April 2010 Archives

We are getting ready for our talk with Arne Duncan, and the members of Teachers' Letters to Obama are actively engaged in generating questions and thoughts to share with him. We have been discussing the key issues, and this weekend we asked members for their thoughts on what they would like to say to the Secretary of Education. More than 200 have responded thus far. Here is what is on their minds:

1. If you continue to insist that pay and job retention should be tied to teacher performance, how do you intend to operationally define "effective teaching"? How will you assure equity among all teachers when: 1) some teachers are not currently subject to high stakes assessments for their students; 2) there is significant disparity from district to district, school to school in the quality of the learning environment, the availability of classroom materials, and the life circumstances of a diverse group of students.
2. How does he believe we can equip children with the creative and critical thinking skills necessary to advance in the 21st century, if we reduce education to bubbling in test questions and offer them a drill and kill curriculum?
3. The public school system is not a business and would fail under a business model. Teacher pay should not be linked to test scores. Who will you get to teach?
4. Does the administration realize the degree of instability it is creating in students' lives by making teachers' lives unstable?
5. How is firing staff helping a failing school?
6. All efforts in education must be for the students. By tying teacher pay to test results you are NOT focusing on the student. What work is being done to evaluate the growth of each student from year to year? How is Arne Duncan doing as a third grader? How is Arne doing as a fourth grader? How is Arne doing as a fifth grader? Is he making typical growth each year for a child of his age and specific learning needs? AYP benchmarks are unrealistic expectations for students. After all . . . did Arne learn to walk or talk at the same time/age as all of the other children in his class?
7. How can we trust you if you support merit pay based on student achievement and charter schools that undermine public education? You said recently that a child who has a good teacher for three years has scores that show it. If a child has a bad teacher for three years, the scores show it. What about that child's home life? Do they go to bed hungry? Do they live in fear? Who are you to determine if a teacher is bad or good. You have never been a classroom teacher. You do not know the realities we face in the classroom every day.
8. Is there research backing up the value of teaching to a test?
9. Did you and the President rely only on test scores to choose your children's schools?
10. We need to allow MORE creativity in learning, in the classrooms, with our teachers, with our students. We have tested to death. We have KILLED individual thought!!! PLEASE QUIT PAYING TEACHERS FOR SCORES!!!.
11. In the past several years, the curriculum has become more narrow due to an over-reliance on testing and test scores, resulting in unfair judgment of students based on limited assessment tools. How will you ensure that ALL students have equal access to a well-rounded, deep education that includes and validates the importance of creative, critical thinking skills that will be needed for their future?
12. What is Duncan's position on the humanities in general and history education in particular?
13. Why do we continue to judge our children's worth and the worth of their teachers by a standardized test that does not measure annual growth when the skills of our children at any given grade level are anything but standard?
14. Research correlates economic status and nutrition to school achievement, much more so than teacher performance. How are we meeting the fundamental needs of our children first and foremost so that they are physically prepared to meet our academic standards. Teachers can teach children who are safe, well fed and rested. Teachers should not have to focus on these factors when they enter the classroom, but many go above and beyond to meet these needs of their learners since their professional performance is judged solely on test scores.
15. How can we get back to writing "Individual" Education Plans for our Special Education students? When they all have to meet the same goal which may be out of reach in some cases, their educational experiences cease to be tuned to individual needs and become generically aimed at meeting API for the school.
16. If funding is linked to test scores, and high performing schools are rewarded, how can The Secretary of Education justify further neglect of the schools that need the most aid?
17. What are you doing to ensure that children have access to quality libraries inside their schools and communities?
18. If not following the rules that public schools makes charters such a panacea, why not just let the public school drop all the rules that they have to follow. Then they will have a level playing field with charters, which, by the way, have proven to be no better than public schools in 80% of the cases.
19. Our students are not being prepared for the real world when we narrow their elementary experience to reading and math. SO much of science and social studies CAN be related to reading and math, too! NO NEED to eliminate it! Funds should be withheld from schools that do NOT include EVERY subject - including art, music, and P.E., too!
20. What valid study gives him the crazy idea that a teacher can force ALL students to advance at least one year/level in subject mastery every year? Is there any place for freedom of the student to make (bad) choices and family culture in his thinking?
21. Since we can not agree on any test currently in use to measure the essence of what student achievement should look like, why not switch the evaluative part of our school performance to a more individualized and student-centered measurement?
22. Why, in the face of research showing high-stakes testing and charter schools are not effective, is the Obama Blueprint still relying on these flawed ideas?
23. Where is the Education's "bailout"? We continue to deal with all of the negative, degrading aspects of NCLB, and on top of it, are dealing with 1) job loss 2) if haven't lost job, increase in class size 3) unpaid furlough days 4) percentage salary cuts. Everything has gotten so negative and dismal in public school education that excellent, knowledgeable teachers are leaving the career in record numbers.
24. Upon examination of reconstituted schools several years later, do you feel that they each are living up to the promise of said reconstitution, or if not, why not?
25. What kind of employee would YOU want on your staff? One who can creatively solve problems, collaborate with others, examine multiple points of view on a topic.... or one who can memorize facts for a multiple choice test?
26. I see "over-reliance on test scores for high stakes decisions" to be the cause of many problems in national education policy. That practice leads to the related problems of narrowed curriculum (in history, civics, and the arts) and teacher pay for test scores. My question is simple: Why are you continuing down the damaging path set by the Bush administration and NCLB instead of bringing a halt to these tests that actually eliminate learning time?
27. What process do you propose for regulating and/or increasing funding in order to address the outrageous funding inequities in our nation's schools?
28. I would ask Duncan if he feels that the kind of education promoted by NCLB and The Race to the Top (of the volcano) is designed to provide quality education or factoids to marshall in the privatization of public education.
29. Would you like to come teach my class for a month and then get paid based upon the results?
30. What are we doing as an educational system to ensure the students of today and tomorrow are equipped to tackle what will be the next generations questions?
31. When are we going to stop overtesting in schools?
32. Just as colleges and universities throughout the country have begun to devalue and deemphasize SAT scores as reliable indices of student success, public schools are doing just the opposite in their increasing emphasis on standardized test measures. At my school, faculty meetings have become recitations of 'benchmark' scores, with kudos to teachers whose students' scores are up and quiet embarrassment for teachers whose students were low performers. My question to Mr. Duncan is how he would propose teaching students whose difficult socioeconomic circumstances and disinterested parent(s) have influenced them to devalue education, resent authority of any type and disrupt the instructional efforts of talented teachers who have brought ingenuity and imagination to their lesson plans. We have students in 8th grade who cannot read and are disinterested in learning how to read. Mr. Duncan says we should not 'blame' other elements of the education system, but we continually wonder how these nonreaders have progressed to the middle school level without being able to read! We have implemented a school-wide, literacy program designed specifically to raise literacy levels. It may work to some small degree; however, I think that any objective assessment of the situation in many schools would conclude that unless we employ programs specifically targeted to the young, black male population, we will continue to fail in the eyes of the world. Recently, I taught a social studies class in which we compared literacy rates between the U.S., Russia and all other European countries. For almost EVERY country, including Russia, America lagged behind in literacy. Mr. Duncan needs to focus his efforts on literacy, with specific attention to low-performing African-American males. The data is already there; the teachers in most schools (regardless of scores) are talented and want the students to learn, but the pointillistic strategy of current education philosophy is weakening our formerly strong, American system of education. As colleges have learned, scores don't tell the story of an applicant; in some situations, college administrators have decided that scores are completely irrelevant to the selection process. Perhaps Mr. Duncan and his staff should consult with these college educators who have discovered that traditional grading systems are far more valuable in predicting student success than are one-day-only scores.
33. To sum up, how does Mr. Duncan plan to address the score-documented evidence of the disparity between black and white students? Is he taking into consideration the socioeconomic and familial backgrounds of students who have not yet been 'touched and inspired' by a teacher? It's nice to able to idealize and romanticize the education process, but does Mr. Duncan understand that the realities of our students' situations may not match his rosy expectations that a teacher can completely erase these realities and miraculously transform his 30+ classes of low level readers to suddenly become "Freedom Writers." Come on! As a matter of fact, please invite Mr. Duncan to visit just a few of the thousands of schools in our country where teachers are the ONLY adults in a student's life that do have faith in his possibilities of success. We need strategies and researched evidence, not more useless testing and condemnation of a profession that is the last hope for many of these children.
34. How can continuing to give sanctions rather than support to "failing" schools do anything more than INCREASE the inequities for poor, minority, and special education students?
35. Why are we tying teacher pay and evaluations to test scores? We prove ourselves on a daily basis in the classroom and there are so many more aspects of a child that teachers affect other than that one-time test score. Where does instilling a love of reading to a child who never willingly picked up a book come in? Building up a child's self-esteem? Making a child feel "safe" or allowing a student a place to explore. We are not given credit for any of the hundreds of things we do for our students when we put our heart and souls into our jobs and only get recognized for a test score.
36. Why does the state feel charter schools are the way to go? If we have a clear vision and the funds to carry it out, we can succeed as well or better than charter schools.
37. In all the talk of accountability I have not seen any mention of accountability for parents. It is difficult in my elementary setting to get parents to make sure children are at school on time, stay for the full day, and keep absences to a minimum. I know it is more difficult for the high school people who are responsible to teach them and test them but cannot seem to find a way to make them come to school. Are there any plans in the works for having parent accountability be a component of student evaluation?
