnicities, cultures and age groups. All interviews will be archived and kept in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Select National Teachers Initiative interviews will be edited for nationwide public radio broadcasts throughout the 2011–12 school year.
StoryCorps already is planning to visit cities throughout the country during the 2011-12 school year to record stories honoring at least 625 teachers. These cities include: Albuquerque, N.M.; Baltimore; Fort Riley, Kan.; McComb, Miss.; Mobile, Ala.; New Orleans; New York City; Orlando, Fla.; Portland, Ore.; and Zanesville, Ohio.
Class Warfare: that’s the title Steven Brill gave to his recent book on the state of American education.
With such a title, one might think that that Brill’s book would investigate how the deep class divisions between America’s wealthy class and our poor and working class, a gap that has grown immensely over the last four decades, has harmed our schools and our students. After all, educational research has shown that greatest challenge our schools face is the grinding effect of poverty on so many of the students we teach.
But Brill’s book embraces without question or qualification the diagnosis of the wealthy Wall Street hedge-fund managers who have driven much of the dominant ‘education reform’ agenda: in their view, the educational failures of schools and students are the fault of public school teachers and teacher unions. More »
Chester Finn has more listings on his C.V. than there are plankton sucked into the megamouth of a feeding whale shark. Although he is an education policy adviser and erstwhile academic, he is not an educator.
He’s the president of the non-profit (in the sense of potential intellectual gain) Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Reportedly he’s a likeable chap ( likes to be called “Checker,” perhaps because he’s partial to board games as much as board rooms), and not at all brash. His murderous animus for teacher unions is conveyed with old-boy elegance and charm. (The eye is not malevolent when it winks like a pixie. With a twinkle he assures teachers that they have nothing to fear from disembowelment.)
In a recent post on the Education Next blog he draws a sharp distinction between the virtue of teachers and the vices of their unions. He practically says that teachers and their unions should be mortal enemies. They would be, he feels, if teachers would simply take to heart opinion polls that show that teachers are revered but their unions are reviled.
He sets up teachers by flattering them, seducing them with praise and suspiciously-flavored statistics from polls. He implies that if teachers cut themselves loose from the unions that exploit and are strangling them, there would be veritable peace on earth. Nothing like a choke-out to clear institutional memory!
But all conscientious teachers know that the interests of their profession and their union are not antithetical and it is not their union that is exploiting them but rather Finn and his confederates who are giving it their best shot. More »
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 »
