Guest post by Katie Osgood.

I have a pretty unique job. I work as a teacher on a child/adolescent inpatient unit at a psychiatric hospital in Chicago. My students come from all over Chicagoland and attend all types of schools: neighborhood, charter, turnaround, private, suburban, alternative, and sometimes no school at all. The vast majority of my students, however, come from low-income minority neighborhoods. My job allows me a rare birds-eye view of the educational landscape here in Chicago.

And I do not like what I see.

My students are often very sick. The reasons they find themselves hospitalized vary, but usually it involves some type of crisis, either a threat of harm to themselves or others. They are in my classroom, on average, for only about a week or two. Some kids are filled with anger about being bounced around to yet another foster placement. Some are depressed because they don't feel wanted or cared for at home. Some are sad because their lives are a series of upheavals including bouts of homelessness, nights without food, and a new school every year or two. Some kids are involved with gangs, and although they may not want to admit it, they are terrified of the violence. Many have drug and alcohol problems already at their young age. My kids are the kids who tried to take their own lives after being bullied and tormented because of their sexual identity. My kids are the ones who have run away after being abused by a relative. My kids get into fight after fight in school because they feel they have nothing left to lose. All in all, my students tend to be those disruptive, difficult-to-educate kids with behavioral or emotional disorders who frankly no one really knows what to do with. So they end up in a hospital like mine.

As I listen to my students' stories about their experiences in school and then look at the current education reforms sweeping our nation, I am increasingly alarmed at what I see. Every change pushed by the corporate reform movement seems to do a greater disservice to my students than the last.

Charter schools are being hailed as 'the answer' and then they unapologetically push my students out. I have worked with kids who were counseled out of all of the major charter school providers in Chicago, even the highly publicized ones lauded by Arne Duncan, Mayor Emanuel, and President Obama. The charters are not serving my kids. My students are also getting more and more untrained novice teachers, like the corporate reform favorite Teach for America provides, and fewer experienced educators. Many of these young college grads know nothing about these students' cultural backgrounds or extensive social-emotional needs. To add to all of that, my students are being labeled as "failures" by the standardized tests mandated by corporate reform's signature piece of legislation, No Child Left Behind.

All I hear coming from the powers that be is to "fire more teachers," "create more charters schools," or "give more tests." None of the remedies being peddled by the elites help my students AT ALL. They are the kids being left behind.

So what DO my students need?

They need caring, committed, EXPERIENCED teachers. They need people with extensive training and practice teaching students who have intense needs. They need as many seasoned professional teachers as possible who already know techniques and strategies that will help them from day one.

They need stability. Every time some politico decrees from on high that a school is failing and proceeds to fire the staff or close the school, they are disrupting children's lives. They are violently, often without a word of explanation to the child, ripping a trusted adult or mentor away from these kids. My students' lives are already chaotic enough, why add to that?

They need "a village". One of my favorite parts of my job is working with a dedicated TEAM of professionals. I am never alone with the kids. There is always at least one and usually more staff around to help coach kids through conflict or frustration. While I teach, the social workers are working with the patients' families and with the child individually to address those important social-emotional needs and family dynamics. Nurses are soothing their physical ailments. Doctors are helping imbalances in the brain. The activity therapist guides kids through therapeutic play, music, and art. It is a collaborative, holistic, team approach to learning. And the kids respond to it.

They need extra resources. My kids have more needs than students from affluent areas. Their schools need to be flooded with social workers, mental health workers, nurses, teacher aides, special education experts as well as with material items like books, science labs, technology, and art and music classes. Flooded.

They need to have their basic needs met. Another perk of my job is that I know that every child in my class had a good night's sleep in a safe environment, every child has a full belly and knows their belly will be full again soon, and that there will be no violence or trauma inflicted on my kids after they leave my sight today. It is a luxury many inner-city teachers do not get. We need to get serious about combating the realities of poverty.

They need creativity and flexibility. How I would love to see schools which were using the most progressive, exciting, inventive teaching techniques possible--The kind of teaching and learning which seems to only happen in private, elite schools. Instead, teachers' hands are tied to scripted curriculum and standardized outcomes. Charters are no better. In fact, some schools, like the highly-praised KIPP franchise, preach "zero tolerance" and "no excuses" with rigid expectations that are so high, my students have little chance to ever reach them. In this manner, the charters conveniently push low-performing students out. Schools need to bend to meet the needs of students, not expect the kids to know how to change themselves. That's the beauty of public education. All are supposed to be welcomed.

They need strong peer groups. Most schools and teachers can figure out creative ways to work with just a small handful of children with truly significant behavioral and emotional needs. Unfortunately, there is a critical mass that is reached when schools become overwhelmed with difficult-to-teach children. As charter schools and turnaround schools skim off the students who are strongest academically and behaviorally, the peer group in the neighborhood schools suffers. And of course, the great paradox in American education is that the schools with the greatest numbers of these challenging students are given the fewest resources to help them.

They need personal attention. Class size matters. When I ask my students what they need from the adults in their lives, the answer is almost always, "someone to listen to us." My students require positive adult attention as often as possible. And so, teachers need small enough classes to reach every child.

They need high-interest curricula developed specifically for them. Thanks to the enormous autonomy my job affords, I get to tailor my lessons to the specific kids in my classroom. This past week, for example, the kids in my elementary class got extra excited about the children's book, The Teacher From the Black Lagoon by Mike Thaler. This pure, accidental interest in the book sparked a whole week's worth of literature lessons where we read all the series, acted it out, and wrote stories of our own. This independence is an extravagance many public school teachers today can only dream about. Instead, they are forced to teach boring, skill-acquisition, test-prep curricula--the kind of terrible lessons which often create more negative behaviors. The only real exciting learning occurs "between the cracks" in those spaces just after the testing week or at the very end of the year after the last grade has been turned in. Those are some of the few moments when students' faces really light up in the process of learning and teachers are reminded why they chose this noble profession.

They need their mental health issues addressed and not punished. These children are sick. We let kids grow up in environments where they are exposed daily to violence, trauma, racism, substance abuse, and neglect. And then we blame them for acting out in rage. They are subsequently funneled into a for-profit prison system instead of supported in their grossly underfunded and overwhelmed schools. It's sick and wrong. These kids can still be helped.

I am tired of hearing that poverty doesn't matter. While mental illness can strike anyone regardless of socio-economic status, living in poverty exacerbates and sometimes creates many of the illnesses that bring my students to the hospital. Teachers are some of the few people out there who work directly with these kids. And as wonderful as they are, teachers alone are not enough. Society at large needs to step up, stop blaming the teachers, and start focusing on the real barriers to achievement.

I am in awe of my kids every day. They are such dynamic, vivacious, intelligent, curious, sweet, funny, young people. I love talking to them, hearing their stories. They have so much to say. But I feel like society has written them off, thrown them away, resigned itself that some people are just not worth saving. A two-tiered education system in being created where the kids who can meet expectations behaviorally get one type of school and everyone else is forgotten in the purposefully starved neighborhood school.

And it makes me so very sad.

When will the conversation shift away from non-issues like choice, competition, bad teachers, and test scores, to finally focus on the kinds of reform that would actually make a difference in these kids' lives?