38. Why not focus your efforts on bringing more resources to improve the planning and success of each student and parent?
39. How do we expand students' thinking and analytical skills if we are basing their education on multiple choice and rote memorization of facts?
40. If there is indeed a race to the top that has money funded, who explains to the kids, families, and communities, why the national government thinks kids should ever lose when it comes to funding for their education?
41. Knowing that it takes English Language Learners 5-7 years to master Academic English, how can we expect students to succeed on state-wide reading assessments when they've only been in our country for one year?
42. How do you propose to provide equal funding for all schools so that all students have the same opportunities?
43. When are we going to make parents accountable-especially in the inner city?
44. I am very concerned about the increasing unrealistic expectations being placed on our children in our public schools. Standardized testing is now driving the curriculum, forcing teachers to push subject matter and skills before children are ready. Public schools and school districts are forced to keep up with the myriad of developmentally inappropriate benchmarks laid out in NCLB. It seems as if common sense has gone by the wayside. Our haphazard approach to reform is hurting our children. Year after year, policy-makers just keep raising the academic bar, and parents and schools continue to scramble to try and meet these unrealistic standards. And when some of our students don't or can't succeed in this developmentally distorted environment, parents and children are made to feel like, and many schools and teachers are publicly labeled, "failures". As a result my profession has been demoralized, and my students are never given the credit their young bright minds deserve. How do you plan to restore/repair the damage done to my profession as a result of this punitive nightmare? What supports are going to be provided to those who work in the most challenging districts?
45. Why divert public school funds for charter schools?
46. Teachers are required to teach the same curriculum to all students while, at the same time, differentiating for each student's needs - ability and learning style. When will teachers be allowed to teach using their abilities and teaching styles to best meet the needs of the students instead of following a script to prepare for a test?
47. Reading is key to success and poor reading is why many fail. How will you make reading a priority for all students?
48. If American schools are not working now, why do you want us to keep doing what we are doing?
49. Why would you even consider cutting funding for National Writing Project, the only writing program with a national network of its kind?
50. Why must everything be tested with a multiple choice test? At what point will teachers' assessment of a student's ability be trusted again?
51. How do we assure that special ed students will succeed to their highest ability in the inclusion classroom. The tests are not geared for them, teachers can't teach individually when the child needs it , yet with inclusion no one is advocating for these children especially with the loss of ESEA and Title1 funding. Is this the next subgroup that will continue to fail?
52. How are teachers accountable for student success when once a student leaves us they go home to a family that doesn't help them succeed? We can't do it all by ourselves, the parents have to have some sort of accountability as well.
53. How we can expect teachers to be !00% responsible for educating our children- Teachers spend 5-6 hrs with students daily. What about the other 18 hrs for these kids- what about their lives? Some of these children's only structure- food- comfort- come from their school day. I don't want my pay being based on the student that hasn't eaten a decent meal- never went to bed last night. I want to give support to these kids but not at the expense of my paycheck when I can't control the variables that come into my classroom.
54. When are you going to acknowledge that teachers are highly trained professionals who need a much, much stronger voice when decisions are made?? So often, these committees are composed of either non-educators or individuals who haven't seen the inside of a classroom for decades!
55. How will we use authentic assessments (this means formative - ongoing assessments that actually show what students know and are learning) rather than focusing on the facts and disconnected information gathered on multiple choice tests?
56. With overwhelming evidence that pay for performance does not work, why are you and other education leaders still proposing this?
57. What can the Department of ED do NOW - since reauthorization may take awhile to get through the "political process" - to begin the shift towards a more balanced education that emphasizes art, music, creative and critical thinking?
58. If your experiment in Chicago has proven to be a failure, how can you persist in the quest to replicate this failed model?
59. How will you rectify the over-emphasis on narrowly-based, multiple choice tests which only serve to limit the curriculum and deprive students of the opportunity for critical thinking and experiential teaching?
60. How can we get funds to innovative thinkers who aren't tied to a school district?
61. Will you implement the strategies that prepare the students of today with the skills needed to be the well rounded citizens of tomorrow? What do you intend to do to help me educate the next generation of American citizens?
62. In what ways do you center respect for the classroom teacher's role in each of your decisions?
63. How can this administration legitimately believe tying teacher pay to test scores is a viable idea without truly seeing that it takes fixing multiple problems to make that concept even close to equitable? Parents must prepare children to learn; communities must support the best possible learning environments; school administrators must give up petty disagreements and work with teachers for the good of the students - ALL this has to occur before we can even begin to think that only teachers can affect student test scores.
64. Why not put more time and money into public schools rather than drain their resources by opening up more charter schools?
65. Will you pledge to read Diane Ravitch's book, "The Death and Life of the Great American Public School"?
66. I would ask him why isn't there a call to action when over 300,000 teachers will be out of jobs? If this loss was in the banking industry, automotive industry or medicine all legislators would be calling for a bill to stop the bleeding. This is a democracy that depends on the educated citizens to participate in their government.
67. As an educator, I want to be and expect to be held accountable for my students and how they perform. How do we creatively, effectively and inexpensively do this?
68. Why do you think standardized tests are the best way to measure student achievement?.
69. Why are you bullying schools and educators into taking steps that have not been shown to improve achievement in the slightest, and refusing to listen to those with actually experience and knowledge in education?
70. When was the last time he spent a day alone in a classroom in a high poverty school?
71. How would teacher pay and evaluation be protected from bias? An administrator could easily create a class that would insure teacher success and the converse. Additionally, I have several classified students in my class who are pulled-out of my room for 2.5 hours a day - How could I be held accountable for their performance on tests? I would prefer to see the assessment of an ongoing professional portfolio that would be host on an open source program such as IBM's Sakai. The portfolio would require each teacher to demonstrate competency and professional growth in many dimensions. Test scores could be part of that I suppose but the tests are so statistically unreliable. Do you foresee the possibility of something like this?
72. When can we respect the profession?
73. Why don't we reward actual learning over test scores?
74. How can a one day snapshot of a student accurately assess a teacher's performance?
75. How does our political leadership justify the emphasis on high stakes, multiple choice testing when educators are continually reminded that we need more creative and scientific thinkers in order to "compete" with other nations and educational systems?
76. Mr. Duncan consistently explains the need for a well rounded education and supports Music, Art, PE. What is he going to do to stop states from cutting these programs which give students an outlet for their creativity and provides education in teamwork and much more?
77. Reconstituting "failing" schools means that children who do poorly on standardized tests are punished. I have been in a school which was "failing". At the same time that our school was closed, we received $3,000 bonuses due to our "achievements". Changing the number of a school, changing the principal, changing the faculty has done nothing to improve our school, as the children, their parents, the community, the problems are the same. If you do not address the problems befalling children living in poverty you are living in denial. What can be done about this?
78. Tell us about your experience TEACHING in a public school and how that shapes your policies.
79. Thank you for having this conversation with teachers. We have been trying to convince
80. policymaker at all levels of government that our expertise is critical to effective policy design and implementation. This conversation, then, is an exception to our typical experience interacting with policymakers. What would it take for teachers to be consulted regularly on education policy?
81. What educational researchers or theorists do you use to help formulate your decisions when faced with creating policy?
82. How do you make a child care about test scores when there is no recourse for a bad score? It is not tied into their grades, promotion, or transcript. Students could care less about how they perform. It's like saying "pretty please take this test so I won't be fired or have a pay cut. If they refuse to take the test (or just play around), it should be discarded.
83. The standardization of education on so many levels is harming so many children. Students and the situations they come from are in no way standard. Why the move in so many arenas (from standardized testing to standardized, scripted curricula) to act on this false premise?
84. How can we turn away from school reform ideas that blame, punish, and disrespect teachers and instead move toward supporting teachers' professional growth and development to ensure that all students receive quality instruction?
85. I have two burning questions. 1. In my opinion, the kind of teachers we need to educate our future generation are highly educated, committed, and have proven their capacity to develop and teach lessons contingent on the needs of each student through programs such as the National Boards. Highly qualified teachers deserve just compensation, deserve the power of autonomy to use and develop the curriculum best suited for their students, and deserve to be recognized for the important and challenging word they do everyday. So far, I have seen nothing but the undermining and disparagement of this profession as a result of NCLB and now RTTT. Year after year, I have seen the kind of teacher I describe above leave my school in Oakland, my district and even the teaching profession due to NCLB policies that have forced scripted programs into their classrooms. taken away any decision-making power of educating their students, and eroded the joy of teaching and learning. What are you doing to elevate the profession of teaching and to encourage the talented and creative teachers to stay in teaching? 2. I believe that merit-based pay is a disastrous idea. First, it encourages competition amongst teachers in a profession that relies on collaboration. And second, it discourages teachers to work in area with high-needs and / or transient populations in which high test scores are much harder to achieve. I believe this will only serve to exacerbate the already unacceptable achievement gap. How do you respond to these two arguments?
86. Research tells us poverty has, in general, a strong negative effect on achievement in schools. Grants may be a start but are insufficient to treat the scope of the problem. What other initiatives is the Department of Education considering?
