"You didn't ask WHICH goals."
In the world of Tweed’s top-down directives, issued by apparatchiks who view time spent in real schools with Kurtz’s “the horror, the horror,” more than one good idea has been transformed into its opposite.
In this regard, exhibit number one is the school quality review. In its original conception, the school quality review was founded on the premise that the most important information about a school’s performance came not from decontextualized statistics, but from observations by professional educators. A team of accomplished educator reviewers has a rich knowledge of good teaching and learning practices, so they can recognize in a school the presence — and the absence — of such practices. Just as importantly, they can provide useful feedback to a school on how a school can develop good teaching and learning practices.
But put that idea in the hands of Tweed, and it becomes a virtually unrecognizable caricature of the real thing. Too many of Tweed’s reviewers lack either the ability or the will to conduct a professional educational observation, and come sweeping into a school with a number of formal checklists in hand. Too little of their time in the school is spent observing real classes and talking to real teachers and students. And too many principals lack even an elementary understanding of good teaching and learning practices, and so engage in the mindless production of volume upon volume of meaningless paper in a quest to satisfy what they see as the insatiable gods of the school quality review volcano.
Enter goals. Every professional teacher has goals for their classes and students. Sit down and have a conversation with a teacher about his or her students, and you will discover a robust knowledge of and ambitious agenda for those students. No New York City public school teacher has ever suggested that goal setting for students is not part of their professional obligation as educators.
But the way in which Tweed has run its school quality reviews has set loose something quite different, a paperwork Frankenstein centered on the mass production of written goals of every sort imaginable. In school after school, principals have set to producing volumes of paper that rival the Encyclopedia Britannica for size. Some principals went so far as to hire outside firms to aid in the production of paper. And the assembly line work of this production of paper has been unloaded upon teachers. Teachers have sent to me forms from their schools in which principals demand that teachers produce a minimum of three written goals every two weeks for their students, another set of goals for the term, and still another set of goals for the year. In high schools where teachers see from 150 to 170 students every day, this is an incredible diversion of time and energy that should be dedicated to the classroom, and all to no constructive educational purpose.
For close to two years now, the UFT has met with top officials at Tweed on this issue of the mindless production of paper for the school quality reviews. In conversation after conversation, they all insist that this state of affairs is not what they intended and that reams of paper will not help a principal score well on a school quality review. But when it comes to actually telling a principal to cease and desist, they fall back on their dogma that the principal is king of his castle and do nothing.
Faced with the proliferation of paper work goals that detracted from education and the unwillingness of Tweed to rein it in, the UFT filed grievances which demanded that time be provided for this work, so that it not continue to detract from the real work of education.
Such “details” matter little to the growing legion of spin-meisters working under Tweed’s Press Secretary David Cantor. With a firm belief that there is an never ending supply of “useful idiots” who will carry their message without asking troubling questions, they have been telling all who will listen that teachers and the UFT don’t want to set goals for their students. And there certainly are the always gullible, such as Eduwonk’s Andy Rotherham, who rush to the barricades on Tweed’s behalf without asking even the simplest of questions. But Tweed has tried to fool all the people for too long, and those with a modicum of independence and integrity now ask the questions. And the answers do not place the reign of Joel Klein in a positive light.
6 Comments:
1 Phyllis C. Murray
· Feb 7, 2010 at 11:41 am
“Faced with the proliferation of paper work goals that detracted from education and the unwillingness of Tweed to rein it in, the UFT filed grievances which demanded that time be provided for this work, so that it not continue to detract from the real work of education.”Leo Casey
Leo Casey is correct. There is a proliferation of unnecessary paper work that detracts from education. Plus the preparation for “the visit”by state/city evaluators goes beyond the duplication of lesson plans for folders. There are ritualized common preps by grade; creation of new folders for all content areas (which house rubrics, plans, flow charts, standards, etc.; and the formulation of brand new ongoing case studies of students. Add to all of this, a rigourous testing schedule, a student’s daily schedule , as Jimmy Margulies illustrates for the Record, might resemble the following:
Period 1 Test taking
Period 2 Teaching to the test
Period 3 Test strategies
Period 4 Test prep
Period 5 Test scoring
Period 6 Multiple choice test
Period 7 Essay Tests
Teacher: Do you know your schedule by heart yet?
Student: Why, are you gonna test me on it?
Visit: Jimmy Margulies,cartoonist,for The Record(Hackensack, NJ)
Surely, as Casey mentions,”the mindless production of volume upon volume of meaningless paper in a quest to satisfy what they(principals) see as the insatiable gods of the school quality review volcano.” has to end. We must find our way back to basics. We have to return to teaching so that we can ensure that the mandated 180 days of instruction can take place… before the bell tolls!
Let Teachers Teach!
Phyllis C. Murray, UFT Chapter Leader
2 Bob Calder
· Feb 7, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Have you tried to build a model for how a hypothetical school would deal with this in a successful manner? For instance, how many students would you be willing to teach in this way? How much money would be needed to cover the teacher’s time competing this paperwork?
Perhaps a school could have a student evaluation and discipline coach for every so many students, taking paperwork and discipline away from the classroom teacher so you don’t have to pay them more or hire more of them. This person could be positioned to take ALL discipline off administrators’ desks as well. You cold probably hire two of these people for every administrator let go in a high school.
Stanford’s recent decision to have an counselor for every 1,000 students points to some interesting speculation. My high school has one part-time counselor for nearly twice that number. It should probably have two full-time counselors who only do social work. If the hypothetical discipline cum goal coach job title were to be added, the needed number might rise to five or six.
Of course if you aren’t interested in improving education, you could just put in a database with five drop-down choices for student goal administration that regenerates automatically if the student’s grades are not above a cut score.
I think I can put a couple of my students to work building a database solution next week…
3 Richard Skibins
· Feb 8, 2010 at 12:44 pm
We should be focusing on ways to end this ridiculous goalsetting garbage instead of providing for time to perform it.
The ball was dropped when ECLAS was introduced. Time was not provided, and the answer was that it was a systemwide problem. Now we have data binders, inquiry binders, running records, baseline, midline, conference notes, group goals, and now individual goals.
Why was none of this ever fought?
4 Paul Winston
· Feb 9, 2010 at 11:18 pm
Leo:
Spot on, once again.
If there is any justice in this world, history will not be kind to BloomKlein.
5 Arlyne LeSchack
· Feb 10, 2010 at 2:10 pm
I had to turn the TV this morning while listening to Joel Klein say with regard to possible teacher lay-offs that wasn’t it terrible that he to lay off the last people hired. It seems to me that that would be standard practice, and it’s only a matter of money and power that he would want to do otherwise.
6 Anthony Wansor
· Feb 11, 2010 at 9:26 pm
Well Leo,
Finally, it seems from watching the interviews with Mulgrew and now with you writing some stuff that actually means something to our lives, we may get somewhere with this union. We have been compaining about this nonsense for years now. Lead your people. They are young and have not been educated about their union. Get off your duffs and get into the schools and lead these young teachers. That is what you are all getting paid to do. That is why we call you the UFT Leadership. Lead. Lead. Lead!
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