Mica Pollock is an anthropologist who teaches at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. She has two new books coming out this summer: Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School (on which she has written the FAQ below) and Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and Opportunity in Our Schools. Her first book, Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School, won AERA's 2005 book award. And she has just launched a new blog, schoolracetalk.org. Head on over to her site for what promises to be a provocative discussion.

1) What is "anti-racism?"

By “everyday antiracism,” we mean acts educators can take daily in schools and classrooms to counteract racial inequality of opportunity and outcome, and to counteract racist ideas about “types of people.”

I should note that by “racism,” we don’t mean the willful harming of people of color by white people. (This is how the law has often framed it.) Rather, the authors collectively define racism as any act or situation that, even unwittingly:

- tolerates, accepts, or reinforces racially unequal opportunities for children to learn and thrive;

- allows racial inequalities in opportunity as if they are normal and acceptable;

- or treats people of color as less worthy or less complex than “white” people.

2) Do you think that history, custom, teachers, or students themselves most often propagate racism?

All of the above. Still, this book focuses on acts by educators. They have great power to “deal” with race issues in schools, for good or ill. Students also react to educators’ everyday acts. This is also why educators are so powerful! In my introduction to Everyday Antiracism, I write that:

In schools, people interact across racial lines, distribute opportunities moment to moment, react to “outside” opportunity structures, and shape how future generations think about difference and equality. Interactions in educational settings help build or dismantle racial “achievement gaps.” To a student, one action can change everything. Everyday acts explored in this book include how we talk with our students and discipline them; the activities we set up for them to do; the ways we frame and discuss communities in our curriculum; and the ways we assign students to groups, grade their papers, interact with their parents, and envision their futures.

Everyday Antiracism shows that educators take many acts in educational settings that harm children of color, or privilege and value some children over others in racial terms, without educators meaning to at all. Further, many racist ideas about “types of people” are programmed into our heads as educators, despite our intentions. So, we want educators asking: which everyday acts by me counteract a racially unequal society, and racist ideas about “types of people”?

3) Some authors in your book deny the validity of racial categories, while others claim that to deny the existence of racial inequality is foolish. Explain.

Racial categories are social realities built on biological fictions. As Alan Goodman discusses in his essay in Everyday Antiracism, 20th and 21st century genetics show that there are no biologically meaningful “racial” subdivisions to the human race. How could race categories like “white,” “black,” “Asian,” or “Latino” be genetically valid if someone labeled “white” in Brazil can be labeled “black” or “Latino” here?

Race categories are things people made up. Over six centuries of life in the Americas, people used law, “science,” and everyday activity to distribute opportunities along the lines of physical traits that were simply too small a portion of our genetic makeup to be valid ways of categorizing human beings (skin color, nose shape, and hair texture, for example). Still, we have made these categories socially real in the past nearly six centuries of American life. So, racial categories are false biologically, but real socially.

This is why the “antiracist” educator must negotiate between two antiracist impulses in deciding her everyday behaviors toward students. She must choose between the antiracist impulse to treat all people as human beings rather than racial group members, and the antiracist impulse to recognize people’s real experiences as racial group members in order to counteract racial inequality.

4) Do you think the promotion of anti-racism in schools will lead to the continuation of anti-racism post-graduation and in the workplace?

If our children are educated in settings where children of all “groups” are treated as equally smart and valuable, they will learn to see one another more that way, too. What children learn in school is typically the opposite. One author in the book, Karolyn Tyson, has studied almost-all-black schools in North Carolina where the “gifted” class is completely white. The very existence of that “gifted” classroom teaches students a lie: it teaches them that some “race groups” are more “gifted” than others. Another author in the book, Beth Rubin, discusses how racially patterned tracking “teaches” students the same false lesson: that some “race groups” are smarter than others. How could these false ideas not continue after graduation? Conversely, if students are schooled in environments where educators actively treat students from all “groups” as smart and “gifted,” how could they not learn to see one another more that way, too? And how could that not continue after graduation?

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Sarah Reckhow taught at Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore from 2002 to 2004 and was a Teach for America corps member. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation explores the role of national philanthropies and community organizers in urban education policymaking.