87. Why is there an over-reliance on high stakes testing with little or no consideration on the diverse needs of all American students and with varying levels of funding available within each state?
88. Charter schools have never been proven to be better than traditional schools and yet they are a major part of the current school reform model. Why is that? I visited one recently and was disturbed to see that there was no library and few books for the children to read. In addition, the goal of the curriculum included having the teachers in each grade be on the same page in the book at all times. This is not only non-innovative, it's a step backwards. Yet this school advertises itself as having an advanced philosophy and better resources for students than the public schools. Why should a school like this be allowed to siphon off funds from public schools in the name of innovation?
89. Why do people who have no experience as teachers in the classroom have so much influence in making education policy? Anyone with classroom experience, especially in struggling schools are tired of being disrespected, ignored, and vilified by people who have no clue about the challenges we face, yet rarely are we given the opportunity to craft policy in our own field of experience.
90. Considering the uncertainty of a complete overhaul of the immigration system, what services and protection will schools provide for children of immigrant parents or who are illegal immigrants themselves?
91. How does a multiple choice test measure a student's ability to think critically about an issue and then communicate his or her ideas in writing?
92. I would like to know what ways we can come together to create schools with strong arts programs which can lead to much needed practice in creative/critical thinking? The arts are a sorely underutilized tool which can be used to help build bridges across the curriculum and help make the students make connections? How can we effectively get that message out?
93. The Associated Press reported on May 28, 2008 reported that candidate Obama had stated at a town-hall meeting in Thornton, Co.: "Democrat Barack Obama said 'U.S. students must learn a second or even third language or the country will struggle to compete in a global economy.'" WHY IS YOUR "ESEA BLUEPRINT" MUTE ON THIS MATTER?"
94. Tests only measure the number of questions a student can answer correctly, not precisely what a student *knows* or can do. Are you so sure all the billions of dollars spent producing tests (from which the student learns nothing beyond a possible hatred for the subject) is a good way to allocate resources and to measure "achievement"? Teachers are jumping through more and more hoops in order to attain certification. Our tax dollars are supporting huge programs for teacher certification. If you cannot trust the certification process, what are we paying for? If teachers taught classes within communities of collaboration--like they do in Japanese elementary schools where teaching is a valued and respected profession--watching and critiquing each others lessons, wouldn't you be able to trust them to be the professionals they have trained to be and to police themselves within their own communities, rather than needing to test the children to death to be certain the teachers are doing their jobs (when we are not even sure that the tests measure anything really valuable)?
95. Does a nation of imaginative, critical, outside-the-box thinkers offend/frighten/concern you? If not, then why are policy makers so eager and determined to make sure that these are *not* the kinds of thinkers we are trying to nurture in our public schools?
96. All of these ideas are from a large urban point of view. Most of America is comprised of small rural schools and many of those have races and ethnicities that are being harmed by the Bush / Duncan policies. There is not any flexibility to be used in many of these places and they are drastically underfunded because of the antiquated formulas and property poor areas. So my question is (and you can try to word this "nicer"), if your plan will only worsen conditions in a small rural community on an Indian Reservation like Nespelem, WA, or a small rural community with many migrant families like Granger, WA, then why the hell would you implement it?
97. I wrote 100, sent them, of them the most critical point I'd make is a better growth model, limiting testing to 3rd, 8th, 11th grade and using that for Federal looks ( if keeping the other then inform schools with it for planning) and of course questioning at great length the FACT that poor children are narrowed in these designs. I see nothing to assist poverty environments. BUT we are in some CRITICAL times with class sizes ballooning in CA record lay-offs. My question might be, HAVE YOU BEEN AWAKE?
98. I have seen kids who have been sick, who had a relative die tragically come to school to take one of these high stakes test. Some students haven't eaten; didn't get enough sleep; their parent didn't come home. How can you justify putting so much on the line based on one test on one day (more or less)?
99. What do you see as the top ten skills needed to acquire a middle class job after high school graduation?
100. My major concern is the lack of any focus on shared responsibility for making public education what it should be... "It takes a community..." How do you intend to encourage/support families and teachers to collaborate on behalf of 21st century learning?
101. When considering the role of the federal government in public education, do you agree that the ESEA's intention was to address "failing" schools and any and all components of the educational needs of the children in those schools?
102. The more you vilify and belittle teachers, the less attractive you make the position to outstanding new teacher candidates. How do you plan to improve the pipeline of new teachers while continuing your campaign of negativity against existing teachers?
103. What do you intend to do to assure that our public schools are all excellent and equal?
104. Why aren't developmentally appropriate practices being considered when creating and using standardized test assessments for young children grades K - 5? Developmentally appropriate practices (see NAEYC) deem standardized testing of young children invalid and not a true measure of their capabilites. Authentic assessment of children in their natural environment ,not a testing one, is a better measure of their true capabilities. Authentic assessment includes, anecdotal notes, checklist, and portfolios to name a few. Teachers can be trained in the process and the assessment can assist a teacher in developing curriculum goals. This is a more appropriate method of instruction for young children as opposed to "teaching the test".
105. How do we accomplish developing creative/critical thinking skills and preparing students for the real world they will enter, while at the same time making educational decisions focused on raising multiple choice test scores.
106. How are we ever going to get schools that that address the core principles and values we cherish if we do not include local stakeholders and experts in the conversation? Whatever happened to the old truism that governing boards (be they at the local or the national level ... and all levels in between) concern themselves with matters of policy while the local stakeholders worry about implementation?
107. Why is so much money spent on "reforms" that have not been proven valid and/or effective?
108. How can states and districts have more control on a local level of how they manage teacher hiring/firing?
109. Why are teacher certifications tied to issues that do not relate to a teacher's subject area? Why can't skilled professionals easily transition to teaching? It seems that teacher programs are weak, and yet the smartest people can't become teachers unless they entered an education program as undergrads. Teachers should be urged to be more highly qualified and ALSO be more highly paid, with more protections. Too many good teachers leave teaching--how will Mr. Duncan work to stop the good teacher loss??
110. Recent events like those in Wake County (NC), where the school board has moved away from its longstanding policy of keeping schools diverse based on families' economic backgrounds, seem to indicate the tenuous commitment of the public to educational opportunity for all students. What can we as teachers do to help strengthen the national commitment to educational opportunity, and what will your Department and Office of Civil Rights do to advance the same mission?
111. Is the purpose of education to build a strong economy (if so, why are you ignoring facts that despite strong test scores in Japan, their economy suffered for ten years and despite lagging test scores in our country, the economy flourished), or is the purpose of education to build a strong democracy that results in a just and stable economy?
112. How can he, or any agency, expect teachers to be paid for performance that is only slightly related to their own actions? When parents and communities are "paid" for performance as well, equities can be addressed.
113. How can a teacher be "held accountable" for the education of a student, when there are far more variables outside the teacher's control than inside?
114. My one question: With the current overemphasis on testing taking up all the class time, students get no time for creative growth. Why does the administration continue to support NCLB, given the devastating impact on our children?
115. How have your formed your stance? What research have your read? Have you heard teachers? Why do you continue to ignore the teachers?
116. Any of the points about test scores would be the most important points. I don't believe that test scores tell us what a student has learned; they only tell us how well a student can take a test. Besides that, students learn in many different ways, and should be assessed in many different ways. In addition, on test day, many things contribute to how well students do on tests: sleep, food, test anxiety, etc.
117. What evidence does he have that firing principals/teachers improves student performance in any meaningful way?
118. How are you going to re-empower teachers to use their own professional judgment to meet the needs of their own students?
119. If we fire half the teachers who dare to teach in a "low" performing school, who do you think will take the job in the subsequent years for such a school? How many highly qualified teachers will never dare to take such a job?
120. Where will the students have access to good reading materials if the school libraries are not staffed and are all closed?
121. How will you assure that a **valid system of assessment** is built to assess teacher quality?
122. Pay-for-performance (i.e.getting away from the seniority model) is important - but we need to define performance more broadly that test score alone. All teachers should be required to have a professional development plan, and that should be a big part of determining whether teachers get raises or not.
123. Why aren't we basing teacher evaluation on research that shows what good teaching is instead of on test scores?
124. Lack of funding for teacher training and in-service at the beginning of each school year. We need about 5 paid days to get going each year before school starts, and we need time throughout the year to train each other and regroup. Too much Prof. Dev. is happening on unpaid time, or not happening at all!!
125. Because of the focus on getting the kids to score well on reading, writing, and math tests, science and social studies are being discarded from the primary grades.
126. Where is PARENT/FAMILY accountability? Why does everyone say it's Teachers' fault when students aren't proficient? How can families be held accountable (either tax credits, etc.) for making sure kids make it to school, learn their math facts and spelling words, and try their best at school? Too often teachers are trying to "fix" broken families, when our job SHOULD be to teach academics to students who come prepared to learn.
127. Tying teacher pay to student success would be fine if a) all students started at the same place and b) the end goal could be consistent from one student to the next. This isn't possible. Every child, every school, every district is unique. How will you address the fact that teachers will be assessed on their students' successes when the journey for each student (and the distance each has to travel to reach "standard") is different?
128. Can common standards be culturally fair and allow for context in education, not just content?
129. I want to know when we are going to focus on the individual child's overall well-being opposed to a simple test score?