Katie Osgood is a special education teacher in Chicago currently working at a psychiatric hospital. She also taught special education in the Chicago Public Schools. She holds a Masters in Elementary and Special Education from DePaul University. Before teaching in America, she taught ESL/EFL for six years in Japan.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by John Kuhn.

Part Two of two.

I ended the last posting with a list of possible causes of the superior academic results seen in Highland Park ISD as compared to Everman ISD. In this posting, I want to talk at length about causality, because it is at the core.

The battle line over causality, like all battle lines, is defined by two sides. One side shouts, "It's poverty, stupid," and the other shouts, "Quit making excuses and get results." Who to side with?

There are two main reasons I side with the poverty faction (not including the fact that I am a teacher and tend to hate it on principle when non-teachers tell me I am terrible at what I do.)

The first reason is simple. To use a baseball analogy, rich and middle-class kids from stable families are fastballs over the plate. We tend to hit them out of the park with regularity. Poor kids, on the other hand, are knuckleballs and rising curveballs. The poorer they are, the nastier the junk. Poverty, in my first-hand experience, makes a HUGE difference in the classroom. In general, homework gets done more consistently if you aren't poor; notes get taken; tests get studied for; parent phone calls get answered; parent conferences are actually attended; commitments are made by parents and followed-through-on; online grades are checked; parent-initiated phone calls are received; questions about grades get asked; supplies are provided from home and not from the teacher's mug of cruddy free pencils.

If you are a reformer, you are likely tempted to say, "So what? Baseball players don't make excuses. They either hit the ball or they get sent down to the minors." But here's my philosophical rub: baseball players face an opponent. There is another team trying to strike them out. I'm left with a fundamental question: in the field of American education, who is trying to make teachers strike out? Who is the opponent throwing this junk? And why don't they just stop?

Everyone you talk to says they want us to hit homeruns. No one self-identifies as the opponent. As far as I can tell, an opponent of education doesn't exist. But these factors that challenge the education of our children keep arising nonetheless. School reformers seem to believe that these pitches are magical and immutable. God is the one throwing the heat, and who are we to tell Him to stop? Poverty has no origin. It has no cure. It cannot be ameliorated or minimized. And any teacher who breathes the p-word, "that which must not be named," is just making excuses.

I say baloney. Poverty can be contained; it's just that no one wants to do it. "Inequality is inevitable" would make a really pathetic national motto, wouldn't it? So quit screaming at me to put out these fires faster and admit just once that there's an arsonist on the loose.
The only problem many are willing to acknowledge is bad batting. They wear jerseys with our logo on them, jerseys that say "Students First" and have pictures of apples and the whole bit. Everyone--everyone--says positive outcomes for children are "the most important thing in the world." But none of this changes the fact that someone is still out there throwing junk over the plate, still trying to make teachers fail in accomplishing "the most important thing in the world," and no one is lifting a finger to stop him. I'm left with the disheartening belief that the reformers' commitment to success for all students crumbles when they are asked to do anything more strenuous than condemn others. Ask them to work for some meaningful improvement in the life conditions of students and they, ahem, balk.

Accountability is only for the teachers in our modern republic. There is no visible or sustained pressure to address school funding, no pressure to address the inequity of resources or the unequal opportunity to learn that, while many are content to pretend it doesn't exist, nonetheless devastates kids in Everman far more than it devastates kids in Highland Park. We batters are supposed to live with these nasty pitches; we are supposed to accept poverty as "part of the deal." There will be no hue and cry in opposition to inequality. And to that I can only say, "Why?"

When Dr. Steve Perry titles a book No One is Coming to Save Us, I can only ask myself why he has given up so easily on equality and the moral imperative of social justice. In surrendering equality and embracing the inevitability of poverty, so many who think they are serving the interests of poor children have traded their birthrights for a bowl of soup (or a stack of standardized tests).

The myth of the Bee-eater is that the outcome of kids is so important that any and all obstacles to their success should be confronted. But that doesn't appear to be the case when it comes to obstacles that aren't teachers.

If you contend that poverty and inequity are "part of the deal," to be lived with and accepted, then I think you are either cruel or you possess a deficiency of moral courage. If you say--as an acquaintance on Twitter recently argued--that inequity is inevitable, then I think you're an enabler for the 1%. If you stand in the public square and say schools must change but society must not, you are a fraud and you aren't fixing anything. After all, there are many places on this green Earth (brace for Finland reference) where inequity is much less pronounced than in the USA. Apparently inequity isn't inevitable everywhere. And before you jerk that knee and say, "But Finland is homogeneous," let me just telegraph to you that my reply will be: "So you're saying America would be more equitable if it weren't for all the black people?" (I like to say that we are just as homogeneous as Finland because we are all people here. I don't subscribe to the prominent philosophy that accepts different treatment of other races as the norm.)

The "quit making excuses" refrain rubs me the wrong way because my "excuse" is the straightforward statement that kids run more slowly in flip-flops than they do in Nikes, no matter how hard I coach them, and that it's pure, cowardly nonsense to say this nation can't give every kid in flip flops a better pair of shoes. When did it become fashionable to throw in the towel on equality in the USA? When did we all agree that Thomas Jefferson missed the mark when he said "All men are created equal"? When did we decide that egalitarianism was no longer a worthy aim for our democracy?

The quick dismissiveness of so many regarding the "excuses" of soul-searing inequality and bone-grinding poverty leads me to believe that they aren't really interested in finding solutions for our children unless the solutions are as convenient as firing 5% of our public school teachers or maybe opening some lucrative charter chains.

I'll ask a question I've asked before: if accountability is good for our schools, then isn't it also good for our society? If bad teachers can be identified and fired, then surely bad policy can be identified and repealed. Benchmarks for statistical progress can survive outside the confines of our public schools, can they not? Or is school the only place in all of America where we are willing to demand improvement and levy stiff consequences for its failure to materialize?

Under NCLB, teachers and schools have been on trial continuously for 10 years. But poverty and inequity haven't had a single day in court. Reams of data have been collected and then paraded before teachers with the question, "What are you going to do about this?" But who of the prominent school reformers has taken the time to parade the readily available data pertaining to school funding inequities and say, "You know, it isn't enough to hold teachers accountable. Our public policy needs a close look too. Policymakers should be held to account"?

If you're in a rowboat that's sinking, it seems to me that you wouldn't waste time arguing about whether you should bail water or plug the leak. It doesn't have to be either-or. Seems that you would let those who think plugging the leak is vital to get about that and those who think bailing water is vital to be about that. In the words of John Thompson in comments here, folks should "play their own position." Listening to policy wonks talk about what teachers should be doing is a lot like listening to white people expound on problems in the African-American community. It is perhaps the least productive and most offensive way of trying to fix something. Yet teachers have acceded (because they had no choice) to the machinations of the policy wonks. But policy has yet to accede to the demands of teachers for accountability on the other end.

I sum up the prevailing narrative in American education policy this way: "Teachers, you must be accountable; policy-makers, eh, do the best you can."