Liam Julian’s review of “Hard Times at Douglass High” boils down a complicated stew of frustration, hope, and absurdity to a singular and simplistic point—many of the teachers are “just plain bad at their jobs.” Julian does begin with a fair remark—this documentary is not a systematic assessment of No Child Left Behind. Nonetheless, the film offers a vivid portrait of common NCLB observations and enough contextual information to make Julian’s reductive reaction dubious.

NCLB is most present in the film as a looming threat with vague and rarely applied consequences, including state takeover. The filmmakers bring us in on test day—students listlessly staring at test booklets, falling asleep, staring off into space. Many students did not take the tests seriously, assuming that the tests had no consequences or feeling too indifferent to try. We also hear from faculty commenting that they are forced to find ways to accommodate failing seniors at the end of the year in order to artificially raise the graduation rate.

We meet a state observer walking the halls with the academic dean. The state observer rattles off the various actions that may be taken if Douglass does not improve. At the end of the film, we learn that the state board of education finally tried to take over Douglass during 2005-2006, but the move was blocked by the state legislature. An impending gubernatorial election between Baltimore Mayor O’Malley and Governor Ehrlich added a heavy dose of partisan politics to that debate. The film implies that Ms. Grant, the principal in the film, was removed due to the school’s low performance. In fact, she was removed due to a school athletics scandal. Nonetheless, the school was “restructured” by the district in 2006, and the administration was replaced. The NCLB accountability system, as practiced at urban schools like Douglass, tends to operate like a merry-go-round; principal turnover rates in Baltimore are very high. School leaders get on board, ride until they get dizzy and stumble off, and then new leaders come aboard.

The bulk of Julian’s column focuses on Douglass’ teachers and seems oddly divorced from policy considerations. Drawing on clips from the film, he offers arm chair criticism of discipline and teaching methods, arguing that “the staff members at Douglass aren’t cutting it.” Even if this were true, Julian draws no clear policy lessons from his conclusion. It seems unlikely that Douglass hired only ineffective teachers from an otherwise talented pool of applicants.

Though there are great teachers at Douglass like Ms. Ray (she is featured in the film, but we never go in her classroom), it is also true that there are not enough. The film offers pieces to form an explanation—vacancies that go unfilled, long term substitute teachers, and a shortage of experienced teachers. The film features a 9th grade English class; the teacher makes a difficult choice to resign midway through the year. Substitutes come in, and the class flounders. The school has also hired a number of Teach for America corps members; some continue to teach there, but many have not stayed beyond the two year commitment, including me. All of these point to a clear problem of supply—Douglass cannot hire and keep enough good teachers to meet its needs. Teachers like Ms. Ray have heart and commitment that few of us can muster for even a few years, let alone decades.

The film does not provide new criticisms of NCLB, nor will it surprise anyone that the school struggles with teacher recruitment and retention. Viewers might be more startled by taking the longer view of Frederick Douglass High School: the school was founded in 1883 and has illustrious graduates including Thurgood Marshall; more than a century later, it is segregated, marginalized, and struggling.

Yet grumbling about the teachers who work in this difficult environment is not the answer. In fact, the film offers some illuminating scenes of teaching and learning at its best, only they don’t take place in a “typical” classroom setting. These include the school’s debate team, choir, band, and music production class. The students involved in these activities display precisely the attitudes we want schools to instill—pride, enthusiasm, and curiosity. Furthermore, the students are expected to perform well and rise to the occasion. Much of the commentary on this film has focused on Douglass at its worst, but much can be learned from Douglass at its best.

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Tim Daly is the President of The New Teacher Project and the lead author of "Mutual Benefits."

Over the past several days, representatives of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and others have sought to challenge specific findings of “Mutual Benefits,” our recently released study on New York City’s school staffing policies. We appreciate the UFT’s engagement in this dialogue and welcome their participation.

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) researched and released “Mutual Benefits” with the goal of sparking a substantive, data-driven policy debate from which better policies would emerge. We are glad to see this debate taking shape and remain optimistic that it will lead to reforms that better serve New York City students.

As our paper indicates, the current policy on teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATRs) is flawed in four fundamental ways:

1. Teachers in the ATR have no incentive to search for positions aggressively and no requirement to apply for positions
2. Teachers have earned and will continue to earn tenure while serving in the ATR
3. There is no limit to the amount of time teachers may serve in the ATR, earning full salary and benefits regardless of their placement status
4. The ATR includes a higher concentration of teachers with documented performance problems than the overall teacher population, and that concentration is growing over time

It is important to note that our assessment of these flaws in the current policy has not, to our knowledge, been rebutted or addressed by any criticism of the paper to date. We stand by these findings and continue to believe that, if unaddressed, the stresses that these flaws put on the school system will inevitably undermine the fair, open and efficient staffing process now in place in New York City.

Though the arguments by the UFT and others against our findings and recommendations have not centered on these core issues to date, many of them mischaracterize our research and threaten to distract everyone involved from the real issues at hand. Below we respond to each of the primary arguments leveled against our report, as discussed primarily in posts on the UFT’s official blog, EdWize.org, and on Eduwonkette.com. We have asked both sites to post this response as part of the larger discussion.

• One-third of ATRs are teaching “regular programs” on a full-time basis.

This assertion is inaccurate and misleading for several reasons, including:

1) It wrongly includes guidance counselors

The UFT estimates that 200 or more individuals in the ATR are, “teaching full programs, with regularly scheduled classes, just as they had done when they were regular assigned to schools.” However, the UFT includes not only teachers but also guidance counselors in this figure. Our report does not include data on guidance counselors or address their hiring patterns at any point. Guidance counselors should therefore be excluded from this calculation. Data from New York City’s payroll system appear to indicate that approximately 85 guidance counselors remained in excess as of April 2007.

2) It includes District 79 teachers, whose excessing and hiring processes were anomalous

In his posting on EdWize.org, Leo Casey of the UFT claims that 270 of the 665 teachers in the ATR are from District 79 alternative schools. Neither figure is correct. According to the NYCDOE’s payroll system, 123 teachers from District 79 schools were in the ATR as of December 2007. These teachers were not included in the 665 figure or our study in general because District 79 underwent a substantial and atypical restructuring in 2007 that led to many teachers changing schools. The rules governing the hiring process for these teachers differed from those for other excessed teachers.

For this reason, TNTP did not include 2007 excessed teachers from District 79 schools in its analysis; it would have been misleading to consider them along with other teachers whose excess process was quite different and far more typical of the city’s normal hiring process. If the UFT believes that the restructuring process for alternative schools should have happened differently, that is a worthy debate – but it is quite separate from this one.

Even so, District 79 teachers fared very well in obtaining new placements. Overall, only 24 percent of teachers excessed from District 79 in 2007 still had not found a new position by December—lower than the unselected rate for teachers who were not from District 79 schools.

3) It is based on an unreliable data source

Last, the UFT’s data is of questionable quality and requires more scrutiny and explanation. It is not enough to conclude that because a teacher reports working a full class schedule that the teacher is actually filling a full-time, permanent vacancy. Self-reported data is vulnerable to a host of inaccuracies. For example, the teacher could be substituting for a teacher who is on long-term leave but who will return again. Verification of the UFT’s claim would require communication with the building principal and an examination of the course allocation for each school. It would require knowing whether the only factor preventing principals from placing ATRs into permanent positions is the budget issue raised by the UFT, or whether they are assigning them to classes merely because they have been instructed to do this as the best way to accommodate ATRs who are housed in their buildings.

It is entirely possible that some teachers in the ATR are effectively teaching on a full-time basis. Indeed, as we have noted before, it is difficult to know exactly how principals are putting these teachers to use. In instances where a reserve pool teacher truly is filling a permanent position, we believe that teacher should be formally appointed to the position. That is a reasonable and fair outcome. Limiting the amount of time a teacher may serve in the reserve pool, as we recommend, may in fact provide an incentive for principals to appoint these teachers to positions formally (or risk losing them).

Continue reading "Guest Blogger Tim Daly on The New Teacher Project's Report" »

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Sol Stern, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, responds both to my post and Bill Ayers's post on social justice teaching.

Thanks for posting my articles on social justice teaching and for being willing to open up this space for more discussion of what I regard as a retrograde education movement.

Unfortunately you [eduwonkette] avoid dealing with the harm done by this movement when you suggest that there’s really no “coherent and distinctive pedagogy that’s taught at schools of education across the country.” If you believe that, you’re somewhat out of touch with some of the biggest stars of the Ed schools. If you can stomach it, I suggest reading the works of Maxine Greene, Michael Apple, William Ayers, Peter McClaren, Carole Edelsky, Henry Giroux, Eric Guttstein, and their many epigones. Several years ago, David Steiner, presently the Dean of the education school at Hunter College, published a study of the syllabi of the basic “foundations of education” and “methods” courses in 16 of the nation’s most prestigious Ed schools. The mainstays of the foundations courses were works by Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux and Jonathan Kozol (who wrote one of the earliest manuals on how American teachers can sneak left wing social justice lessons into the classroom.) For the methods courses, Bill Ayers’s To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher tops the bestseller list. Among those education writers who are almost never included on course lists are advocates of a knowledge-based and politically neutral curriculum, such as E. D. Hirsch Jr. or Diane Ravitch.

You also minimize the problem by suggesting that even if it could be shown that social justice teaching was a significant part of the Ed schools’ agenda, “they largely have been unsuccessful.” I don’t know how we might measure success or failure in this regard. I do note that just two months ago, The Nation, always on the alert for signs of resurgent leftism in our civic institutions, celebrated the growth of the social justice education movement. In my City Journal articles I have cited numerous examples of New York City schools devoting their curriculums to social justice themes and have described specific units taught to children (including in elementary schools) that clearly fall under the rubric of political indoctrination. For example, the radical education group NYCoRE created a “Katrina curriculum” that has been piloted by one of the group’s leaders in the fourth grade of a Manhattan elementary school. The curriculum leaves nothing to chance, providing teachers with classroom prompts designed to illustrate the evils of American capitalism and imperialism. One section, called “Two Gulf Wars,” suggests posing such questions to the kids as: “Was the government unable to respond quickly to the crisis on the Gulf Coast because the money and personnel were all being used in Iraq?”

So it seems to me that the question isn’t precisely how widespread social justice teaching is right now (although more studies would be welcome) but rather what public school leaders – state education commissioners, teachers union leaders and district superintendents – might do to make sure that intrusion of left wing or right wing political ideology into the classroom doesn’t spread any further. We need a professional code of ethics for teachers, a Hippocratic Oath if you will, that makes clear that our public school classrooms are not laboratories for social and political change, with the kids serving as guinea pigs. Perhaps Stanley Fish put it best: “Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or obedience or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or antinationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk show host.”

Unfortunately, in his recent New York Times column, Professor Fish somewhat hypocritically ignored his friend Bill Ayers’ blatant violations of this injunction. So it’s useful that Ayers surfaces here and proudly affirms that he is “in favor of teaching for social justice.” Still, he’s unusually reticent in this post and comes close to defining the social justice teaching he advocates as nothing more than mom and apple pie. He denies that he is out to indoctrinate students in left wing ideology. This is understandable, considering the current news cycle and the public tribulations of Ayers’ Hyde Park neighbor Barack Obama. I admire Ayers’s loyalty to Obama and his sense of political discipline (unlike Reverend Wright.) I assume that after November 8th we will be getting the full, unexpurgated Bill Ayers again. In the meantime I offer a few more snippets from Ayers academic corpus:

For a course called “Social Conflicts of the 1960’s” Ayers posted his introduction to his collection of Weather Underground agitprop —called, with no intended parody, Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974. “Once things were connected,” Ayers’s introduction recollects, “we saw a system at work, we were radicalized, we named that system—imperialism—and forged an idea of how to overthrow it.” If this isn’t an attempt at indoctrinating students, I don’t know what would qualify for that characterization. Similarly, Ayers offers these comments about the role of K-12 teachers for his course on Urban Education: “Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression—we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things. We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally. We cannot be child advocates . . . in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine.” So, not only should public school teachers be working to overcome racism and oppression in Chicago but they should be advocating for the “children of Palestine.” Considering that Ayers’ website includes rants against Israel and Zionism, we can just imagine what he means by that exhortation. And here is the entire required reading list for that same Urban Education course:

- Freedom School Curriculum (Distributed in class).
- Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000.
- bell hooks. Teaching to Transgress, Routledge, 1994.
- William Ayers. Teaching Toward Freedom, Beacon Press, 2004.
- William Ayers, Pat Ford. City Kids, City Teachers, New Press, 1996.

Now that’s real intellectual diversity. No left wing ideology, no indoctrination here. Perhaps Professor Ayers’ Urban Education course answers Eduwonkette’s question about whether “teaching for social justice involves a particular pedagogical approach?"

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I asked Bill Ayers, Professor of Education at the University of Illinois - Chicago, to weigh in on teaching for social justice. You can read his blog here.

It’s hard to know what Sol Stern is worked up about. He quotes me exactly once, urging new teachers to work to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and…be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.”

In spite of the ellipses, and in spite of the fact that this is a tiny excerpt from a syllabus for a class I taught to masters level students, it makes sense—all great teaching, after all, comes back to the twin goals of human enlightenment and human freedom. Whether “teaching underprivileged children to read” or teaching history or physics to graduate students, education involves a search for truth through evidence and argument, and teaching at its best allows students to become more powerful and more purposeful, more informed and intelligent, more aware and more ecstatically free in their projects and their pursuits. That’s teaching.

Stern repeats several times that I want to “indoctrinate students” and turn classrooms into “laboratories of revolutionary change.” Not true, not even close. He claims that I want to “promote left-wing ideology in the nation’s classrooms,” and that my work is based on the idea that “the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony.” Not true, not true. He offers no accompanying quote or citation, which is a little odd since he states that it’s a “major theme.”

The one true assertion he makes about my actual work—and he repeats it several times—is that I am in favor of teaching for social justice. He never explains why that’s a bad thing—Stern favors teaching for social injustice?—but simply calls it the “social-justice teaching agenda.”

So a brief word on schools and social justice: all schools serve the societies in which they’re embedded—authoritarian schools serve authoritarian systems, apartheid schools serve an apartheid society, and so on. Practically all schools want their students to study hard, stay away from drugs, do their homework, and so on. In fact none of these features distinguishes schools in the old Soviet Union or fascist Germany from schools in a democracy. But in a democracy one would expect something more—a commitment to free inquiry, questioning, and participation; a push for access and equity; a curriculum that encouraged free thought and independent judgment; a standard of full recognition of the humanity of each individual. In other words, social justice.

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Mike Klonsky is back with the second half of his guest post. His first post can be found here.

Public school reform could not help but be affected by power and influence of the Ownership Society Anschluss that went full-tilt at all public space, including public schooling, eight years ago.

Deb Meier, reflecting on her early notions of small schools, posted this on her blog:

I thought small schools was one reform no one could do harm with… I saw them as representing new ideas and new relationships between the constituents to schooling. I thought of Ted Sizer's little Parker School in Fort Devons, Mass, and a half dozen other little schools I immediately loved. I forgot about the little independent bookstores in my neighborhood that have been replaced by the Barnes and Nobles of the world.

But when the small-schools movement that she helped launch in the ‘70s met up with the Ownership Society and its top-down strategy for urban school reform, it became clear to many of us that we had to take a fresh look our own change strategies. As Jessica Siegel wrote in the Village Voice: “…what for Meier was an innovation has become, for Klein and Bloomberg, a bulldozer.”

In the last chapter, we offer some strategic and tactical ideas about public school reform and how we can work to both save and transform public education. They include an analysis of the role of teacher unions, and building opposition to NCLB’s testing mania and privatized school management. A key piece in all of this is community organization and fighting to keep public schools public.

And a new study funded by the Annenberg Institute seems to back us up on that. It finds:

-Organizing is helping to expand the capacity of urban public schools to provide a successful earning environment.

-Organizing is contributing to higher student educational outcomes.

-Organizing is helping to expand equity and school capacity in historically underserved communities through targeted district- and state-level policy and resource interventions.

So, in the words of the old labor agitator, Mother Jones: “Don’t mourn. Organize.”

Thanks again to Eduwonkette for letting me guest blog and I hope you will read our book.

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We're well into Small Schools 2.0, which makes it an opportune time to reflect on the similarities and differences between the two small school reform waves. Joining us to discuss this issue is Mike Klonsky, author of a new book on small school reform and the blog Small Talk.

Thanks to Eduwonkette for inviting me in as a guest blogger to talk about our new book, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society. She hasn’t told me yet how much $$$ I have to kick back her way. Just put it on my tab, 'Kette.

Susan Klonsky and I write from the perspective of long-time educators and school activists who were heavily influenced by democratic schooling (and de-schooling) movements in the ‘60s, including the Freedom Schools and Citizenship Schools that were central to the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the ‘60s.

The early small schools efforts in New York, Philly, and Chicago were filled with much of the same transformational spirit and sense of purpose. Mainly created by rebel teachers and supported by community-based organizations, the early small schools, beginning with Deb Meier’s Central Park East in 1974, had the potential to be much more than replicable models of corporate-type restructuring (in the Starbucks sense). For us, they were primarily ways to engage whole school communities in the education of children.

Many of the new small schools were democratically run and focused on making kids more visible and on building a professional community of teachers. Even the early charter schools that followed, pioneered by progressive thinkers like Ted Kolderie, Ted Sizer, Joe Nathan, Albert Shanker and Ray Budde, looked nothing like today’s chains of Edison and KIPP schools. Words like autonomy and choice didn’t mean what they mean now under the Bloomberg/Klein reforms in N.Y. or Daley/Duncan Renaissance 2010 in Chicago. Autonomy meant teachers would have more power over their teaching/learning environments and be freed up from stupid rules, while choice meant expanding choices and options within local schools for students with diverse interests and ways of learning.

Our book tells the story about what happened when that movement ran head-long into the "Ownership Society" (to use George Bush’s own campaign slogan) with its penchant for eroding public space in favor on shock-and-awe privatization, standardization, and school closings. The early small schools visionaries couldn’t have imagined their efforts to create a critical and innovative force within public education being taken over by corporate-type school operators and program vendors. They wouldn’t have dreamed of chains of small schools, bankrolled by the world’s richest men—schools actively excluding ELL kids or students with disabilities for the first two to three years.

How could this have happened? Is there a way out of the quagmire? More on this to follow.

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Sean Corcoran is an economist who teaches at the Steinhardt School of Education at NYU. He is a co-author (with Sylvia Allegretto and Larry Mishel) of The Teaching Penalty, a report released today by the Economic Policy Institute.

“I don’t see why a good teacher should be paid less money than a bad senator . . . It is unconscionable that the average salary of a lawyer is $79,000 a year and the average salary of a teacher is $39,000 a year.”
- John McCain, Republican debate at Dartmouth College, October 29, 1999

“We are going to have to take the teaching profession seriously. This means paying teachers what they are worth. There is no reason why an experienced, highly qualified teacher shouldn't earn $100,000.”
- Barack Obama, from The Audacity of Hope

A charter school in New York City recently announced that it will pay its teachers a base salary of $125,000, with opportunities for extra pay when the school performs well. This announcement may come as a surprise to charter supporters who believe that charter schools are capable of doing much more with less, but the school’s founder Zeke Vanderhoek may be on to something.

A large and growing body of research has demonstrated that teacher quality is one of the most (if not the most) important resources schools contribute to the academic success of their students. At the same time, the average quality of teachers has steadily fallen over time, and an increasingly smaller fraction of the most cognitively skilled graduates are choosing to teach (for more on this see here).

Vanderhoek believes that significantly higher salaries will bring these top graduates back to the classroom, and he may be right. Economists have linked this steady decline in teacher quality since 1960 to the rise in career opportunities for women and the sizable gap between teacher salaries and those of other professionals.

Sylvia Allegretto, Lawrence Mishel, and I offer an in-depth analysis of this teacher pay gap in a new book to be released today by the Economic Policy Institute. (This book is in part an update of our 2004 analysis). The results are discouraging. In 2006, public school teachers earned 15% less per week than similar workers, a gap roughly one percentage point larger than in 2003. Only ten years before, the weekly pay difference between teachers and non-teachers was a mere 4.3%. But the 1990s economic boom largely left teachers behind, as average earnings growth for college graduates far surpassed that of teachers. (Average earnings plateaued after 2000, but the relative pay of teachers never recovered).

The recent slip in relative teacher pay is only a small part of a much longer decline in the attractiveness of teaching. Using Census data on teachers and other professionals, we find that the annual teacher pay differential has grown from parity (or a 14.7 percent pay premium for female teachers) in 1960 to a 20 percentage point gap in 2000 (or almost 30 percent gap for female teachers).

Our analysis is sure to bring out the usual “teachers have it easy” chorus, which claims that teachers’ supposed light work schedule and “summers off” adequately compensate them for their lower annual salaries. (See this report by the Manhattan Institute, for example, which argues that teachers are one of the highest paid professions). In our book, we take a closer look at these arguments and find they are mostly overblown. Either way, policymakers interested in raising the quality of the teacher workforce should be much more concerned about the big picture than petty quibbles over the number of hours teachers work each week or each year.

The fact is, college graduates weigh the relative attractiveness of each profession when deciding which line of work to pursue. And I’ve seen little evidence to suggest that our most highly skilled graduates are interested in part-year employment that pays low salaries and the opportunity to vacation or work at Sears during the summer. Vanderhoek recognizes that teaching is a profession that must compete with many others for top talent, and that the traditional compensation package has little to no chance of winning that talent over. His experiment is unlikely to change the face of the teaching profession overnight, but I think it’s a big step in the right direction.

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Jeff Henig is a Professor of Political Science and Education at Teachers College. He shares insights from his new book, Spin Cycle, published this month by The Russell Sage Foundation.

Public discussions about education research are often highly polarized. Advocates often wield their own studies and slam their opponents’ devious misuse of science. In my new book, Spin Cycle: How Research Is Used in Policy Debates: The Case of Charter Schools, I explore more the relationship between politics and research as it is - and as it might be.

My example: The 2004 AFT charter school report and its aftermath. The AFT report presented federal data indicating charter schools were not performing as well as traditional public schools serving similar populations. The New York Times covered it on page one (Charter Schools Trail in Results, U.S. Data Reveals.) The pro-school choice Center for Education Reform returned fire, enlisting a group of researchers to sign a full-page advertisement The New York Times ran eight days later. It read like a primer on proper methodology for conducting social science research. Rather than simply recap its pro-charter position, the Center for Education Reform took the The New York Times to task for failing to subject the AFT report to a more rigorous and skeptical review.

Was this evidence that education research had emerged from obscurity? Did it mean research coverage would observe the rules of good science, with attentive referees ready to throw flags at violations? Unfortunately, no. Ensuing rounds of give-and-take featured personalized attacks and an unwillingness to acknowledge the complexity of the phenomenon under review.

One chapter in Spin Cycle describes the media’s role in exacerbating polarization. I focus on mainstream print. The Web and blogosphere play a part, but in my story, the effects are largely negative.

Not so long ago, an article about research had to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, reviewed by outside reviewers who didn’t know the author’s identity, then revised according to the reviewers comments. It took six to twelve months from submission to final acceptance, then another nine months or more until publication. There was generally a reluctance to cite research until it had been vetted through this slow, usually meticulous peer review process.

New technologies compressed the time between initial results and public release. Researchers often feel pressure to get their results out there “now,” fearing being scooped and believing that the window of opportunity to influence policy debates is open for shorter and shorter intervals.

When speed becomes critical, processes for refining, checking, and simply deliberating about evidence can be short-circuited. But the pressure to be speedy is often manufactured: “political time” isn’t “policy time.” Politicians may clamor for instant access to new findings. But policy learning takes a slower arc. Sometimes, it makes more sense to slow down, to wait for evidence to accumulate rather than rush to judgment based on the latest study.

Don’t misunderstand me. While new technologies exacerbate the pressure to be speedy and hyper-reactive, I’m not looking to turn back the clock. Fortunately, the blogosphere has the potential to raise the level of public discourse about research in several ways the mainstream media can’t - or won’t:

1) Depth of knowledge and analysis. For journalists, education remains a relatively low- status, high-turnover beat; many who cover it lack the expertise to wrestle with quantitative studies and issues of research design. Others find it hard to convince their editors and producers to give them the time and space for greater depth.

Whether you agree with them, or they agree with one another, bloggers like Eduwonk, Edwize, edspresso, and my gracious host, eduwonkette, know what they’re talking about and are less constrained by space.

2) Breadth and context. The myth of the “killer study” — a single piece of research so strong and unassailable it sweeps the slate clean and triumphs once and for all — blinds us. Science is a collective undertaking. Enlightenment demands sifting through multiple studies conducted at different times and places, using an assortment of defensible measures and designs.

By archiving reports on earlier studies, linking discussions of new research to reports on similar topics, and adding judgment that comes from observing research debates over a number of years, education bloggers can help deflate the idea of the killer study. The education blogosphere could cultivate an atmosphere that acknowledges that, while some studies are certainly more convincing than others, we can and must learn from imperfect research. More than a “gold standard” is worthy of consideration.

3) Democratization. Many politicians, journalists, and researchers believe they must dramatically simplify discussion of evidence to find any traction. Should we shrink our expectations of democracy? Or should we hold to a high ideal of democratic decision-making and help develop a citizenry that is up to the challenge? Those aren’t easy questions. Dewy-eyed pronouncements about the natural wisdom that bubbles up from the grassroots should be greeted with healthy skepticism.

Yet democracy’s long-term health calls for raising the level of sophistication with which public issues are discussed and resolved, Fortunately, electronic media provide the open forums that can ensure that serious discussion of education research is not an elite, invitation-only event.

Posted by eduwonkette at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Scott McLeod, a professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Iowa State, blogs at Dangerously Irrelevant. Many thanks to Scott for this guest post!

When eduwonkette asked me to guest blog about data-driven decision-making in schools, I eagerly agreed. Why? Because in my work with numerous school organizations in multiple states, I have seen the power of data firsthand. When done right, data-driven education can have powerful impacts on the learning outcomes of students.

Unfortunately, most school districts still are struggling with their data-driven practice. Much of this is because they continue to think about using data from a compliance mindset rather than using data for meaningful school improvement. An uninformed model of data-driven decision-making looks something like this:



This is the NCLB model. Schools are expected to collect data once a year, slice and dice them in various ways, set some goals based on the analyses, do some things differently, and then wait another whole year to see if their efforts were successful. Somehow, this model is supposed to get schools to 100% proficiency on key learning outcomes. This is dumb. It's like trying to lose weight but only weighing yourself once a year to see if you're making progress. Compounding the problem is the fact that student learning data often are collected near the end of the year and given back to educators months later, which of course is helpful to no one.

A better model looks something like this:



The key difference in this model is an emphasis on ongoing progress monitoring and continuous, useful data flow to teachers. Under this approach, schools have good baseline data available to them, which means that the data are useful for diagnostic purposes in the classroom and thus relevant to instruction. The data also are timely, meaning that teachers rarely have to wait more than a few days to get results. In an effective data-driven school, educators also are very clear about what essential instructional outcomes they are trying to achieve (this is actually much rarer than one would suppose) and set both short and long-term measurable instructional goals from their data.

Armed with clarity of purpose and clarity of goals, effective data-driven educators then monitor student progress during the year on those essential outcomes by checking in periodically with short, strategic formative assessments. They get together with role-alike peers on a regular basis to go over the data from those formative assessments, and they work as a team, not as isolated individuals, to formulate instructional interventions for the students who are still struggling to achieve mastery on those essential outcomes. After a short period of time, typically three to six weeks, they check in again with new assessments to see if their interventions have worked and to see which students still need help. The more this part of the model occurs during the year, the more chances teachers have to make changes for the benefit of students.

It is this middle part of the model that often is missing in school organizations. When it is in place and functioning well, schools are much more likely to achieve their short and long-term instructional goals and students are much more likely to achieve proficiency on accountability-oriented standardized tests. Teachers in schools that have this part of the model mastered rarely, if ever, complain about assessment because the data they are getting are helpful to their classroom practice.

NCLB did us no favors. It could've stressed powerful formative assessment, which is the driving engine for student learning and growth on whatever outcomes one chooses. Instead, it went another direction and we lost an opportunity to truly understand the power of data-driven practice. There are hundreds, and probably thousands, of schools across the country that have figured out the middle part of the model despite NCLB. It is these schools that are profiled in books such as Whatever It Takes and It's Being Done (both recommended reads) and by organizations such as The Education Trust.

When done right, data-driven decision-making is about helping educators make informed decisions to benefit students. It is about helping schools know whether what they are doing is working or not. I have seen effective data-driven practice take root and it is empowering for both teachers and students. We shouldn't unilaterally reject the idea of data-driven education just because we hate NCLB. If we do, we lose out on the potential of informed practice.



Thanks for the guest spot, eduwonkette!

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)