What do YOU think? What would be YOUR question or statement for Mr. Duncan?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Next fall the school where I taught for 18 years is laying off two of its four administrators, and the Spanish teacher as well. Schools are losing nurses, custodians, and librarians were lost years ago. My district, Oakland Unified is being forced to cut more than $80 million from next year's budget.

Each of us who works in the schools has a different story, but I bet there are few out there who will not be directly affected by the current and coming budget crisis in our schools. We are told the funds just aren't there, but where did all the money go?

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sounded the alarm last week, warning that next fall 100,000 to 300,000 teachers could be laid off, with class sizes increasing and educational quality sinking as a result. Senator Tom Harkin has introduced a bill that would provide $23 billion in emergency funding to fill the gaps in state budgets that are forcing these layoffs.

Some people think we should just buckle down and get used to it. The prosperous-looking Michael J. Petrilli of the Thomas Fordham Institute told NBC news: "Not only do our schools have to go on a diet, they need to adapt a whole new way of life. Because this money is gone, and it's not comin' back any time soon."

He has a point. During the boom years of the past decade, schools were adequately, though still not equitably funded. Now that the economy has contracted, tax revenues have declined, and schools are starving.

So the money is gone. But it has not vanished into thin air. The money is going somewhere.

At the Federal level there are two major issues that affect the availability of tax revenue. The first is the massive Bush tax cuts, which were supposed to guarantee permanent prosperity. Instead, the lion's share of savings has gone to the top 1%, leaving the middle class to shoulder the cost of government services.

We have a bad economy, we are told, as if this is like a storm passing over, a series of events beyond human control -- perhaps even our humble comprehension.

In the US, the recent data (from the Economist magazine) on the economic recovery indicates that while national income has increased by $200 billion in the past year, corporate profits have increased by $280 billion, while wages are down by $90 billion.

But Goldman Sachs just handed out $3 billion more in bonuses -- just this quarter! On top of $18 billion in bonuses given to employees last year! There are now about three million public school teachers in the US. These bonuses divided among all teachers would equal more than $6000 per teacher. There are about 100,000 public k-12 schools in the nation. That is $210,000 for every single school. This money has not vanished. It has been shifted. Corporations now pay less in taxes than ever. Last year Exxon-Mobil, which made more than $45 billion in profits, paid ZERO in federal taxes.

In many states, tax policies have shifted more and more of the burden onto the middle class. For example, in California, Proposition 13 freezes property taxes at 1978 rates until the property changes hands. This has benefited corporate landholders far more because they rarely sell their land, while ordinary homeowners usually sell every five to ten years. Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected on a pledge that he would lower car registration fees, which he did - costing the state billions in revenue. And Republican legislators refuse to increase revenues, even through common-sense methods like a levy on oil extracted in the state.

The second big money pit is military spending, much of which is funding wasteful and destructive wars. The US now spends close to $700 billion on its military, more than the next dozen countries combined.

As teachers, we constantly remind ourselves that our primary duty is to the well-being of our students. But I also recall the way our fellow professionals, nurses, are willing to go on strike to ensure a reasonable nurse to patient ratio, to ensure their patients get quality care. As teachers we must be prepared to do the same.

I will be joining my Oakland colleagues on the picket line this Thursday when we stage a one-day strike for a better contract than the one the District imposed on us last week. Our new superintendent, Dr. Tony Smith, has pledged to find new revenues to increase teacher pay over time. But the state cuts have put us in a very bad spot.

I am unwilling to accept, as Michael J. Pirelli urges, that the money to support our schools has permanently vanished, shifted into the bank accounts of the wealthy forever more, or that our military should receive more than half of federal funds. We decide how the wealth of our nation is spent, and our spending should reflect our priorities. If the future of our nation is our children, how can we simply throw up our hands and accept this slow-motion disaster of our own making?

What do you think? Should we adapt to the new reality? Or should we re-shape it?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

One of the goals of the Teachers' Letters to Obama Facebook group I started six months ago is to give space for teachers to share with one another and the world at large our true feelings about what we see occurring in our schools. Some teachers are in functional, even wonderful schools. Others are not. We need to hear from them all, even when it is not easy. They are our witnesses to what is happening every day. Today I am sharing a post from one such teacher, Robin Barre. She teaches troubled students in the RISK Learning Center, an educational program that is part of the nonprofit organization "Peace for the Streets by Kids from the Streets." The program is contracted with Seattle Public Schools through the Interagency Academy.

THE TRAVESTY WE CALL PUBLIC EDUCATION

Every day I diligently read postings on my Facebook Home News Feed page from education and educators' groups, follow leads from various ed bloggers such as Teacher Education, Edutopia, and the like. All are inspiring, make excellent points, advocate for teachers and students, eloquently speak against the rising tide of tying teacher evaluations to student test scores. I respond, argue, defend, and encourage others to do so as well. But over and over again, I despair because I see a wide, gaping hole. An abyss that our children have the potential to fall into. The abyss of the current trends, philosophies, beliefs, and unspoken missions of public education in America in the 21st century. I despair. I truly do.

I use the word "abyss" seriously and without much hyperbole. Our children can and do fall; I work with the children that have fallen into the abyss. The students I work with have so many diagnoses that a person could pick up the DSM-IV, point to any page, and I could say, "Yep, I have a student with that diagnosis." They have come to my little schoolroom because the public education system has failed them. We have failed them - as a culture, as a society. Of course, they come to this program feeling as though they are the ones who have failed. It is my work to help them believe in themselves again, to let them know that they are not the ones who are failures but that the system is at fault.

This sense of failure that my students experience is a powerful one, and it informs every moment of their daily, ongoing lives. It colors their past, their present, and their future. In a nutshell, they come to this little alternative high school believing that because they can't (pick one of the following to fill in the blank) - read at grade level, write at grade level, remember how to do long division, "do" fractions, sit in their seats for more than 30 minutes at a time, or feel comfortable in a room with more than 10 people - then they are failures. This is the message that's been drilled into their heads since they first entered the public school system.

So many of our discussions are about teacher evaluations, assessments, how to best prepare our students for the "real" world, how to make sure they leave our classrooms with the skills they will need to survive in the world. These discussions are important; they are valuable. And given the recent success in Florida and the governor's veto of the Pay-for-Performance Bill in Tallahassee, they are effective. But as I have said elsewhere these are not the conversations we need to be having.

I want to hear some discussion in which we speculate how public education may be, indeed, traumatizing our children. And how public education is moving (or being made to move) into a position of perpetuating the status quo of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s three most pressing problems facing the American people: poverty, racism, and militarism. I would add a fourth these 40 years later, the problem of capitalism. These discussions we have go round and round like a hamster on his wheel in a small, smelly cage. Assessment. Evaluations. Teachers' performances and pay. Meanwhile, our students, our children, those lives in our care are sitting in overcrowded classrooms, irrelevant surface knowledge being stuffed into their heads, and, God forbid if they don't obey/conform/learn/"get it", because then they are labeled ADD, ADHD, ODD, OCD, lazy, rebellious, bi-polar, depressed, and the list goes on. So easy to point the finger at them so we, as a society, do not have to look at our own growing pile of shit that we lay at these children's feet.

I want to tell the story of two children I know, from two very different worlds. The first is of a compelling, active, talkative young man, who was six years old when I had the opportunity to spend three days in his company along with his father, a successful, middle class, well-educated man with a loving wife, living in a beautiful suburban home. Benjamin, as I will call him, could talk with me about dinosaurs, fossils, rocks, and swimming. He was intensely interested in the natural world around him. He could find the insects the rest of us adults could not see. He was completely without fear, picking them up, holding them up to his face so he could peer into the universe of the bug. He picked leaves and flowers, even tasted them much to our fear and concern, bringing the world into his being as fully as a young child could. Benjamin asked a million questions about everything. He could climb any obstacle in front of him, in fact, even sought them out to accept the challenge they presented. He put his hands in water, dirt, stone, trees. He leaped, jumped, ran, quarreled, sought out, sat with, and explored the world as thoroughly as I've ever seen any child do. As a teacher, I was totally and completely in love with his ability to learn about the world. I would have been honored and privileged to have had this child sitting in my classroom.

You can imagine my horror when Benjamin's father said that Benjamin's first grade teacher had expressed concerns that perhaps Benjamin had Attention Deficit Disorder. I do not know the circumstances of Benjamin's first grade classroom. And I can certainly sympathize with the teacher who most likely had been given the impossible task of keeping 22-26 six year olds in their seats for 4-5 hours a day, knowing that she was going to be evaluated in some regard as to how well these children could read, write, and 'rithmetic before they left her classroom. But I begged Benjamin's father to do all he could to resist this argument that because his son was a lively, questioning, eager, active, normal six year old boy then he was, in effect, ADHD and needed medication, extra seat time, or the label itself, which would haunt him for the rest of his life. This was a child, I thought, who was getting ready to be traumatized by the system that was supposed to nurture this spirit.

My second story is about a young woman who comes from a very different background than Benjamin. Amara's mother is a single mother of three children, living on social security because of a disability. Amara's mother immigrated from East Africa many years ago, and Amara was born in the United States. Yet Amara grew up speaking her mother's native tongue as well as one of the other East African tribal languages. Amara has lived all of her life right smack in the middle of urban America, in neighborhoods that many of us would shudder to think of living. She has told me stories of policemen running through her house with guns drawn, hunting for neighborhood gang members who were seen running through her yard. Amara has many barriers to her education - a physical disability, several learning disabilities, and a developmental disability. She is barely literate in reading and writing, and can perform math at about a 3rd grade level. Amara has had to listen to well-meaning teachers and ill-meaning classmates call her "retarded." She has had social service agencies drop her case file because they could not place her in an appropriate job setting given the multiplicity of her disabilities.

Amara can speak three languages proficiently, and yet, she sat in a high school classroom for an entire semester being made to learn her ABC's. Teachers and classmates continuously mispronounced her East African name (which I have changed for confidentiality reasons). She is exquisitely attuned to the emotional undercurrents going on around her. She said to me once that she thought parents' attitudes really gave their children attitudes. She could see this in the interactions between her friends' parents and children. Amara did not need a master's in psychology or early childhood education to understand how parents model for their children. Amara knows how to forgive; she can point to her heart and say, "It hurts here." Or "I know here that it is the right or the wrong thing to do." She is one of the bravest people I know, putting herself in vulnerable position after vulnerable position, all in the attempt to move her life forward, risking ridicule, misunderstanding, impatience, anger and frustration on the part of those who do not know her barriers. And yet, she'll get up the next morning and say, "I'm ready to try again." But our education system and our culture says, You are not worthy because you cannot read, write, or do math problems to our satisfaction.

I want to begin having conversations about why the schools failed this child. We were so determined to make sure that she could read, write, and do math, when it was so obviously outside the realm of possiblity that all of her other gifts have been ignored, denied, or denigrated. I spent three years trying to make Amara what the school system wanted her to be so I failed to affirm those inherent strengths with which she was born. She has been traumatized by the system that should have nurtured those gifts.

Our public education system is supposed to be a constitutional right for our children. Education is one of the social apparatus of a culture. I want us to begin discussing what this means. What is our education system being used for? And, by extension, what are our children being used for? I walked away from mainstream, comprehensive school as a teacher because I was literally being made ill by what was being asked of me and what I was being asked to expect from my students. My soul was dying, and I could see that the high stakes testing environment of the system was killing the souls of my students. I could not do it any longer. I had not even finished paying off my school loans.

We are right to continue fighting our policy makers around these issues of teacher evaluation and assessment. We must not stop. But I want to see discussions taking place - strong, vehement, impassioned, emotional discussions - about what the education system is doing to our children. These are all of our children - our students, our sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, neighbors, grandchildren, and the children we all once were. I think that perhaps if we began really seeing what is happening to them as they sit in the classrooms that all of us have created, we would be horrified. Our classrooms are becoming an abyss in which imagination, creativity, critical thinking, the natural impetus to learn the world, and the inherent value of each child's humanity is swirling down, down, down, leaving them and the teachers exhausted, sick, and empty. It is a travesty and a tragedy. It is a human rights abuse. Why aren't we talking about this?

What do YOU think about Robin's perspective? Does what she says about how our schools sometimes traumatize children ring true for you? Should this be discussed more?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

San Diego teacher Ashley Hermsmeier has written a provocative post where she observes that her students have no particular reason to care about the scores they receive on standardized tests. This is actually a big problem for educators whose reputations and even livelihood increasingly depends on these scores. She writes:

The test scores do not affect teens' lives in any tangible way and therefore students do not care about the tests. Threatening that something "might" happen "next year" doesn't even register on the teenage radar. They know their score will never be seen by a college admissions counselor, will not affect their grade and will not go on their transcripts.
This translates into complete apathy toward the tests. Students can bubble in whatever they want on the answer sheet with no personal consequences, making (often inappropriate) designs out of the bubbles on their answer sheets. (Yes, this happens each year.)

Her solution to this is to try to MAKE them care. She suggests:

The simplest and fastest solution is to put the scores on student transcripts. Do this and we might also be surprised to find that kids in this country are smarter than current test scores reflect and that education in this country may not be as far behind other countries as we think.

And then presumably the colleges might start taking these tests into account when they make admissions decisions? The trouble with this is that I have a feeling few of the students making original designs in the bubbles on their answer sheets are spending March wondering if they were accepted to Harvard, and thus this would not really matter anyway.

But Ms. Hermsmeier has raised an important problem. In California our students take the California Standards Tests every spring. In the fall parents will receive a letter informing them of their child's scores. Teachers will receive colorful spreadsheets showing the students who tested at proficient or below basic. But there is no actual consequence for the student. They will advance to the next grade (or be held back) as a result of the grades they earn from their teacher. Their test scores are available so we can see how well they learned, and perhaps how well we taught, but they are not used for any other purpose that intersects with the students' lives.

For me the solution Ms. Hermsmeier arrives at is half right. If test scores are such valuable pieces of information that we are willing to base a teachers' evaluation and pay on them, then they ought to matter to the person actually responsible for generating them.

But what if the students are actually right to discount the value of these tests? What if the tests, even when taken seriously, are not an accurate reflection of what students know and can do? The more pressure is placed on these tests, the more incumbent it becomes on us to try to convince the students that they need to try their hardest on them. By middle school students have taken these tests for years, and are aware of how they are likely to score. So they make a decision. I do not BELIEVE in what this test has to tell me about myself. I do not believe that I am BELOW BASIC.

My friend David Cohen wrote a fantastic post about this last week on the InterACT blog, explaining some of the troubles his students have with the tests:

Meet Burris. Poor Burris has had a rough time of it, changing schools, in and out of foster care, and probably dealing with some health or cognition issues that interfere with academic growth, but it's hard to tell because the records aren't complete and his current guardian is not pursuing any diagnoses or support. Burris is a nice enough kid, and will put forth a decent effort when the task seems relevant and non-threatening. One area where Burris is pretty smart though is in understanding schools. He's seen enough of them to know that tests are traps: all the schools use tests to find out how much you don't know yet and to punish you for it by putting you in classes you don't want to take. If you can even get him in the room with the test in front of him, he might go through the motions, but he will not risk his best effort only to be trapped by it again. Now that he's in tenth grade and new to my school, I have two options. I can tell Burris he's wrong about schools and tests and beg him to do his best - and blow any chance I have of gaining his trust, because you can't make a young adult believe something that runs counter to a decade's worth of life experience. Or I can tell Burris I understand his point of view, and maintain a relationship that will yield some results on work other than the tests. So, while I will maintain high expectations for Burris in the classroom, I honestly can't expect his test results will mean much. (Of course, I'll never see those test results anyways, because they don't come back during the school year and I won't be teaching Burris next year). Kids like Burris might make up another ten percent of my student load.

David goes on to describe some other fascinating varieties of students, each of which presents a different challenge when we want to measure their performance using that precious test.

While students like Burris make up perhaps ten percent of David's population in affluent Palo Alto, in some Oakland schools students with this profile are far more numerous. David captures the teacher's dilemma perfectly. Do we align our own values with those embodied in the tests, and festoon our walls with posters urging our students to invest in these measurement devices? I have a very hard time taking this path, because I do not think it will serve students like Burris well.

What we need to do is make our assessments connect to skills and knowledge that intersect with our students' lives. I do not believe it should be our mission to get our students to care more about the tests the policy makers value. Instead, it should be our mission to get our policy makers to care more about how our students actually learn.

What do you think? Should we use all our powers to try to make students care about their test scores? Or does this do more harm than good to them?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Last Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle had a front page article about Democratic Party candidates attempting to whip up enthusiasm among their followers, to rival the energy seen in the Tea Party across the country.

Politicians need look no further than Florida to see where the grassroots activity will come from. Energized by a terrible law that would have diverted 5% of education money into tests, which would be used to evaluate and pay teachers, that state's educators, parents and students came out en masse. They protested along roadways, they challenged their politicians on the facts, they clogged their mailboxes and fax machines, they filled Facebook with groups posting the latest news, and made themselves a force to be reckoned with. Governor Charlie Crist, who hopes to soon be Senator Crist, heard the siren call of the "voice of the people" and vetoed that bill last week. Now he is reaping his reward - thousands of teachers grateful for his support, and willing to lend theirs in exchange.

In nearby Louisiana, Republican governor Bobby Jindal has decided that "taking on the teachers' unions" will help improve schools. He has introduced legislation that will expand charters, tie test scores to teacher pay and evaluations, and make it easier to fire teachers if their students' scores do not improve.

In this increasingly polarized climate, teachers are wondering -- just who are our allies?

I am a bit disappointed that the race for California governor has thus far revealed the choice between bad ideas and no ideas at all, regarding our schools. Republican candidate Meg Whitman makes the typical politician's claim that she can simultaneously lower taxes and increase the quality of our schools. Her platform calls for more charter schools and merit pay for teachers, although there is little evidence that either of these will lead to better outcomes. Fellow Republican candidate Steve Poizner is bolder still. He likewise calls for more tax cuts, charter school districts, merit pay, and goes even further to call for the elimination of collective bargaining and tenure in the five lowest performing districts in the state.

But an even bigger disappointment has to be the Democratic Party candidate, former governor and Oakland mayor, Jerry Brown. Brown now serves as state Attorney General, and has earned a name for himself recently fighting mortgage fraud and other legal abuses. He also has some history in education circles. He helped bring two charter schools to Oakland - Oakland Military Institute, and Oakland School for the Arts. I recall his years as mayor with mixed feelings. He clearly cared about the schools, and sought to influence things for the better, but like most politicians, he did not seem to have a very strong handle on how to do so. A letter he wrote to the Department of Education last fall, commenting on Race to the Top, suggests he might have learned something from this experience. He wrote:

Inherent in the command and control philosophy of your draft regulations is a belief that everyone agrees on what should be taught--to whom and when--and how the lowest performing schools can best be turned around. Yet, there are so many unknowns about what produces educational success that a little humility would be in order. A better way would be to state what educational outcomes children should reach and then permit state and local flexibility to figure out how to reach the desired outcomes.

He went on to say:

As Oakland mayor, I directly confronted conditions that hindered education, and that were deeply rooted in the social and economic conditions of the community or were embedded in the particular attitudes and situations of the parents. There is insufficient recognition in the draft regulations that inside and outside of school strategies must be interactive and merged.

Unfortunately a visit to his campaign web site reveals he does not include education among the five areas he is focused on. This is disappointing.

UPDATE: A visit to his website today (August 6, 2010) reveals that Education is now the #1 issue listed under the "Fighting For You tab. It states:

I have been studying education and working on related issues ever since I was elected to the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees in 1969. I approach this task with some humility, and a realization that there is no silver bullet that will fix everything. Education improvement takes time, persistence, and a systematic approach. California's education problems are not limited to just the lowest performing schools and teachers.

Political candidates are going to see a huge increase of interest in educational issues this fall. This will sadly be due to the unprecedented funding crisis our schools face. Class sizes are going to rise, programs will be cut, and students are going to be paying the price. Some politicians will intensify their attacks on teachers as the source of the problem, which will polarize education politics as we saw in Florida.

Perhaps Jerry Brown has avoided education issues out of humility - it has been said, after all, that the beginning of wisdom is knowing that one knows nothing. But a good leader will find that teachers are an untapped wellspring of expertise around educational policy. In the past few years there have been some intensive efforts to engage teachers in this work, and it is paying off. The Teacher Leaders Network, to which I belong, has produced a number of TeacherSolutions reports on subjects like performance pay. A California group, Accomplished California Teachers, is preparing to release a report sharing teacher ideas on how to improve teacher evaluations, and has an exciting new blog, InterACT. The Facebook group I started five months ago, Teachers' Letters to Obama, now has more than 1700 members, and we are actively discussing what some of our representatives should say to Secretary Duncan in a phone conference we have in the works.

If politicians want to see an enthusiastic base of support, they are going to need to become educated and outspoken on these issues. As a teacher I am ready to donate, campaign, make phone calls, and walk my precinct for political leaders that make our schools a priority. Many of us are also ready to offer policy ideas rooted in our experience in the state's schools. In order to get involved, however, we need to be asked. And we need to know, are you with us?

What do you think? Are you ready to become more politically active around educational issues? Will teachers make a difference this fall?

photo by Anthony Cody

Posted by Anthony Cody at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Career and College Readiness is the latest buzz-phrase in school reform. After spending the last ten years or so obsessing about student test scores in reading and math, educators are taking a couple of steps back to get a handle on what our schools are actually producing. One of our most important goals has got to be to get as many of our students as possible prepared for successful careers, whether they go to a four-year college or not.

A few decades ago, vocational education became a dirty word. It was seen an educational backwater, a series of dead-end classes for students who couldn't succeed academically, so they could be trained in various trades. There was definitely some tracking going on, and de facto racial segregation as well. As a ninth grader in Berkeley public schools, circa 1972, I signed up for an all-boy "Chef class." I was called in by my counselor, who looked at me with embarrassment and said, "You know, it's all Black kids in that class." He was sure I had made a mistake, and would not want to waste my time on a class designed to give the less academic students an easy elective. I was taken aback by his assumptions, and insisted the class stay on my program. He was right about one thing - I was the only white kid in the class, but that was good experience for me as well.

In high school, I took machine shop, and then at community college took classes in welding, along with some more academic choices. Before long I was working in a foundry, where I was a grinder and welder for the next five years or so. Luckily for me, taking a class in machine shop or welding did not prevent me from taking courses in history or science. My brain was not stunted by labor. And my years in the foundry did not prevent me from succeeding at community college, and making my way to UC Berkeley, where I graduated a few years later, with a major in environmental education and a minor in political activism.

Although we are told that we must send every single student on to a four year college, less than half of them are able to follow this path, for a variety of reasons. And though a college degree still confers some advantages on a student, many jobs require a different set of skills not found on the liberal arts campus. Recognizing this, there is a new vision being offered by those in the field of career and technical education that declares our mission to prepare students for careers as well as college. The Association for Career and Technical Education has just released this report, "What is "Career Ready"?," to explain this concept.

Here is the core idea:

Students must also be able to apply academic knowledge to authentic situations they may face in their careers, a skill that takes practice and intentional instruction that may need to be tailored to a student's specific career goals. For example, students preparing to be nurses need to be able to calculate and apply ratios, proportions, rates and percentages to determine drug dosages, while construction students need to be able to apply geometrical principles to design and implement building plans.

Some educators have been at this for a while, and have some great ideas about how it can be done very successfully.

I spent Friday with my son visiting the beautiful campus of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, on the California coast, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. I was struck by the power of the school's simple motto: Learn by Doing. The faculty here have decided that this credo will guide their studies, and it shows. Students are given design projects in many of their classes, and actually build working models to test out their theoretical knowledge.

Seniors must come up with a major project in their last year, and there is an entire building devoted to giving them space and support for this. Student-led clubs enter and often win every design competition offered in the country, building steel bridges, water reclamation systems, or a concrete canoe. A group called Engineers Without Borders has students working to develop a water project in the hills of Thailand, and building a medical facility in Nicaragua. Students take time in the summer to travel to these places to work with local villagers to build the facilities they have designed. They not only are learning how to apply their knowledge, they are also gaining great experiences working as a team, and leading others to accomplish great things.

A month ago I visited a high school in Las Vegas with a similar approach. The Southwest Career and Technical Academy is a magnet school that draws students from all over Clark County. It has two major divisions; the Design Academy and the Professional Services Academy. Within the Design Academy there are programs devoted to Video Game Design, Web Design, Entertainment Engineering, Interior Design, and Fashion. In Professional Services, there are students focused on Culinary Arts, Nursing, Hospitality, Dental Assisting, and Respiratory Therapy.

Like Cal Poly, this high school has a strong emphasis on student projects. They follow the Project-Based Learning model developed by the Buck Institute for Education (disclaimer - I am on the faculty of the Buck Institute and occasionally help lead workshops with them). In my visit I saw students doing projects learning to use social media like Facebook for commercial marketing, and developing their own newscast. The school has strong connections with local industry, so students know that what they are learning will be useful in their future.

In my own district, Oakland Unified, there is a strong movement in this direction as well. There are a number of career-focused academies at high schools, and next year even more will be launched. Oakland Technical High has led the way, and offers academies focused on Health, Biotech, Engineering, Green, Performing Arts, and Computers. I am pulling together a team of science and history teachers to work on a new Project-Based Learning collaborative project, designing and implementing projects in our classrooms across the district.

If my seventeen year-old son is any indication, this is a winning approach. He has not made his final decision yet, but it looks as if Cal Poly may be his favorite. When students can connect what they are learning in school to the real world, then they can make that connection apply to their own future. Then our schools are truly preparing our students in a meaningful way.

What do you think? Are you seeing success through a "Learn by Doing" approach?

Photo credit to SignalPAD, used by permission, Creative Commons.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Teachers are front and center in the current education reform debate. Many reformers have cast teachers as both villains and possible saviors in our schools. Everything would be fixed if we just got rid of bad teachers, according to Newsweek. Since we are often blamed for failing schools, it is easy to fall into a posture of defending ourselves by pointing the finger at others. A few weeks ago I saw teachers celebrate when Bill Maher said "Let's not fire the teacher when the students don't learn - fire the parents!!" But the harder we try to shift responsibility onto others, the more it looks as if we are unwilling to accept our share as educators.

New York University professor Pedro Noguera said something very interesting in this interview a few months back.

(Teachers') unions need to make it very clear that the interests of the teachers are aligned with the interests of the children. Whatever's good for the teachers better also be good for the children. And if it's not, then it's a problem. It should be the case that parents and children are in total solidarity with their teachers. Because they recognize that when teachers' work improves, they also benefit. Right now, in too many places, that's not the case. The teachers' union has defined its interests in terms that are often antithetical to the interests of the children, and that's a huge problem. It's a problem for the unions, because it means that a lot of times they are not getting the political support that they need. And it's a problem for the schools, because too often the schools work for the adults, and not for the children.

We are preparing for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, and over at Teachers' Letters to Obama, we have been discussing what we want to say to Secretary Duncan when we speak with him soon. This federal law has been a disaster for teachers. It has narrowed the focus of our instruction, and taken away our autonomy as professionals, as we are given scripted curriculum to make sure we are teaching what will be tested. The schools where we work have been labeled failures, and some have even been closed or reconstituted. Efforts to tie our pay and evaluations to test scores threaten our livelihood and job security. But for each of these things we would criticize, there are countervailing reasons that can be offered based on the interests of our students. The narrowing of the curriculum can be defended as a necessary focus on basic skills. What is a lifeless scripted curriculum to one person is a research-based curricular innovation to another, one that makes sure all children have access to solid instruction. The schools that have been labeled failures and targeted for reconstitution have had low performance for years, and are not serving their students well. Why should we protect the jobs and pay of these teachers, when the fate of thousands of students hangs in the balance?

Please do not take me as a defender of NCLB, or the new, modified version in the works. I do not agree with these defenses of the law, and think we could do much better. But as we prepare for deeper public dialogue, I am challenging myself and other teachers to revisit the reasons we are dissatisfied. Yes, we want to be trusted, we want time to collaborate, we want to be respected as professionals - these are all reasonable things to desire. But none of them cuts to the heart of the matter in school reform. We will prevail in the public arena, as Pedro Noguera suggests, only as long as we build our vision around what is best for our students, and build solidarity with them and their parents.

What do you think? How can we better connect our interests and ideals as teachers to the interests of our students?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 8:41 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Secretary Duncan wants to talk with us. Five months after I posted my Open Letter to President Obama, four months after we sent over 100 letters to Obama and Duncan, we are being invited to speak by phone with Arne himself. We are ready. More than 1600 teachers have joined our Teachers' Letters to Obama Facebook group, and we have been actively discussing the key issues in education policy. One of our founding members, Kansas City teacher Marsha Ratzel, set up a meeting with her Department of Education representative, and shared our letters with him. He was impressed, and pushed them up the line in the Department. Result? The Secretary wants to speak with us! Thank you Marsha!!

Over the next few days we will discuss what we want to say to Secretary Duncan and who should represent us. I invite you to join us. Post what YOU would like to say. Vote for others so we can determine who should represent us. This is our chance to be heard.

Here are some of my questions:

You have said that you are "tight on results but loose on means." However, your policies are setting some very bad means into motion. For example, in Florida, Senate Bill 6 will put in place new tests at the start and end of each year, in each and every subject, and the results on these tests will be used to determine 50% of a teacher's pay and evaluation, with no local control at all. This has been justified by lawmakers belief that this will earn them Race to the Top dollars. Are you happy with this direction they are taking from you?

You and President Obama have made it clear that you wish to move away from the punitive aspects of NCLB. We all know the terrible effect it has on teachers and students to have their school labeled a failure. But a central part of your reauthorization plan for NCLB is to label the bottom 5% of the schools as failures and require them to be restructured. Unfortunately the states have not shown much capacity or imagination in this regard, and once again, your mandates are resulting in heavy-handed actions as we saw in Central Falls in Rhode Island and Fremont High in Los Angeles. Since the categorization as "failing" continues to rely on the tests you have deemed inadequate, as many as 20% of our lower-performing schools are going to be in constant danger of failing to meet learning goals. Won't this inevitably result in the same sort of test-driven culture at these schools that has been the hallmark of NCLB?

President Obama and you have spoken about the desire to free teachers from the need to prepare students for standardized tests from September to May. However, when you speak of multiple measures, one gets the sense that the remedy is limited to adding high school graduation rates to the formula, and MORE tests in more subjects. To combat the narrowing of the curriculum to reading and math, we will test more, not less. And have tests at the start and end of each year so as to be able to measure growth. And those who have read the draft Common Core Standards have noted that it sets testable targets starting at kindergarten. Are you suggesting that the way to keep teachers from having to teach to the test is to add more tests?

From coast to coast, state budget shortfalls are having terrible effects on our schools. We are losing libraries, nurses, school counselors, safety officers, and class sizes are climbing. This is going to widen the gap between schools attended by children in poverty and those with wealth. In this climate, does it make sense to award federal funding on a competitive basis? Won't this widen the gap between haves and have-nots?

The major focus of this discussion will be the Blueprint for Reathorization of ESEA (NCLB) that came out a few weeks ago. An excellent review was offered a few days ago by Richard Rothstein here: A blueprint that needs more work.

Please come to the Teachers' Letters to Obama Discussion page and share your thoughts there as well as below.

What do you think? What would YOU say to Secretary Duncan if you had him on the phone?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

At the root of the current reform drive from Rhode Island to Florida to Los Angeles is an authoritarianism disguised as accountability. "Reform Or Else" could be the motto of the day. Unfortunately coercion destroys trust, and this is perhaps the single most important element in a successful school.

The essence of reform is getting people to do things differently. What does that look like in a struggling school? A successful strategy might include:

1. Investigation of all the factors affecting student performance


2. A shared understanding that neither parents nor teachers are to "blame" for the current situation, and that all of us need to work together to find solutions.


3. Development of clear educational goals, and authentic assessments that will reveal progress towards those goals.


4. Collaboration between teachers and parents to develop strategies to address as many factors affecting progress as possible, especially ones that the school and parent community can implement.


5. Teacher sharing of instructional practices found to be effective with our students


6. Willingness to open our classrooms to one another, to share what is working, and be open to new ideas to improve on things not working so well.


7. A collaborative evaluation process, where the process is used as a chance to reflect on our practice and set goals, and follow through with professional growth aligned to these goals.

Each and every one of these steps is built on the bedrock of TRUST. In order to improve, we need to allow our weaknesses to be revealed. We need to know that we are all -teachers, parents and administrators -- in this together. We need to know we are all striving to serve our students as best we can, and that we will all help one another to meet the great challenges we face.

Somehow many of our leaders in Washington, Florida and California - (and perhaps in your state as well) have decided that teachers can NOT be trusted. Regardless of how this decision was reached, it is having a calamitous effect on the efforts to improve our schools. What happens when you decide that teachers will only do their jobs if they are forced to?

• You use the threat of firings to "motivate" people to embrace reform strategies that have been devised by district or state leaders.


• You base a large portion of teacher salary and a teacher's evaluation on their students' test scores to "incentivize" them to do their jobs.


• You adopt more and more prescriptive curricula and canned instructional programs so you can ensure that your incapacitated staff will know what to do.


• You devise more and more intrusive testing systems to monitor and control instruction and learning and allow you to identify and punish laggards.

And what effect are these steps going to have on the list of potentially fruitful strategies offered above?

1. Investigation of factors affecting student performance is abandoned because it is concluded that the teacher is the only factor that matters.


2. We do not need to spend time figuring out goals because they are determined entirely by the state. Assessment of success or failure is limited to the state test. No other performance counts.


3. Collaboration with parents is sabotaged by mutual indictment. Teachers feel they are being unfairly blamed, and it is actually the parents' fault, and parents feel let down by the teachers.


4. Instructional strategies and scripted curricula are imposed by the district and implemented without enthusiasm or investment by discouraged and disempowered teachers.


5. Teachers will not share effective practices because we get these from outside experts. If we had any effective practices we wouldn't be in this mess, would we? Also, if my pay and evaluation depend on my scores, I want mine to be the best in the building. Why should I share that curriculum I wrote over the summer for free?


6. Collaborative practices are undermined, and isolation is increased, which has the effect of insulating the teachers most in need of improvement from the pressure and support of their colleagues.


7. The evaluation process is driven by test scores and adherence to the scripts and strategies imposed from on high. Reflection is not called for - just examination of test data.

This is a great way to destroy, not rescue, a struggling school.

We have heard occasional nods to authentic assessment from Secretary Duncan and President Obama. And Secretary Duncan has praised those who work in challenging schools for their dedication. But they both applauded the firing of the entire staff at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, and the blueprint for reauthorization of NCLB makes it clear that there will be a perpetual list of struggling schools subject to similar coercive reform measures.

When I have raised objections to reconstitution in the past, I have heard the rejoinder: "But something must be done to fix these chronically low-performing schools, mustn't it?" YES. But to succeed, you must build from a foundation of trust and respect for the people that teach in these schools. Coercion destroys trust. Every school is at heart a community. Some are dysfunctional communities. Some have had poor leadership. Some have not developed their capacity to respond to the challenges they face. But we must begin by building on and expanding the trust and strength that binds a school together, because that is going to be the foundation for the changes we need.

What do you think? Can change be achieved through coercion? Is trust needed in order to improve a school?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Teachers are finally learning how to organize. It took some intense provocation, because we do not rile easily. But from Florida to Fremont High School in Los Angeles, teachers are doing what it takes to be heard. And this is not your mother's protest movement. Teacher protest is alive in the digital age, and we are using the latest tools of the times.

Facebook has emerged as a tremendously powerful vehicle for organizing. I discovered this myself when I posted my open letter to President Obama last November. I created a Facebook group, Teachers' Letters to Obama, the same day. Within a few weeks it had 600 members, and now has more than 1,500. We used the group to collect more than 100 letters to send to Obama and Duncan, and have been actively discussing solutions to the challenges we face, and galvanizing further activism by our members, getting them to write letters to Congress and other policymakers.

One of our early members was Jesse Turner, who wrote of walking in his cold apartment as a child to stay warm, and pledged to walk to Washington, DC, this summer, to protest NCLB and Race to the Top. Inspired anew by the March 4 protests, Jesse launched his own Facebook group, Children are more than test scores, to inform and activate others. In less than a month he has attracted more than 4,250 members.

Another blogger, California teacher Sarah Puglisi, posted a list of her own 100 National Standards a few weeks ago. Here are a few random examples:

• 6. All children should know nature, value nature, interact within nature, and be in families that have some capacity to do the same.
• 19. All children should have adults that can cooperate, hear one another, resolve conflict, have the capacity to demonstrate love, attention, concern, solutions, turn taking, deference.
• 27. All children should enter school believing and maintaining as long as possible a joy in learning, and a belief in self as not "behind", not labeled, not seen as less.
• 63. All children should have bandaids, both the real thing and the metaphorical kind. To heal.

Her post has generated a Facebook group "I bet we can get 1,000,000 teachers to adopt these standards."

Why has Facebook emerged as such a powerful vehicle? First of all, most teachers are women, and according to this report from istrategy labs, at least 54% of Facebook users are female, and the largest age group is 35 to to 54 year olds. Facebook membership has more than doubled in the past year, and more than 100 million Americans are registered users. Facebook allows you to set up a group, host discussions, and share links and videos. You can even announce a protest, invite people to attend, and track who says they will come. But the best thing about it is that since this is a social platform, posts can permeate into our everyday social scene, so amidst the flurry of news from friends like "I just popped some popcorn and am going to watch Casablanca" we can get posts with the latest news about teachers protesting in Florida, or an invitation to write our congressperson about ESEA. And since so many people belong, it is possible for important news to spread virally outward.

Florida teachers are also using Facebook very creatively. The group Stop Senate Bill 6 -- actually started by concerned parents, now has about 22,000 fans, and is a hub of organizing activity for parents and teachers in the state. And the teachers are taking their message to the Facebook pages of their representatives as well. A visit to the Republican Senate Majority Office Facebook page reveals scores of notes from angry teachers raising serious questions about the future of education should this law pass.

Another outlet for teacher voices have been the blogs. I have used my blog to spread word about the movement to save Fremont High School from a draconian reconstitution. A group I helped found a couple of years ago, Accomplished California Teachers, has launched a new group blog, InterAct, which is carrying provocative perspectives from leading California teachers. And the Teacher Leaders Network, to which I belong, has a strong group of teacher bloggers with great things to say.

Art teacher Rian Fike has used his diary on the Daily Kos to share news of the teacher movement against Senate Bill 6. Because of him, I saw these great YouTube videos of teachers confronting Republican governor Charlie Crist, pressuring him to veto the bill. This is a great example of effective dialogue with our representatives. The teachers are passionate, on point, and united.

YouTube is another tool teachers are beginning to use effectively. Jesse Turner has launched a project to have teachers, parents and students post messages about NCLB and Race to the Top by June 14th - Flag Day, as a patriotic and democratic protest. He has used Facebook to create the organizing group, and the videos will be posted to Youtube.

I still believe the most powerful ways we can confront injustice are the ones we have always used, but these new tools can serve to amplify and build these methods. Jesse Turner will walk in protest as did many civil rights marchers decades ago. But because of Facebook many more will know of his march and have a chance to witness it, support and even join him as he walks. The teachers at Fremont High School are doing good old fashioned community organizing to rally parents, students and community members to support their school -- but we know about it because they are willing to share their story on my blog. Teachers speak truth to power as the Florida teachers did last month, but many more of us can be inspired thanks to videos posted to YouTube, and bloggers like Rian Fike.

After eight long years of No Child Left Behind, teachers are finally getting organized. It will take some real determination, clarity and action to overcome the misinformation that now dominates education policy. But teachers are showing we know how to use the tools at our disposal, and we will use them to be heard.

Update #1: Rian Fike has posted again on the Daily Kos. He writes:

We caught wind of the bill three weeks ago. Our unions made sure we understood the dire situation. We took the ball and we went supersonic. Facebook groups gained thousands of members per day, and then we met together in person to protest. We got our cause on the local news in over 30 different cities. We followed the money trail to the Council of 100. We found out that Publix Supermarkets and Office Depot were part of the plot. We are waiting for a clarification of their position, since they immediately began backpedaling. If the bill is forced through and signed by Governor Crist, we will organize massive boycotts.

Update #2: Los Angeles teacher Jose Lara has just posted a YouTube video sharing teacher perspectives on their fight to save Fremont High from reconstitution.

Update #3: Parents and teachers in Palm Beach, Florida, really led the way with their Facebook group, Testing is Not Teaching, which has been used for the past eight months to organize their movement to stop the District's over-reliance on standardized tests and scripted curriculum. Once again, parents together with teachers are a force to be reckoned with!

Update #4: Daily Kos blogger and Florida Art teacher Rian Fike is back with another report: Florida Teachers are a Force: traction against the Jeb Bush machine.

The bill that was headed straight into law has galvanized a whole new voting block that will need to be honored in November and forevermore. We are so powerful at this point that Jeb Bush has started robocalls against us. We are turning Charlie Crist toward a veto, which obviously will be a big swing for the Fl-Sen seat. Check out Crist's reason for the turnaround.

When I read that, I just about lost my lunch. Why? Because I had spoken the exact same sentence to his secretary the day before.

Update #6: Friday, April 9: Florida teachers and students need us! Governor Crist's veto is the only thing that will keep Senate Bill 6 from becoming law. I just sent a fax. Call his office at 850-907-1218. Fax his office at 850-487-0801 or 850-907-1219. Please tell him to VETO SB6/HB7189.

What do you think? Are we using the right tools to get our voices heard? Are there other ways we can have influence over the future of our schools?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend