Living in Dialogue

This has been a tough one to grapple with. I left the classroom several years ago, and although I was recognized as a successful teacher, I did not feel very successful my last couple of years. So when I write about teachers leaving the classroom, my own story lurks behind the broader narrative. This year I am working with young teachers, trying to keep them teaching in Oakland, and that is causing me to revisit the issues I dealt with in my own decision, and trying to think about ways we could make things better.

There are things most people do not understand about teaching in an inner city school. I appreciate the research that shows an effective teacher is the most important variable in a child’s academic growth, because if I didn’t think I could make a difference, I never would have become a teacher in the first place.

But there is a way in which this ends up putting a very large burden on the shoulders of the classroom teacher, and when we look for reasons for teacher burnout, this is a big part of the problem. As teachers we sometimes feel as if it is our job to make up for whatever is missing for our children. Don’t get me wrong – I believe our students come from culturally rich home environments. They are blessed to have different languages spoken at home, to have parents and grandparents who share their heritage with them. But not all of the experiences in their home and previous school environments prepare them for success in school.

Many of our students live in neighborhoods rife with violence. The San Francisco Chronicle reported a year and a half ago that as many as a third of the children in some of our urban neighborhoods suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder -- a rate nearly twice as high as troops returning from Iraq. The recent shooting of a young African American man, Oscar Grant, was captured on video by onlookers from multiple angles, and for weeks the scene of a policeman shooting a youth in the back execution style was replayed on local TV stations and Youtube clips. A basketball game this week between two local high schools went off peacefully, but following the game on the streets gunfire sent students running. Luckily nobody was hit, but danger and death are just around the corner for our students, and they must be resilient to survive.

This creates a whole set of problems for classroom teachers. The way students learn to solve problems on the street is very different from the way they are solved in the classroom. Race enters into the equation as well. As a white male teacher, there are power dynamics at work when I seek order or quiet in the classroom. I work to establish good relationships with all my students, based on mutual respect. But it has not always worked. Sometimes students want to create a reputation for themselves by taking me on, and that can be tough to handle. I do not want to engage in a power struggle, but I have to stay in charge of my class.

I have felt in a bind, because my heart tells me the students need more space for creative expression, more time when they can speak and be heard about what is going on for them. But these same students are behind on their math and science skills. I feel an intense responsibility to prepare them for their future, so they can succeed in Algebra in a couple of years, so they can tackle problems in science and come up with creative solutions using the tools they have learned.

My awareness of the issues the students bring to school informs my approach to pedagogy. I know my students sometimes feel powerless at home or in their neighborhoods, so I try to give them some power in class, by putting them in charge of aspects of their learning. I want them to come up with questions to guide our scientific investigations. I want them to apply the math we are learning to creative projects, not just repetitive worksheets. These approaches take more time, and take us in unpredictable directions that often do not align with the state standards for science or math. That means I am “wasting instructional time.” If we are to meet the needs of our students, we must have standards that are flexible enough to accommodate more student-centered instruction, and less focused on memorization of hundreds of terms and concepts.

I also think our broader discussion of school reform misses the reality these students and teachers inhabit. “Raise the Bar!” “Every child must learn at the highest levels.” "Algebra for All 8th graders!"“Hold teachers accountable.” This rhetoric and the performance mandates that go along with it create a huge external pressure on an already intense educational environment. I want my students to succeed academically, but I want to be able to recognize them as individuals as well, and build on their strengths. The pressure to drive everyone up to same level of proficiency sometimes makes us feel like failures before we have even begun – and like convicted failures once the test scores come back in the fall.

Teachers need more time to collaborate and support one another in these tough times. We need to be able to talk and share what is troubling us, and what is working, so we can get fresh ideas. However, our time is growing even scarcer – with after-school tutoring, lunchtime tutoring, and meetings that must follow strict protocols.

There is an intense focus on increasing academic achievement, but that seems to sometimes blind us to the other aspects of our students’ lives. Teachers are in a pressure cooker, and the pressure just gets ratcheted up every day. I believe this environment has a lot to do with the high levels of turnover we see among our teachers – and perhaps the high dropout rate for our students as well. Many of the teachers who do stay adopt a stoic -- or even cynical attitude, because they cannot respond to these pressures with flexibility. If we want our schools to retain teachers, and to blossom as creative centers of learning for all, the environment must become more humane for teachers and students alike.

What do you think about the pressures facing today's urban teachers? How can we make our schools more humane and sane places?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 8:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Oakland is addicted to low-cost beginning teachers.

Ten years ago, the Oakland schools had a big problem. Every summer 400 teaching positions would open up, but only one hundred teachers would be found who were willing to accept jobs in Oakland at the salary offered. When fall came, 300 teaching positions (out of 2,500) would be left unfilled. The new Superintendent Dennis Chaconas thought he had an answer. Raise teacher pay in Oakland by 20%, moving us from way below average to a bit above average for the region. It worked! Over the next two years, fewer teachers left, and more teachers applied, so the District was well-staffed.

But there was a problem with this solution. When teachers stayed, they moved up the salary scale. The average salary for teachers went up even more than the 20% raise, and before long, the District was bankrupt, and forced to borrow money from the State of California, which came along with a state-appointed administrator to make sure we lived within our means. So teachers had to give back 4% of our raise. Oakland teacher pay, adjusted for inflation, has actually dropped by another 10% since 2004. The average teacher salary now in Oakland is $17,000 less than in neighboring San Leandro – due to a combination of lower average number years teaching, and a lower salary schedule overall. [note: since I wrote this, it has come to my attention that San Leandro teacher salaries do not include health benefits -- thus their pay is artificially high compared to Oakland. The average Oakland pay remains $6,000 lower than the next lowest Bay Area district, however.]

So Oakland has managed to balance its budget by dramatically lowering average teacher pay. But what about the 300 classrooms that were empty a decade ago? Not to worry. They are filled by interns from several different programs. These interns take a six week crash course in the summer, and then are placed in charge of their own classroom in September. All in all, the District employs approximately 250 interns in their first or second year. Unfortunately 55% of the new teachers hired have left the District three years later.

The level of turnover is especially high in areas like special education, math and science. About half of our middle school science teachers and a third of our high school science teachers are in their first three years. Turnover is also greater at schools with the highest rates of poverty.

A closer look at where new teachers are concentrated reveals some systemic inequities. In the state of California, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning reports that 9% of the teachers at low-performing schools are under-prepared, while only 2% are underprepared at high performing schools. Taking a closer look in Oakland, we find that in all of the five top performing elementary schools there is only one intern teacher -- less than 1%, while at the lowest performing five, there are a total of ten such teachers -- 17% of the total number.

There is nothing inherently wrong with an intern. Most of them arrive with a high degree of enthusiasm and motivation, and actively engage with their colleagues. But there is a big difference between a new teacher and one with five or ten years of experience. Most veteran teachers have mastered classroom management, and have a range of instructional strategies to draw upon. I am currently helping to lead a project which has a team of experienced science teachers devoted to supporting novices. We are working to share curriculum resources and ways of teaching we have found work with our students in Oakland. However we face several challenges. The sheer number of new teachers means we do not have enough experienced mentors to serve them all. In addition, the low salaries mean it is hard to retain our experienced leaders. The top salary in Oakland is just under $71,000 a year, while teachers in San Leandro next door top out at over $91,000. It is little wonder that we lose teachers after a few years.

When we think about what is needed to turn a struggling school around, most of it comes down to a dedicated team of educators pulling together to build a solid program. It means teachers and administrators reaching out to parents and students, involving them in making the school a hub of learning activities. It means teachers collaborating on common assessments, sharing effective practices, and learning together how to meet the needs of their students.

Unfortunately, with the level of turnover we are experiencing among our science teachers, and at many of our high needs schools, we do not get to these levels of work. We are working at a much more basic level – the rudiments of classroom management, or sharing lesson plans with teachers who have never taught about density or chemical reactions before. This is valuable and essential work, given the level of inexperience we are coping with. But we are stuck at this level, and with many of our experienced teachers leaving, and a constant churn of newcomers, it is hard to see how we will move to the level of professional work we need to in order to dramatically improve student outcomes in our community.

To bring average Oakland salaries up to the middle range for the region will cost about $11,000 per teacher – about $25 million a year. Unfortunately the latest cuts proposed by the governor take $28 million away from the District's budget of about $650 million. However, the stimulus bill from Washington may restore some of this funding, and local leaders are discussing placing some sort of revenue measure on the ballot, so there may be some new funding available to make some changes.

For Oakland to turn our schools around, we must stabilize our teaching force. We must invest in competitive teacher salaries to curtail this calamitous turnover, and end our addiction to low-cost beginning teachers. Our students deserve the best schools, staffed with a solid mix of teachers at different levels of experience. Our teachers deserve the pay that will build and sustain such schools. This is one bad habit it is time to break.

Does teacher turnover stymie school improvement in your District? How do the challenges in Oakland compare to those in your area?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I have to admit I have been a bit puzzled by the way our world seems to work, especially the latest news from Wall Street. Executives there apparently require bonuses that are several times their annual salaries – already in the millions of dollars – in order to motivate them to perform the duties for which they were hired.

It has made me wonder about the reason policy makers seem so fixated on attaching bonuses to teacher pay for the things they value, like student test scores. Frequently we hear teachers being accused of “opposing accountability,” because we are reluctant to have our pay linked to our results measured this way.

In my experience, most of the people who choose to teach in schools with the greatest need feel a high degree of social responsibility. For that reason it seems particularly unjust that the social indictment for poor test scores falls on them the hardest, because their students often lag behind their peers in schools of wealth and privilege.

Part of the problem is that our commitment to social justice is hard to quantify, and perhaps hard for people in business to even fathom. So I awoke this morning determined to record the ways in which I have felt accountable as a middle school teacher of math and science for 18 years in a high needs school.

I enter class each morning accountable to my students, knowing this is their chance to learn, especially those who have not learned so much in the past six years of school. I chose middle school because the students seem on the cusp, ready to go either way, and if I can catch them and help them choose learning, then I have made a big difference.

I know that if this sixth grader has not mastered his times tables and does not understand fractions, I can give him a chance in the next nine months to get over his fear of math so he can succeed in Algebra in a few years. If we fail, I know he is unlikely to make it to in college. My reward is hearing him say "This isn't so hard," as he finishes a quiz. My reward is hearing from him a year later that 7th grade math is easy, because we learned so much last year.

I know the ancestors of many of my students arrived to these shores in shackles, and the legacy of slavery and racism has cast a long shadow. Education is the best chance my students have to escape poverty, but many of them, at age 11, already feel like failures. I feel it is my responsibility to find ways to reach them, of allowing them to develop their skills and imaginations in ways they may not have done before. My reward is when I see them engaged in learning, when I see them working to produce a second draft better than their first, standing up and sharing what they learned to their peers, taking on the role of a learner.

I know the only science these students may have had was reading about somebody else’s experiments. If there is a future scientist in the room, that child will need his curiosity awakened and rewarded by the knowledge that his questions can be answered by investigation. That means I am accountable for creating an atmosphere of excitement and intrigue around science, because that is the most powerful motivator for learning. The reward for this is the excited buzz I hear among them when they are conducting their experiments, and the scientific presentations I see them give to their peers when their investigations and research is complete.

I know that I need the help and support of the parents of my students if we are going to succeed. That means I feel accountable for communicating with them through the year. There are phone calls in the fall to introduce myself and make them aware of my grading system and expectations, and the ways they can monitor their child’s work, and follow-ups when their child needs some guidance. My reward is that when I phone in the spring because their child has failed to do homework for a week or two, and is goofing off in class, I have a responsible parent helping that student complete his work, and have averted a possible failure.

I know many of my fellow science and math teachers are in their first year or two of teaching, and they are struggling. If they are to succeed, I will need to help develop a collaborative community so we can share curriculum ideas and management strategies. My rewards are the fresh ideas I get from my newer colleagues, more sharp minds to help me problem-solve my own dilemmas, and a team of teachers to create some school-wide initiatives to help our students. My biggest reward is seeing those teachers choose to stay in this tough profession, better yet stay at this school, rather than move on to an easier assignment elsewhere.

Pay for performance is the latest thing that is supposed to cure what ails public schools. If only teachers would allow ourselves to be held accountable for our results, then we would see us motivated to improve student learning. But for me, and I suspect many other teachers, our problem has never been lack of motivation. I strongly believe teachers should be paid more for the work we do, and teachers who do more should be paid more. So I support differentiated pay to reward greater effort and greater levels of expertise. But if policymakers believe the extra motivation from a year-end bonus is going to lift our students’ test scores, I think they are going to be disappointed. Unlike the Wall Street executives, the primary rewards we are seeking are not monetary ones, and test scores are only a small part of the way we measure our success.

What motivates YOU as a teacher? What do you think about performance pay for teachers?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Dennis Overbye wrote in the New York Times last week that “Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.” In a comment responding to this column about the resurgence of science under the Obama administration, a reader named Aaron writes:

Scientific thinking can and should be practiced by everyone, not just those who do science for a living. I'd love to see logical and critical thinking better integrated into the public school curriculum. I'd also like to see students learn how to formulate clear questions and design good experiments, rather than simply performing "canned" laboratory exercises. (How can something that has a predetermined answer be considered an experiment, anyway?) The ability to reason and to try one's ideas against reality are at the heart of the scientific endeavor, and, not coincidentally, essential to the nurturing and continued existence of democratic homo sapiens.

Overbye and Aaron have gotten to a core issue in science education. Science cannot be contained in a book. To be taught properly, it must be practiced. It is possible to teach the appreciation of music, but most schools choose to teach music by giving students instruments and allowing them to learn by practicing. Even though their early efforts may be painful squeals, the sweet notes will eventually come, and even the ones who do not achieve mastery know more than someone who merely has listened to a recording, or even attended a live concert.

The authors of the best science curricula understand this, and try to recreate the process of scientific discovery through an inquiry approach. Students need a chance to explore, especially with unfamiliar materials. Then they can begin to generate their own questions. As Aaron says, they need to try out their own ideas. That is when they begin to understand their own creative role in the scientific process. With practice and guidance, they can move beyond exploration and begin to learn the careful discipline of scientific investigation.

When I wanted to teach my students about buoyancy, I gave them Cartesian divers I had assembled using a soda bottle and eye dropper. I could have immediately provided them with a lecture explaining why the dropper dips when the pressure on the water is increased. But it was far more engaging for my students to get their diver and be asked to investigate themselves, using their powers of observation and experimentation to come up with their own ideas. They learned not only about buoyancy, but also about their own capacity to investigate the world around them.

Under No Child Left Behind, instruction in science has generally been downplayed, especially at the elementary level, because the lion’s share of a school’s score comes from language arts and math. Some have proposed that this could be fixed by giving science greater weight, and providing more frequent tests of science knowledge. Unfortunately, given the current approach to standards and assessment, I am afraid that will move us in the wrong direction.

Our states, (and California is as guilty as any) have laden down our science standards with lengthy lists of concepts and facts students must “know.” A little over a decade ago I worked helping develop a science curriculum. Even though we wanted to develop students’ ability to conduct scientific inquiries, our investigations tended to be carefully scripted, with predetermined questions and results. That is what you get when you have to address dozens of standards each semester. We produced something undeniably hands-on, but lacking in-depth scientific inquiry. And this is the nature of every curriculum that manages to meet state standards.

California standards include a strand focused on investigation and experimentation which actually includes some solid inquiry skills. If teachers focused on these, students would learn to record observations, generate hypotheses, and use the tools of science to investigate the natural world. Unfortunately, when it comes to the California Standards Tests that measure proficiency in science, the test blueprints reveal that only ten percent of the items focus on investigation and experimentation. Ninety percent of the questions ask students to recall facts and concepts, such as “Students know density is mass per unit volume.” This focus on facts tends to reinforce textbook-centered direct instruction.

The state has guidelines that require 25% of science curriculum to focus on hands-on activities. But hands-on is not the same as true scientific inquiry. Most textbook activities are cookbook recipes, with simple procedures followed by questions about what was observed and can be inferred as a result.

I am not suggesting students learn only what they can discover for themselves. We need to teach what has been discovered in the past, and what scientists are revealing about our world today. But we need a balance between teaching students what is known, and giving them the tools of science to make their own discoveries.

School reform has become intensely focused on accountability for results, and this has driven our curriculum and instruction towards that which can be measured on a multiple-choice test. But if these tests miss half the knowledge we truly value, as is the case with science, we may do more harm than good by increasing their emphasis. Our standards and our modes of assessment will need to change in order for us to truly challenge our students to become the scientists they can be.

What do you think? Are our science standards and tests missing the mark?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)