Every time Diane Ravitch or a teacher brings up poverty, you can count on some wag to say something like the declaration in the comments section after one article that "we should not wait until all our nation's social differences are erased to take more steps to improve schools," as if Diane Ravitch or any teacher has ever actually argued for that. What teachers say is, "Please, tend to poverty. We're dying here." And the reform movement's callous reply is "Shut up and teach harder." If we say, "Hey, while you're holding us accountable, could you also demand action on the poverty/inequity issue?" we can expect to be summarily ignored. Poverty will not be addressed, thank you very much. The curveballs will not cease. Learn to hit them or go home.

But you and I well know that teachers will never hit the curveballs like we hit good pitches. And each one of those kids who isn't a home run is a real person, with a real future, good or bad. And we don't get those pitches back. So you can pile the guilt on me and my colleagues if you want. And you can wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first. You can puff yourself up and assure Oprah Winfrey and all your snooty friends that you are better and more pure than the sorry teachers like me and every last member of my blood family, regular middle-class people who pollute every town in America with our mediocrity. But I see through you. We are your scapegoat; we make you feel better about being privileged in a nation where many are not. "If it weren't for bad teachers," you say, so that you may avoid saying, "If it weren't for people like me."

This all comes to me in the context of a Texas funding system that funnels more money to a child's school if it's in a wealthier community, and less if not. Contrary to popular straw men, no one is saying, "Fix poverty and only then hold me accountable." We have said (or tried to say), "Hey, while you're beating the tar out of me with all this accountability, would you mind terribly slapping society on the wrist for the outside factors that simultaneously influence these test scores (which, incidentally, you'll be using to fire me someday)?" And as long as enough education wonks dismiss truly diabolical schemes like Texas's Target Revenue funding system as nothing more than a lazy teacher's excuse, such poxes won't get cured. The curveballs will be incoming. And my friends and I will keep swinging (and all too often missing).

Why is there not a parallel system of accountability for public policy that affects learning? After all, no one honestly believes that test scores are solely affected by teaching; yet no one proposes that we use these same test scores to identify other weaknesses in our democracy. Why aren't we bailing water AND plugging the leak? In the strange reality of these education debates, any proposed effort to ameliorate poverty is seemingly rejected out-of-hand, on the off chance that helping poor kids might accidentally bless teachers with a kind of collateral beneficence.

So what I argue for is the fairly obvious concept of shared causality. The poor scores of poor children are not caused merely by bad teachers, but by a variety of factors, all of which can be remedied (but not all of which can be remedied by teachers).

Surely the day will come when it is considered simplistic and unproductive to insist that bad teaching is the sole or even greatest source of our educational woes. Surely some of the attention will one day get fixed in the direction of that other giant causal agent, inequality.

And if shared causality is acknowledged to be real, then it follows that there must be shared accountability for the outcomes of our children. Every actor whose fingerprints are on these children should be held equally responsible for the results of his or her actions. The fact that Texas lawmakers can routinely invest $7 million dollars more educating 6,000 kids in a rich neighborhood that they spend educating 6,000 kids in a poor neighborhood and NOT be faced with relentless cries of "Inadequate Progress" or "Unacceptable" speaks volumes to me. The fact that school reformers can't find the time or energy to speak out against systematic fiscal child abuse--yet also can't stop rooting out a tiny proportion of bad teachers in a select subgroup of our schools--leaves me little choice but to ascribe to dark conspiracy theories about the deliberate undermining of the American public school system.

The children's song "There's a Hole in the Bucket" never ends. After starting by singing "There's a hole in the bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza," Henry and his wife go through a list of steps needed to fix the hole, the last of which is fetching a bucket of water. That, of course, takes them back to the beginning.

The education reform debate is like that. But it's even worse because we disagree over which lyric truly begins the sad tune: "There's poverty, Dear Arne" or "There's bad teaching, Dear Diane." The chicken-and-egg nature of the debate may never end, but sensible folks should hedge their bets and insist that one not be addressed without also addressing the other, and with equal attentiveness and urgency.

John Kuhn is Superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt Independent School District in Texas. Last year he spoke out on the steps of the Capitol in Austin, and was featured in this interview here.

What do you think? Are teachers being used as scapegoats by a society unwilling to address systemic inequality? How can we change this song?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Part 1 of 2

Guest post by John Kuhn.

"There's a hole in the bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza."

At the root of the school reform debate as I see it is a fundamental disagreement about causality. No one disagrees that by any number of measures (PISA scores, graduation rates, etc.) the academic outcomes of some American students are horrendously unacceptable. On this point, even Michelle Rhee and Diane Ravitch are in perfect agreement, along with everyone else who thinks even a little bit about education.

But then the wheels come off.
When you ask the question, "What caused this?" the wheels come off.
When you ask the question, "How do we fix it?" the wheels come off.
We are all friends until we're not. And when those questions come up, we go to our respective corners and we prepare to fight for what we see as the best way forward. This is great. This is the messiness of democracy. I'm thrilled to be wearing these gloves. (I don't pretend to be impartial.)

You discover many battle lines when you survey this field of contest. Charter schools force traditional schools to get with the program vs. charter schools skim kids in order to look better. Vouchers encourage competition vs. vouchers haven't worked in Milwaukee. Merit pay encourages excellent teachers vs. merit pay destroys morale. And on and on.

But I want to use my happy visit to this blog to study my favorite battle line of all, one that I have revisited various times in past comments. First, a bit of local context that will help me advance this discussion:
In 2006, legislators in the great state of Texas--that beacon of compassion for the unfortunate--planted into statute a creation called the "Target Revenue System." Under this system, each one of the 1029 (or thereabouts) school districts in Texas was assigned a dollar amount that would be its full share of state and local revenue. No more and no less. It was to be a floor and a ceiling. Now, since school districts in wealthier areas were accustomed to a certain standard of living, the legislators decided they couldn't very well fund them at the same rate as those unfortunate suckers in the border towns, inner cities, or fading farm towns. Ergo, different districts got different Target Revenues, which to this day differ. (In essence, some of Sam Houston's children get a higher allowance than others, depending of course on how black they are.)

So, if you look at the current list of Target Revenues in Texas (published here since the Lone Star State doesn't seem eager to put it out for public viewing), you'll find that Star ISD gets $3809 per weighted average daily attendance (WADA) while Westbrook ISD gets $13,116 per WADA. (I will be using the shorthand "per student" in place of "per WADA" for clarity from here on out.) So, if both these sample school districts have an identical 1000 students, Texas policymakers will lavish upon Westbrook ISD $13,116,000 and will bless Star ISD with a slightly less generous $3,809,000. Keep in mind that both districts are required to provide the same curriculum, both are required to offer the same mandated programs, and both are required to have their students achieve identical minimum outcomes in terms of test scores, attendance rates, graduation rates, and so forth. (I wonder if the "Money doesn't matter" folks will honestly contend that Star ISD should have no problem getting the same results as Westbrook ISD with 10 million fewer greenbacks to play with. I'm sure if Star ISD would just cut some of the fat in its administration office and quit hiring so many dad-blamed assistant football coaches they could close the gap!)

So clearly, the Target Revenue System in Texas is from the devil. But I don't want to shortchange our esteemed congressmen, so let me just add here that they really, really intended to "bring the bottom up" over the past six years, but the darned economy just didn't leave them enough money to do that AND give tax breaks to luxury yacht buyers. Sometimes you have to make hard choices.

Westbrook and Star are the most extreme example of the funding gap in Texas; I want to focus on a less extreme (but no less egregious) specimen.
North of Dallas there is a well-to-do suburb called Highland Park. According to the last census "per capita money income in past 12 months" for Highland Park was $116,772 and "median household income 2005-2009" was $176,375. The median value of a home is $982,600 in Highland Park.

South of Fort Worth, there is a blue collar neighborhood called Everman. According to the same census "per capita money income in past 12 months" for Everman was $16,685 and "median household income 2005-2009" was $39,508. The median value of a home is $80,700 in Everman.

I'll ask two rhetorical questions here: 1.) should these two school districts be funded at the same level? And 2.) if not, which district should get funded at a higher clip, and why?

If you answered that Highland Park should be funded higher because rich white kids are used to nice things, you are a winner! (And on a side note, I'd like to thank you for reading the blog, Congressman.)

Now, here are some relevant educational funding facts taken from the Texas Education Agency's "Academic Excellence Indicator System". (You'll notice that it doesn't say a word about "funding excellence" anywhere.) The hyperlink will take you to the TEA's AEIS search engine so you can verify that I'm not just making junk up. (Please be aware that there are two Highland Park school districts in Texas. This Highland Park is usually denoted as Highland Park-Dallas. Also note that the state of Texas accidentally forgets to acknowledge the existence of the Target Revenue System on the AEIS report it releases as public information regarding each school district; that being the case, I have taken the target revenue information for these two schools from the link previously shared above, which contains information appropriated from the Equity Center.)

Comparing Two Districts: Everman Vs. Highland Park

Funding
Target Revenue: Everman: $4973... Highland Park: $6013
WADA: Everman: 6184... Highland Park: 6697
Allotment for first 6184 kids: Everman: $30,753,032 ... Highland Park: $37,184,392

Teaching Quality
Avg actual teacher pay: Everman: $50,491... Highland Park: $55,894
Teachers w/adv. degrees : Everman: 14.6%... Highland Park: 67.1%
Students per teacher: Everman: 15.5 ... Highland Park: 15.6
Turnover Rate : Everman: 18.0%... Highland Park: 9.2%

Outcomes
4-year completion rate: Everman: 85.2%... Highland Park: 98.1%
Met standard, sum of all tests: Everman: 67%... Highland Park: 98%
College-ready (TSI)-English: Everman: 50% ... Highland Park: 93%
College-ready (TSI)-Math:: Everman: 58% ... Highland Park: 96%

Demographics
% of student body is white: Everman: 6.3%... Highland Park: 90.4%

The one conclusion we can all agree on here is that students in Highland Park are turning out better than the students in Everman, academically speaking. But now I have to knock the wheels off our happy consensus and ask the question: "Why?"

The way I see it, there are a few possible answers.
1. White people are intellectually superior. (The KKK prefers this answer.)
2. Higher income parents have smarter kids. (Higher income parents prefer this answer.)
3. Inequitable school funding stunts academic achievement. (I prefer this answer.)
4. Everman has crappy teachers and Highland Park has awesome teachers. (School reformers prefer this answer.)
5. Everman has crappy parents and Highland Park has awesome parents. (Republicans and burnt-out teachers prefer this answer.)
6. Social factors outside-of-school in Everman are more toxic to education than factors outside-of-school in Highland Park. (Democrats prefer this answer.)

In my next posting, I'll delve deeper into causality and explain why I titled this posting as I did. I know you can't wait.

John Kuhn is Superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt Independent School District in Texas. Last year he spoke out on the steps of the Capitol in Austin, and was featured in this interview here.

What do you think of the funding of schools in Texas? How does this compare to school funding in your state?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 6:51 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody

As state after state rewrites their education laws in line with the mandates from Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver process, the teaching profession is being redefined. Teachers will now pay the price - be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students' test scores. Under NCLB it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers to NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label.

This revelation came to me as I read the Score Card on Education prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), authored by Dr. Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips. This is a remarkable document. It provides their report on where each of the states stands on the education "reform" that has become the hallmark of corporate philanthropies, the Obama administration and governors across the nation.

It begins with a histrionic comparison between the struggle over our schools and the Battle of Britain in the Second World War. The authors write:

Britain's enemies overreached, invading the Soviet Union and attacking the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Finally, British forces defeated the German army in Egypt, securing their hold over the strategically vital Suez Canal. Prime Minister Churchill recognized the turning point:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth Hitler's Nazis will meet equally well armed and perhaps better armed troops. Hence forth they will have to face in many theatres of war that superiority in the air which they have so often used without mercy against others, of which they boasted all round the world, and which they intended to use as an instrument for convincing all other peoples that all resistance to them was hopeless.

We mean to hold our own.

In 2011, America's struggle for education reform may have also reached a turning point--an end of the beginning.

In case you missed it, in this analogy, the teacher unions represent the Nazis, while the forces for corporate reform represent the doughty British and their allies.

The greatest success story cited in this report is Indiana, where the corporate reform "alliance"succeeded in passing comprehensive "reforms."

Gov. Daniels detailed the reforms to the American Enterprise Institute audience, describing how Indiana lawmakers limited collective bargaining to wages and benefits. Indiana law ended the illogical practice of LIFO (Last In, First Out) in layoffs, mandating a determination of merit-- based in part on student test-score gains--rather than simply seniority be used as the basis for making layoffs.

Readers may recall my post last July describing the role the Gates Foundation-funded group Teach Plus played in advancing this legislation. The Gates Foundation last year also gave ALEC a grant of $376,635

to educate and engage its membership on more efficient state budget approaches to drive greater student outcomes, as well as educate them on beneficial ways to recruit, retain, evaluate and compensate effective teaching based upon merit and achievement.

The report describes many other reforms enacted by the Indiana legislature, including expansion of vouchers, charter schools, "virtual schools," and a parent trigger so that parents can petition to convert neighborhood schools into charters.

But it was the introduction to the report, written by Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, that brought this into focus for me. He writes:

Prior to this session, 99 percent of Indiana's teachers were annually rated "Effective." If that rating were actually true, 99 percent--not just one-third--of our students would be passing national tests. From this point on, because of the diligence and fortitude of our reform-minded legislators, teachers will be promoted and retained based on performance rather than seniority. Teacher evaluations, which will be locally formulated, will rely on student improvement. Successful educators will be rewarded, while those whose students lag behind will be asked to find work elsewhere. Additionally, schools will now be graded on an A-F scale and they, too, will be held accountable for student advancement; and the state will not hesitate to intervene in those schools that fail repeatedly.

According to this logic, the individual teacher's accountability for student performance is absolute. Governor Daniels apparently believes there ought to be a one to one correspondence between student achievement and teacher effectiveness. This is rather incredible, but there you have it. Most systems base between 25% and 50% of the teacher's evaluation on test scores, but that is enough to make a big difference in one's career, as examples below illustrate.

Even Eric Hanushek, the economist who has done more to advance these evaluation systems than anyone, admits that teachers only account for around ten percent of the variability in student test scores. (Teachers are the largest IN SCHOOL variable, but their influence is dwarfed by factors such as family income and education levels.) But when teacher unions represent the axis of evil, I guess anything that can be done to rout them is justifiable.

According to the Wall St. Journal, as of last fall, nearly half the states now link teacher evaluations to student test scores. This week Connecticut became the latest to make the move.

I do not think teachers in many states quite understand how the profession is being transformed. And our unions are, in some cases, negotiating these agreements into place. Tennessee has been ahead of the curve, and may offer us a preview of what may be in store. There, the state has had en extensive data collection system for years, and, in order to gain Race to the Top funds, implemented a comprehensive system that rates teachers using test scores.

Michael Winerip wrote about Tennessee in the New York Times:

Teachers have it worse. Half of their assessment is based on their students' results on state test scores, a serious problem for those who teach subjects with no state test.

To solve that, the state is requiring teachers without test results to be evaluated based on the scores of teachers at their school with test results. So Emily Mitchell, a first-grade teacher at David Youree Elementary, will be evaluated using the school's fifth-grade writing scores.

These "reforms" have been created to give principals more authority, so they can fire bad teachers. But even principals are questioning the new model. Carol Corbett Burris has been outspoken, and has rallied more than 1,278 principals in the state of New York to object to the new evaluation system there.

In a New York Times column posted yesterday, Principal Corbett Burris writes,

The right question to ask, however, is not whether this evaluation system is good or bad for adults, but rather whether it is good or bad for students.

Numerical evaluations of educators, 40 percent of which is based on student test scores and achievement, will damage the relationship between teachers and students, a relationship at the heart of student success.

It will accelerate teaching to tests instead of teaching to the needs of kids.

It will put teachers in the terrible position of wondering whether the performance of their weakest students on a test might be a threat to their careers.

It will make principals hesitate to lead schools where test scores are low.

This is a good summary of the bad effects of this shift. In the brave new world of teacher evaluations based on test scores, every teacher, every year, will be subject to the vagaries of chance. Every teacher will have to decide how that class of English Language Learners will affect their livelihoods. Every teacher will live in fear of being assigned special ed students, likewise difficult to move on the VAM charts. We are moving from the time when schools were blamed to a new time of the toad, when individual teachers will be vilified, their careers ruined over their scores.

To make this more real, I want to share with you some specific results from the Houston Independent School District (HISD).Houston has been evaluating teachers based on value-added student test data (calculated through a widely-used commercial system called EVAAS) for the purpose of both merit pay and dismissal.

In spring of 2011, a number of HISD teachers' contracts were not renewed, largely due to:
"a significant lack of student progress attributable to the educator," and
"insufficient student academic growth reflected by [EVAAS] value-added scores."

A recent research summary included evidence about the value-added scores of several teachers, including this one, who had been a highly-regarded elementary teacher in HISD for more than 10 years. In each year, she "exceeded expectations" across every domain in her supervisor evaluations. She was given a "Teacher of the Month" award in 2010 and a "Teacher of the Year" award in 2008.

Here are her scores for the previous four years:

Many studies have found that the scores that come from these models are subject to a great many factors, and are highly variable from year to year. In Houston, the study quoted here found that most teachers' value-added scores were lower in the years when they had a large number of newly mainstreamed English learners, a practice that occurs in grade 4, as shown in this teacher's case.

Here is another example.

This teacher certified for grades 4-8 via HISD's Alternative Teaching Certificate (ATC) program. She took a full-time position in HISD in 2006. Until 2010-11, she was rated as "exceeded expectations" or "proficient" across every domain in terms of her supervisor evaluations. Like most teachers, she had positive (3 out of 6) and negative (3 out of 6) value-added scores across the years.

In 2009-2010, when she was assigned to teach a large number of English Language Learners who were transitioned into her classroom, her value-added scores went down. This well-regarded teacher has now also left the Houston school district, while those who have stayed are increasingly confused and demoralized by this system.

These teachers report that there is no relationship between their instructional practices and their value-added ratings, which appear unpredictable. As one teacher noted:

I do what I do every year. I teach the way I teach every year. [My] first year got me pats on the back. [My] second year got me kicked in the backside. And for year three, my scores were off the charts. I got a huge bonus, and now I am in the top quartile of all the English teachers. What did I do differently? I have no clue.

These examples were drawn from the report of a policy briefing sponsored by the American Educational Research Association and National Academy of Education, Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Brief for Policymakers, by Linda Darling-Hammond, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, Edward Haertel, and Jesse Rothstein. The report notes the results of a number of studies that have found wide swings in teachers' value-added ratings, based on classes and characteristics of the students they teach, the year, the test, and the statistical model used. For these reasons, this research summary points out that leading research organizations, like the National Research Council, ETS, and RAND Corporation, have all counseled against the use of these kinds of ratings for high-stakes decisions for teachers. As a letter from the National Research Council's Board on Testing and Assessment stated in a letter to the US Department of Education:

"VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness ... should not used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable."

Of course this is all taking place against a backdrop of rising class sizes and cuts to support services such as school libraries and health programs. But teachers alone are held accountable for the results of their students, on the narrowest of measures. How many more teachers will we lose as these policies spread? How far will this corporate reform war on our profession go? At the end of the day, this will hurt the most vulnerable students the most, as it will speed up the revolving door of their teachers and create a dynamic in which teachers with options will try not to teach in the schools and classes where poor students and English Language learners predominate.

It seems that ALEC considers itself engaged in a battle of epic proportions, yet many teachers are too busy working to even realize that their profession is being redefined in state after state. I would offer another quote from Winston Churchill:

One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.

What do you think? Will teachers suffer a fate similar to that of our schools under NCLB, and find themselves declared failures? Is it time to turn and confront this danger?

(tables from the report, Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Brief for Policymakers, used with permission.)

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Last night in President Obama's State of the Union address, he repeated a familiar refrain about the importance of teachers.

A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance.

But it seems that it is those in power who are actually using teachers to escape from the realities of poverty these days.

President Obama offered as evidence a citation from a recent Harvard report:

We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000.

He went on to say,

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let's offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren't helping kids learn.

There are several problems with this. As others have pointed out, if you take a classroom of 25 students, and spread $250,000 over their 40 years of earnings, this amount comes to a grand total of $250 a year per student. This is unlikely to represent an escape from poverty. (see more thorough responses to the Chetty report here, and here.)

The second problem is a glaring contradiction, a logical flaw so huge it has been overlooked by almost every journalist apparently too polite to challenge the administration on it. If you do not wish teachers to teach to the test, if you want them to be passionate and creative, then how can you insist that their performance be measured by the use of test scores?

Let us be crystal clear. The Obama administration has made the use of test scores to evaluate principals and teachers a pre-condition for federal aid. Both Race to the Top and the NCLB waivers require that states develop evaluation processes that incorporate this data. Furthermore, the administration proposes to continue to identify and target for closure or "turnaround" the bottom 5% of schools, once again based on these same test scores we are told should not be taught to.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot tell teachers to be creative, you cannot pretend you are "flexible," when you mandate the use of test scores for teacher and principal evaluations, and continue to use them as the basis by which schools are condemned as failures.

But the biggest burn is this. Everyone now knows that many of the wealthy have abandoned any pretense of caring about the poor in this country. They use every device to cling not only to their privilege, but to obscene levels of enrichment. The answer to poverty ought to be clear to us, as it was to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. more than fifty years ago. Poor people need a living wage. People need opportunities to work. We need a tax structure that rewards people for working and producing, not investing billions in tax havens overseas.

Of course teachers make a difference. But the idea that teachers will somehow elevate the one in four children in this country from poverty is not only wrong, it is a distraction from the real sources of poverty and inequality. In short, it lets the billionaires off the hook.

To his credit, President Obama discussed a number of measures that could result in a fairer tax structure, and encourage investment in our infrastructure and manufacturing base. These things could create jobs and opportunities.

Teachers have already chosen to put our shoulders to the wheel of inequality. Those of us who work with children in poverty are making tremendous sacrifices to meet their needs. The reason child poverty has expanded over the past two decades has nothing to do with "bad teachers," and everything to do with the huge concentration of wealth, and the devastation of America's manufacturing base, as millions of jobs have been shipped overseas in pursuit of higher profits.

The drive to get rid of bad teachers for the benefit of the poor is a phony crusade. The use of test scores for this purpose ensures that students in high poverty schools will continue to wallow in year-round test preparation, even while Arne Duncan sails around telling everyone he is opposed to teaching to the test..

The only people who are escaping poverty as a result of this charade are the wealthy. By making teachers the source of salvation, the rest of society is off the hook. By claiming that "bad teachers" are the reason our students lag, we can, as a society, ignore the enormous opportunity and resource gap that condemns millions of our children to poor futures.

Enough.

What do you think? Do teachers offer students an escape from poverty? Or is it the wealthy who are looking for the easy way out?

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It has been a busy week for the internet Goliaths -- education tweeters who have enjoyed turning Michelle Rhee's #sixwordessay contest on its head. Perhaps we can shift our focus to our President, whose education policies leave a great deal to be desired.

Tomorrow evening President Obama will take to the air to make his State of the Union address. Advisor David Plouffe explained that an enhanced version of this speech will be broadcast on the www.whitehouse.gov website, and the speech will be followed by a discussion where staff will respond to questions from the public. Before and after the speech, use the hashtag #SOTU. For the discussion during the speech, use the hashtag #WHchat You can also submit your questions via YouTube. See details here. On January 30, President Obama will hold a separate event where he will respond to these questions.

This is an opportunity for teachers and parents to communicate our concerns once again.

So what would you ask the President?

Here are my questions to kick us off. Please add your own below, and if you have a Twitter account, begin tweeting them as well.

1. No Child Left Behind will soon declare every school a failure. Why must states agree to use test scores to evaluate teachers and principals to get relief from this terrible law?

2. You say you don't want teachers to teach to the test. Isn't this inevitable when you make teacher pay and evaluations depend on these scores?

3. How will your administration respond to states like California that fail to apply for NCLB waivers?

4. Teachers in Hawaii have just voted to strike rather than agree to the conditions imposed by the state's Race to the Top application, in particular an agreement to be evaluated by some as yet to be determined system based on their test scores. Doesn't this raise questions about the wisdom of this approach?

5. As we go further down the road of expansion of charter schools, supported by Race to the Top and other federal policies, researchers are finding that these schools are intensifying the degree of economic and racial segregation. Does the administration plan to continue to support the expansion of charter schools?

6. Last March you said we are too often using tests to punish students or schools. You suggested we could shift away from annual tests. But your administration is moving towards even more frequent tests, with even more rewards and punishments attached to them. Why don't your policies match what you know to be sound practice?

7. The practice of labeling schools as failures has become impractical as almost all schools will soon fail according to NCLB. But the idea that we can improve education for students by declaring their schools failures, and subjecting them to closures or harsh "turnaround" strategies has not worked. Your administration's proposal to continue this practice for the "bottom" 5% of our schools will perpetuate the high pressure on test scores for student in poverty. If punishing schools for low test scores has not worked -- as you suggested last March, (and was not shown to work in Chicago under then CEO Arne Duncan) why is it being continued for any schools at all?

8. Last year Congress passed a law that allows people with as little as five weeks of training to take positions of responsibility as full time teachers. These poorly trained teachers are concentrated in areas of high poverty. Will you support efforts to reverse this law, to ensure that all students have fully qualified teachers?

9. I worked in the schools of Oakland for 24 years. We have huge problems with high teacher turnover, and part of the reason is the endless pressure to raise test scores. Why would anyone choose to teach in high poverty schools when this pressure is the status quo?

What questions do you have for President Obama? Please share them here, and if you make a YouTube video, please share the link.

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Ten days ago, I shared a guest post authored by Kelly Flynn, Teachers Hold the Key. They Always Have. This morning it received the following comment:

While I wholeheartedly agree with Ms. Flynn that teachers need to become more aware and involved in the reform strategies that are shaping our profession, I wonder what the best method for involving teachers should be. I belong to a group called the Denver New Millennium Initiative. We are a varied collection of voices of teachers who have 3-30 years of experience in K-12 schools in the Denver metro area. Though we have many differences in regards to our backgrounds and affiliations, we share a desire to be active members of the educational policy sphere. Where I think I am at odds with Ms. Flynn is that we couldn't do all that we have been able to do without the financial support of various foundations. Does this mean that we are less effective? I certainly hope not. We strive to be an organization that empowers teachers to have a voice in the policy sphere, and we are completely teacher-driven in our goals and efforts. I, too, have fears of corporate powerhouses taking over public education, but I am also grateful to those funders who have provided the means for my peers and I to become powerful voices for our profession here in Denver.



--Jessica Keigan, English Teacher and Member of the Denver New Millennium Initiative

Here are my thoughts in response to this important issue.

Ms. Keigan,
Thanks for your comment. This is a tricky issue. Like you, I have participated in many projects that were funded by foundations. Without non-profit foundation support I would not have had the chance to network with others through the Teacher Leaders Network. The whole National Board project would not have happened without foundation support, and that was hugely helpful to me as well. Even Education Week, which publishes this blog and many others, would not exist without ongoing support from foundations. I am grateful for this support. I am also aware of the work the New Millennium Initiative has done, and even participated in the early stages of some of that work with the San Francisco Bay Area project.

But foundation support has, it seems to me, become more agenda-driven than in the past. And sometimes that agenda may have an influence on the direction teacher advocacy projects take.

What is the emphasis of projects that receive funding? The organizations that apply for grant funding must anticipate what the foundations want to support, and tailor their proposals accordingly. This means that even though teachers that are recruited to participate may have a voice in the work that is done, the template has been laid down even before the work has begun.

You may find that there are certain things that "the funder wants" that must appear in your final product. That has been my experience. For example, I worked on a report on teacher compensation several years ago, and while within the pages of the report we were allowed to be critical of the use of test scores for teacher pay, it was made clear to us during the editing process that our final report had to allow for test scores to have some role.

This is not a black or white issue. There are some foundations that are much more aligned in their outlook with teachers than others, and thus give projects much greater latitude. There are others who have decided to focus their philanthropy on a particular agenda, a particular set of policy goals. In this regard, the Gates Foundation stands out, both because of the magnitude of their role, and the clear agenda that has emerged from most of the projects they have been supporting. I think it is important for teachers to look closely at the stated goals of the projects they participate in, and be alert for hidden agendas as well. For example, I do not think students and teachers in Indiana were well served by legislation that was passed with the help of the Gates-funded group Teach Plus, as I wrote here.

I think Kelly Flynn's post is a reaction to this sort of manipulation of teacher voice, and a call for teachers to develop our own voices in ways that do not depend on foundation support. I think this is very important because clearly, if teachers depend on these foundations to have a voice, then we are subject to their control.

More than two years ago, many of us were intensely dissatisfied with the Obama administration's education policies, especially the squandering of billions of dollars on the Race to the Top. Would any foundation at that time have funded outspoken advocacy against these policies? I didn't think so, and did not even try for funding. Instead, I launched the group Teachers' Letters to Obama, which I think was effective because of our ability to speak truth to power - and it cost us next to nothing. Would any foundation have supported a teacher and parent-led grassroots protest at the White House, such as the Save Our Schools March? I doubt it. There are real limits to the kinds of advocacy that foundations are willing to fund.

I do not think we need to reject foundation support on principle, but we need to make sure we are not being used to advance an agenda that is not in the interest of our students or our profession, and we need to develop our independent capacity to speak out and be effective advocates without utter reliance on foundation support. At a time when public education faces unprecedented dangers, teachers need to be able to stand on our own two feet, and do what it takes to be heard.

What do you think of the role of foundations in teacher leadership? How should teachers relate to leadership opportunities funded by various foundations?

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Last night I had the honor of speaking to an audience of several thousand teachers from the greater Sacramento area, at an event that featured State Superintendent Tom Torlakson, California Teachers Association vice president Eric Heins, Linda Darling Hammond and the woman who has emerged as the champion for teachers, Diane Ravitch. Nine area teacher union locals cooperated to organize the event, and in spite of driving rain, the huge Sacramento Convention Center was packed with more than 3,000 people.

This was by far the largest crowd I have ever addressed. Here is the message I shared.

I spent 24 years working in the Oakland schools, and most of the last decade of that, our district was under state control. I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that Governor Brown was correct when he said Wednesday:

"I have a hunch principals and teachers know the most" (about how to improve our schools.)

Governor Brown and Superintendent Torlakson have rejected Arne Duncan's NCLB waiver process. California is blazing its own path towards better schools.

I want to paint a picture of how schools might be improved, once we get our ship of state onto a better course.

About fifteen years ago, Bret Harte, the Oakland middle school where I worked, had major problems. We had lots of students living in poverty, lots of immigrants, lots of special ed. We had high turnover, especially among science and math teachers. So we got a grant from the state - a program that went away a decade ago. The state's Middle School Demonstration Program gave us about $30,000 a year to pay for us to collaborate, attend conferences and get some expert coaching. We paired every novice science or math teacher with an experienced colleague to give them advice and support. We met together to work on our assessments, and we observed one another teach using the Lesson Study process.

We were not intensely focused on our test scores, but they did rise. We were focused on learning together, and on understanding how to reach our students at all levels.

For the next two years, we did not lose a single science or math teacher.

We went on to spread this work across the District, [through a program called Curriculum in Focus] and Oakland now has a robust science program, with a special program called TeamScience that mentors novice science teachers in our middle and high schools.

You can guess the next chapter of my story about Bret Harte Middle School. Beginning in 2002, No Child Left Behind labeled our school a failure. We failed to make AYP one year after the next, with so many subgroups it was very hard to get them all going up at the same time. The Middle School Demonstration Program was cut, morale dropped, and a couple of years later there was only one teacher remaining from the dynamic science team we had built.

But we had learned what works.

Collaboration works. Teachers planning lessons together, observing one another teach, sharing assessments, and puzzling over what is making a difference with our students.

Reflection works. We grow when we have time to look carefully at what we have done, see what worked and what didn't, and revise. Every lesson until our last is a draft.

Experience works. Teaching is so complex, and our students are changing constantly. Experienced teachers develop a reservoir of case studies in our minds. We begin to understand how to reach students who have unusual talents, how to create that sense of community in our classrooms that brings kids out of their shells, and helps them take risks.

Assessment works when the results are immediately available to teachers and students. Teachers know their students and the curriculum, and they ought to be assessing learning on a regular basis.

Mentoring works. Careful conversations that guide and inform can help a novice learn so much more, and avoid some of the shortcuts that cost dearly in the long run.

The MOST precious thing teachers have is time with one another.

Teachers in Finland spend 300 fewer hours with students than do American teachers. And the time they spend together is not consumed with poring over test data, or trying to focus their curriculum on things that will be tested.

As Adrienne Rich said at the start of No Child Left Behind,

Universal public education has two possible--and contradictory--missions. One is the development of a literate, articulate, and well-informed citizenry so that the democratic process can continue to evolve and the promise of radical equality can be brought closer to realization.

The other is the perpetuation of a class system dividing an elite, nominally 'gifted' few, tracked from an early age, from a very large underclass essentially to be written off as alienated from language and science, from poetry and politics, from history and hope--toward low-wage temporary jobs. The second is the direction our society has taken.

That is the direction we have taken under NCLB, but we have a chance in California to make a shift. Every teacher, every parent, every citizen needs to act on what we know works, and reject what we know is poison to our schools and students.

The entire edifice of No Child Left Behind is nearing collapse. The idea that we can improve schools by condemning them as failures is bankrupt. Even Arne Duncan knows that you cannot declare 100% of the schools in the nation a failure. Unfortunately, they are working on a whole backup act, which the NCLB waivers represents. There is the possibility that they will succeed in partitioning off as failures, the bottom tier of schools.

Everyone can agree -- in fact I heard on in Diane Ravitch's appearance on the radio yesterday, the host, Michael Krasny, said "Everyone knows that the schools in Oakland are bad." So we've all got to agree that somewhere there are the bad schools that deserve the terrible things that have been done to many many schools under No Child Left Behind. And the thought that came to mind this afternoon was a quote from a famous book: "Whatever you have done to the least of these, you have done to me." I implore Superintendent Torlakson and Governor Brown. Do not sacrifice the bottom 5% of our schools in this way. Continue to lead us in a new direction.

Principals, teachers, students and parents all know much better. No Child Left Behind is dead in California. Let's get on with the work of making our schools lively communities of learning for all of us.

What do you think of the choices confronting California?

Photo by Jivon Feliciano, used with permission. Video by David Cohen, used with permission.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

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In his State of the State address today, Jerry Brown continues to lead education in a direction that is different from that taken by most of the nation's governors. Like few other leaders, he seems to recognize the flaws in our over-reliance on tests, and the need to shift power back to those in closest contact with our students.

You can read his entire statement here.

Here is what he had to say about education in California:

Next, I want to say something about our schools. They consume more tax dollars than any other government activity and rightly so as they have a profound effect on our future. Since everyone goes to school, everyone thinks they know something about education and in a sense they do. But that doesn't stop experts and academics and foundation consultants from offering their ideas -- usually labeled reform and regularly changing at ten year intervals--on how to get kids learning more and better. It is salutary and even edifying that so much interest is shown in the next generation. Nevertheless, in a state with six million students, 300,000 teachers, deep economic divisions and a hundred different languages, some humility is called for.

In that spirit, I offer these thoughts. First, responsibility must be clearly delineated between the various levels of power that have a stake in our educational system. What most needs to be avoided is concentrating more and more decision-making at the federal or state level. For better or worse, we depend on elected school boards and the principals and the teachers they hire. To me that means, we should set broad goals and have a good accountability system, leaving the real work to those closest to the students. Yes, we should demand continuous improvement in meeting our state standards but we should not impose excessive or detailed mandates.

My budget proposes to replace categorical programs with a new weighted student formula that provides a basic level of funding with additional money for disadvantaged students and those struggling to learn English. This will give more authority to local school districts to fashion the kind of programs they see their students need. It will also create transparency, reduce bureaucracy and simplify complex funding streams.

Given the cutbacks to education in recent years, it is imperative that California devote more tax dollars to this most basic of public services. If we are successful in passing the temporary taxes I have proposed and the economy continues to expand, schools will be in a much stronger position.

No system, however, works without accountability. In California we have detailed state standards and lots of tests. Unfortunately, the resulting data is not provided until after the school year is over. Even today, the ranking of schools based on tests taken in April and May of 2011 is not available. I believe it is time to reduce the number of tests and get the results to teachers, principals and superintendents in weeks, not months. With timely data, principals and superintendents can better mentor and guide teachers as well as make sound evaluations of their performance. I also believe we need a qualitative system of assessments, such as a site visitation program where each classroom is visited, observed and evaluated. I will work with the State Board of Education to develop this proposal.

The house of education is divided by powerful forces and strong emotions. My role as governor is not to choose sides but to listen, to engage and to lead. I will do that. I embrace both reform and tradition--not complacency. My hunch is that principals and teachers know the most, but I'll take good ideas from wherever they come.

I am excited that California is beginning on the path towards authentic education reform. Jerry Brown has made public statements in the past along these lines. See this report from October, Jerry Brown puts the Brakes on Test-Driven Reform, and this one from last May;California Governor puts the Testing Juggernaut on Ice.

As far back as the fall of 2009, while serving as California's Attorney General, Brown sent a strongly worded statement to Education Secretary Arne Duncan raising concerns about his Race to the Top program. Here is what he said then, in part:

The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best. This is a "one size fit all" approach that ignores the vast diversity of our federal system and the creativity inherent in local communities. What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive member of society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.

I will be joining Diane Ravitch and Linda Darling-Hammond at an event in Sacramento this Friday, Jan. 20. Tickets are still available. It will be a good time to be in the state's capital. We finally have a light at the end of this test-crazy tunnel.

What do you think of the approach Governor Brown is taking? How does this compare with leaders in your part of the world?

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Patrick Ledesma offers an interesting window into the world of "teacher leaders" in his post this week. I share some history with Patrick. He and I met about eight years ago when we were both members of Apple's Digital Edge project. More recently, we were both active in the Teacher Leaders Network. Last year, we exchanged ideas in a lively dialogue related to his perspective as a Teacher Ambassador Fellow with the Department of Education.

In Patrick's latest post, after describing some of the projects he has been involved in, he suggests that "teacher leadership, as a concept, remains undefined." The title of his post asks "What is Missing in Teacher Leadership? A Roadmap & Destination"

He suggests a handful of avenues for teachers to expand their leadership - but I am afraid I am still missing the destination he has in mind.

For me, teacher leadership cannot be an end in itself. The "seat at the table" will be just that, if we cannot bring about a shift in the relationships teachers find ourselves in today.

So before we begin discussing roadmaps, let's see if we can agree on the terrain in which we find ourselves.

Our schools, and the teachers who work there, are in the midst of a mammoth effort to centralize control over education. In the past decade, starting with NCLB, we have seen the Federal government intervene in every school in the nation through mandates to improve test scores. This project is now being compounded by efforts to create common national standards, and common assessments to go along with them. Federal policies are requiring states to implement these standards as a condition of receiving assistance, and likewise requiring states to create systems of teacher and principal evaluation that incorporate test score results. Even teacher preparation programs will soon be required to be judged and subjected to rewards or punishments based on the test scores yielded by the teachers they produce.

Non-profit foundations are now funding a huge array of organizations that are active in the educational sphere. Most have aligned their priorities along similar lines, and are funding projects accordingly. These priorities are also largely aligned with the policies of the Department of Education, and are also designed to enhance opportunities for the expansion of various private enterprises in the education arena, from charter school networks, to test and curriculum publishers. There is an increasing synergy across these sectors.

Meanwhile increasing numbers of our students are suffering the effects of poverty, but we have been professionally chastised for mentioning this as a factor affecting their achievement. We have been silenced as vocal advocates for equity, because this could be nothing but an excuse for our own inadequacy.

That is the terrain as I see it. What does this mean in terms of a roadmap for teacher leadership?

The most obvious and well-paved road takes an accomplished teacher in the direction of the projects described above. The organizations with funds to pay to teachers to be professionally active are drawing their support from these foundations. As I related here, advocacy of groups like Teach Plus seems to be aligned with increasing the use of test scores on teacher evaluations, and diminishing due process and seniority rights for teachers.

The more traditional road of teacher leader as active professional leader within a district still exists, but priorities at the district level are set by the test-driven federal agenda, so one is enmeshed there as well.

But these two paths assume that teachers are more or less passive participants in the system, incapable of altering the course of events. If my assessment of the terrain above is accurate, how does a teacher respond? There is a third arena of teacher leadership that Patrick somehow missed. That is the realm of teacher as a leader of social change. For me, I am thinking of leadership that encompasses both a critical moral dimension, and an awareness of our responsibility to shape the institutions we participate in.

Perhaps we might term this type of leadership "teacher leader as change agent." Unfortunately, this may not be as promising a career path as the previous two models, especially in this day and age.

Last week, my guest columnist Kelly Flynn ruminated on the reasons teachers have not been more outspoken as we have seen our schools attacked and our professionalism undermined. She offered a challenge:

The solution to the corporate takeover of the public school system lies with teachers. It always has. By not speaking up they send the message that they approve of corporate reform. For far too long they have allowed the debate to go on without them.

Silence implies acceptance.

Teachers who are afraid to speak up must remember: they have right on their side. They know what learners need to flourish in the classroom. Test prep and drill does not foster true learning. Teachers may not have the nerve to stick up for themselves, but they are rabid defenders of students.

To this I would add another concept drawn from Jon Stewart's recent interview with White House staffer Melody Barnes. Stewart asked,

Do you think ultimately we will find ourselves changing our entire model of education? I have always found with education that individuals are the ones that make the enormous difference, and the more that you're able to empower a great teacher, a great principal, a great superintendent, can make enormous differences. How do we empower the individual to have the authority and the responsibility to make those changes, and not tie them to arbitrary objective realities or goals?

This is a wonderful reminder of the principles that I believe ought to be foundational to our work as teacher leaders. I believe the most effective teacher leaders are not those who go with the flow of corporate and non-profit dollars, nor those who drive forward federally-driven mandates for improved test scores. They are those who seek the autonomy of each and every student as a unique learner, and seek professional autonomy and responsibility for themselves and their peers. They seek out others to meet this challenge, and participate in grassroots organizing efforts as well. The teachers who are agents of change are the ones I am looking to for leadership these days.

What do you think? How do YOU define teacher leadership?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend