September 2010 Archives

My post last week, OprahPaganda, responding to Oprah's Monday show promoting Waiting for Superman, was widely read, and sparked a lively discussion.

Valerie Pientka, a National Board certified teacher who read my post, shared with me a letter she wrote to one of Oprah's producers. I think she has some valuable insights.

I saw the (Oprah) show and was extremely disappointed. There was no teacher voice. Yes a few seconds of tapings from teachers, but there was no opportunity to hear what a teacher has to say about any topic within education, what a teacher thinks, what is the reality of the classroom, of the student's lives. We heard a lot from men, but all the female teachers were positioned as a backdrop, which perfectly mirrors the way this profession works. The vast majority of teachers are female, yet hold precious few positions of power, due to a basic lack of respect for children and for the profession.

There are two competing goals in education today. For teachers, who look into the eyes of their students each and every day, the goal is to help that student reach his or her potential, to build capacity within each child so that he or she may develop their God-given gift, no matter what that gift may be. Children who reach their capacity become productive citizens in our country. However, because of the top down, business model approach, (the same business model that brought us as a country to our knees in 2008) currently utilized in this profession, children are looked upon as human capital. The evidence for this is the overwhelming use of standardized test scores. Arne Duncan says it himself, "We have to educate our way to a better economy." What about a better democracy or society, of which a better economy is also an outcome? The economy can not be *the* goal, as there will never be a 'good enough' economy. Teachers do not see children as future widgets for the economy but as inquisitive, passionate beings with many, many gifts that are not reflected by a test score.

It is important to note, that there are much better methods of evaluating the learning that goes on in a classroom in a modality that better matches students learning style, called performance measures. These measures are utilized by many of the successful countries to which we compare ourselves, which by the way also have cradle to grave social services, but they are cost prohibitive according to the 'experts' and are not part of the conversation. The ugly underbelly of the testing frenzy in education is the unregulated explosion of big business into education via tests and other measurement methods that are imposed upon our children by myopic, economy obsessed non-classroom practitioners.

School year 2010-2011 will impose 17 standardized tests upon struggling high school students in the Chicago Public Schools. There is no rationale on the planet that should support such a decision. Eight out of ten Chicago Public School students live at or below the poverty level. Do you really think more testing will somehow overcome poverty and the resulting neglect? Do you really think that a level playing field for these students is the goal? Are the students in urban areas just not as bright as those of suburban areas as test scores indicate, or are vast financial inequities also reflected in these scores? Did any of your guests address that issue?

A joint report by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, National Action Network, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., National Council for Educating Black Children, National Urban League, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Schott Foundation for Public Education have published a position paper against Arne Duncan's Race to the Top because of the inherent inequities in education that are not addressed in this reform. If you took the time to really speak to a teacher, poverty and the resulting inequities would undoubtedly have been a focus of the conversation.

Your own guest, Emily, illustrates this point. As a young lady who knows she does not perform well on standardized tests, she wants entrance into a charter school that does not have the ludicrous standardized testing constraints that are imposed upon public schools. The not for profit charter school movement could be a very positive influence on the current landscape of education, simply because they do not have to adhere to the same inane constraints found in public education. However, we as a country will never pony up the capital or the political will to dispense with these constraints and create a 'charter mentality' for public education. I had hoped that we had learned that lesson when we dismantled the mental health facilities that housed our mentally ill in the 70's. Although this institution too was in desperate need of an overhaul, our mentally ill have become our homeless and our imprisoned. If we are unwilling to address the financial disparities of students lives and schools we continue to risk a similar outcome for our neediest children.

If you have the courage to listen closely to teachers, read teacher blogs, or speak to education experts, rather than business experts, you will find this belief emanating from their souls, which is the place from which a real teacher operates. Important learning does not occur outside of important relationships. This is exactly what Geoffrey Canada, your guest, knew and ultimately created in the Harlem Children's Zone. He knows that unless a holistic approach, one that encompasses all areas of a child's life, is implemented, learning will not occur. The SEED charter school movement is another example. Students must leave the reality of their lives behind from Monday through Friday and attend a boarding school, in order to learn.

The resentment of teachers is palpable. It is we who must witness yet one more reform that we know not to be in the best interest of our students. We resent our profession being taken over by people such as Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee who have had little to no experience in a classroom, yet utilize practices that penalize rather than empower. We resent an infusion of massive resources that are changing the nature of educational research with the goal of matching the motives of for-profit charter schools. We resent the teacher bashing that has been ongoing for the past two decades and has recently gained a vicious momentum. We resent the attack upon the labor unions, as it is yet one more attempt to diminish America's middle class. We resent being the only voice for the next generation of children who are depending upon us, and yet we ourselves have no voice. We resent having to participate in a top down, economy focused 'solution' rather than in a bottom up, child centered solution that values our children as gifts of the future. We resent having reforms and initiatives imposed upon us without any avenue for discussion of what is working and what is not working. We resent the fact that so much energy and effort is aimed at destroying what sadly, is for many children, the safest place in their lives, their neighborhood school. We resent any solution other than raising our way to higher quality in our schools by professionalizing teaching. And finally, we resent watching one of our favorite hometown gals, Oprah, become yet one more notch on the belt of a vicious plan to destroy the last vestige of American democracy, our public schools.

If you are ever interested in a REAL discussion on education I offer the following EDUCATION experts: Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, Anthony Cody, among many others who really understand education as it is their life vocation.

Valerie Pientka is a 34 year veteran public school teacher and will be retiring at the end of the school year. She is Nationally Board Certified, EAYA Art, and will find out in November if she passed the recertification process. She is in the final stages of writing her dissertation, and will graduate with an Ed.D in Curriculum and Instruction in May.

What do you think? Do you feel this reflects your views as a teacher or parent?

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

Monday I was the lone teacher at an afternoon forum entitled "Grading the Teachers," hosted by the Graduate School of Education at Berkeley. The focus was on the use of so-called Value Added Measurement (VAM) and the series of articles which ran in the Los Angeles Times this summer. I was on a panel focused on the media, which given the tremendous role the media is playing in driving the agenda for education reform, seemed appropriate. Also on the panel with me were Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, Susan Rasky of the UC School of Journalism, and Jason Felch, one of the authors of the LA Times story.

The entire event and supporting links are available for here. The media panel is below.

Here are my prepared remarks. As you will see if you watch the video, I did not get to share all that I had prepared. So I offer it all here.

Our focus today is on how the media has addressed teacher effectiveness, but we really need to place this in a much larger context. First, let me say that Teacher evaluation DOES need to be improved. I worked as a Peer Assistance and Review coach in the Oakland schools for two years, and saw the evaluation process up close. I worked with a group of accomplished and recognized teacher leaders to write a report offering concrete ways this can be done. Copies of our report are here. There is work being done across the state, including in Los Angeles and Oakland, to strengthen teacher effectiveness and evaluation practices.

But that said, what we are witnessing is an all-out war on America's public schools and teachers.

Here is some of what I heard in the past week:

Bill Gates assert that America would go from the middle of international academic rankings to the top, if we could get rid of all the bad teachers.

There is zero evidence that America has more "bad teachers" than other countries. But we do lead the developed world in the proportion of children in poverty, with more than 23% of our students below the poverty level, while most of the countries beating us have less than 5% living in poverty.

This exchange on Oprah:
Michele Rhee describes teacher tenure as "a job for life." Oprah says "After two years you have a job for life and you can't be fired! Who does that?"
Davis Guggenheim, the Waiting for Superman movie producer, intones "Everybody gets it. It's automatic. You show up for two years, you got tenure."

That is a flat-out lie. In my district, which is known for a strong union, teachers do not get tenure unless their principal wants them to. Many teachers are released at the end of their first or second year. Tenure is by no means automatic. And there are indeed ways to get rid of tenured teachers, who do not have "jobs for life," but rather have rights to due process. In fact, a few moments earlier, we were told "Michelle Rhee has fired a thousand teachers and principals," many of whom had tenure.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said:

What's really going on in a place like Newark is we have violence and drug use because we have no hope. And the reason we don't have hope is because children don't believe tomorrow can be better than today, because it's an obscenity that we've robbed from them their education.

In the city of Newark, one child in three is below the poverty line. Unemployment in 12%.
Things are much the same in Oakland, where unemployment is 17%.

A few decades ago politicians decided that DRUGS were the cause of all of our woes in the cities. So our political leaders declared a war on drugs. They gave speeches demanding "get tough" laws. Now our prisons are overflowing, and more than two million Americans are behind bars.

Drugs and crime were symptoms of hopelessness, however, not the cause. Locking up millions of Americans has not delivered our neighborhoods from crime - and the costs for prisons has diverted billions away from our schools.

Now our politicians and their billionaire sponsors are leading us on another phony moral crusade. But instead of a war on drugs, we have a war on teachers.

NBC News announced a special panel happening this morning with the title, "The Lessons of New Orleans: Does Education Need a Katrina?" They're trying to wash us away and start over, with charters and TFA interns. This media hurricane is formidable. They have billionaires and Oprah, NBC news "reporters" and propaganda films, non-profit and for-profit charters and others who stand to gain from this, all waving the banner of this phony crusade.

NBC News president Steve Capus, responding to criticism that teachers and those with a critical view of the administration's education reform agenda have been shut out of Education Nation programming, says:

NBC News [personnel] are not the experts in this place. ...the role of a news organization is to put a spotlight on these issues/challenges, and on the people who are doing incredibly strong work to try to affect change. The news division's involvement begins and ends with that spotlight. We're not coming at this from a policy angle.

Truly flabbergasting. According to the material on their Education Nation website, "Education is key to the success of our country..." Yet this multi-million dollar news organization has nobody on their staff they consider to be expert in this crucial field? Secondly, what is the role of a news organization? I thought the role of a news organization was to investigate and uncover the truth, and share it with the public. In the case of an issue where there is a real controversy, such as education policy in America, a news organization ought to give a balanced presentation of the controversy, with competing perspectives represented by the most reputable and respected advocates available.

And the whole scheme of Valueless Addition, championed by the LA Times, fits right into this narrative. Based on test scores and cursory observations by untrained reporters, the Times launched a McCarthyist hunt for the bad teachers responsible for poor test scores.
As HL Mencken said, the job of a journalist should be to "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." But courage has been redefined by the powers that be, and now they pat one another on the back for the courage to attack the people working every day in our toughest schools.

Here are some things that could be tackled by journalists, which I have heard not a PEEP about during the Education Nation:

• Our nation has more than 20% of our children living in poverty, while Finland, which is at the top of international rankings, has only about 2% in poverty. Could there be a connection here?

• What are the teacher evaluation and professional practices in the nations that are doing better than us on international comparisons?

• Schools now are MORE segregated than at any time since the 1950s. Could this have anything to do with the achievement gap?

• Charter schools have been promoted as superior to regular public schools. How about an in-depth look at the way charters limit their student population, turning away those without parents willing to support them?

• Who are the members of the Business Round Table, and the Hedge Fund billionaires investing in charter schools and "education reform," and what do they stand to gain?

The media is currently the fiddler playing a tune called by billionaires.

But as Diane Ravitch said last week in Los Angeles:

"Teacher evaluation is a red herring, a diversion. A diversion intended to take our glance away from the poverty and racial isolation in which these students live. It salves the conscience of the billionaire boys club and enables them to blame hard-working teachers for the poverty and inequality that mars our society and hurts children."

The barrage of unfair criticism against teachers, especially those in low-performing schools, is having a deeply demoralizing effect. One of those teachers was Rigoberto Ruelas, who took his life this week. A dedicated teacher in South LA for the past 14 years, with a perfect attendance record, his family said he had been upset and depressed since the LA Times listed him as being ineffective. He may be the first casualty in America's war on teachers.

What do you think? Is there a war on America's teachers? What role is the media playing?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 7:38 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

One of the remarkable things to emerge over the past week of education-themed discussions were the young teachers willing to discard tenure. Here are some of the comments we heard at yesterday's Education Nation Teacher Town Hall yesterday:

Brian Williams asks, "Are teachers under attack?" A teacher in her twenties replies,

I believe teachers are under attack, and as an educator in Newark, teachers SHOULD be under attack. You should be held accountable. You don't enter the teaching field to make lucrative amounts of money. You come into the teaching field to be a good teacher and fill the minds of the students of the country. So yes, are we under attack, yes, but we should be, and you should be held accountable.

This is starting to sound a bit like the Stockholm syndrome.

Another says,

As a younger teacher, I don't understand tenure. I don't see a need for it. I have a union rep in my school, and when I felt under attack she has been there to protect me, but I don't need tenure for that. I'm going to go in and do a good job, and they'll see that I'm doing a good job, and they'll hire me again. I don't need a piece of paper to tell me that I have to be hired each year.

It is amazing the faith these people have in authority. We can all agree there are bad teachers out there who are doing a disservice to children. Are there no bad principals? Are there no circumstances under which you might want a piece of paper to grant you some rights? Is it not possible that the union rep who defended you when you were under attack relied on that piece of paper to make sure you had a fair hearing? In the absence of a contract guaranteeing you due process, there might be no way for your union rep to effectively defend you from attack.

In some parts of the country science teachers who wish to teach about evolution may find themselves under pressure from parents or administrators not to do so. There may be parents who complain when teachers hold their students accountable for their work or behavior. All these issues can result in teachers needing some protection.

In my district, schools get a certain amount of money based on how many students they serve. Experienced teachers are paid more than the novices, sometimes twice as much. Is it not possible that a principal, who is responsible for balancing the school's tight budget, might be influenced to trade one veteran for two novices, and that this might result in some unfair treatment? My suspicion is that if these young teachers choose to stay in the profession, their attitude towards the need for due process may shift.

But one of the best comments came from another teacher, who said the following:

I have an issue with the word attack. I really feel like as a professional, I don't need to be attacked. I need to be supported. I need feedback - wonderful feedback. That's the only way we're going to grow. I think places where teachers feel safe to work, places where teachers feel their voices are heard - are great places to learn. And that's what I want for my child, and that's what I think we teachers want for all of our children in our classrooms. Passion isn't enough, criticism isn't enough - the support needs to be there.

Brian Williams: What about the people who shouldn't be there?

My worst critics are my colleagues. These are the people that hold me accountable every day for what I do. So long as the teachers' voice is not on that panel, we are being shut out. When we get together as teachers, and we put up our norms, our standards, just like the medical field, just like in your place of work, you hold the people around you accountable. We're not scared of accountability. But the word attack is negative. The word attack doesn't suggest positive outcomes. And what we need is for OUR voices to be at that table.

She said what teachers have been saying for years. We are willing to hold ourselves to much higher standards than an annual evaluation ever could. But we need a climate of care and collaboration. The best principals understand this, and work to build it. Due process allows us to function in an environment where we are safe from unfair attacks, while we are still held accountable by our colleagues and administrators. Evaluations should be improved, so that teachers get more high quality feedback. And principals should get more support in this area, because it is hard to do this all alone. But teachers who are ready to throw away our rights to due process should think long and hard. You may not always find yourself on the sunny side of that process, and may wish you had a piece of paper between you and the unemployment line.

Update: Guess who was the ONLY teacher featured in a clip on Brian Williams' evening news program? The young teacher who does not understand the need for tenure.

What do you think? Has tenure outlived its usefulness? Should teachers defend due process?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

On Oprah yesterday, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said,

What's really going on in a place like Newark is we have violence and drug use because we have no hope. And the reason we don't have hope is because children don't believe tomorrow can be better than today, because it's an obscenity that we've robbed from them their education.

Here is the reality, Mr. Governor.

In the city of Newark, according to Wikipedia, 28.4% of the population and 25.5% of families are below the poverty line. 36.6% of those under the age of 18 and 24.1% of those 65 and older are living below the poverty line. The city's unemployment rate is 12%.

A few decades ago politicians decided that DRUGS were the cause of all of our woes in the cities. Drugs were the cause of crime, and destroyed our neighborhoods. So our political leaders declared a war on drugs. They gave speeches demanding "get tough" laws that would keep the criminals off the streets, and remove this dire threat to our communities. Now our prisons are overflowing, and more than two million Americans are behind bars, and three times that many are on probation.

Drugs and crime were symptoms of hopelessness, however, not the cause. Locking up millions of Americans has not delivered our neighborhoods from crime - and the costs for prisons has diverted billions away from our schools.

Now our politicians and their billionaire sponsors are leading us on another phony moral crusade. But instead of a war on drugs, we have a war on teachers.

The poverty rate in Oakland, California, where I have worked for the past 24 years, is similar to that of Newark, so I am familiar with these conditions. Unemployment and poverty drive people to drugs and crime, and, as has been documented in voluminous studies, have a significant effect on school achievement.

Our schools are being labeled the root cause of all this dysfunction, but this is absolutely wrong. This is not to say that our schools cannot be improved. But to make these schools into the scourge of these poor communities is the height of demagogic abuse.

The truth is that poverty and unemployment yield hopelessness in our communities - and in our schools as well. People who have lived in multi-generational poverty often see no way out, and children are very sensitive to this. Teachers in our schools do their best to inspire our children to lift their aspirations upwards, but we do not succeed with all of them.

A teacher I work with described a student she is having trouble with this week. I asked about his family situation. The father says the mother is a drug addict. The child lives part time with an older brother. You can only imagine the turmoil in this sixth grader's life - and he brings that turmoil to class with him every day, and recreates it everywhere he goes. And let me tell you, this is exactly the sort of student who would NOT be accepted at many charter schools, because many of them REQUIRE active parent support and involvement. Our public schools do not have the resources to cope with this, and this year the school has even fewer support staff because the state has lowered the funding levels. To turn around and blame this dysfunction on these half-starved institutions, and the teachers who work in them, is cruel and immoral.

It is true that our schools are not adequately serving all of our students, but to say that the schools are the root of the hopelessness in our communities is exactly backwards. The schools are struggling to offer hope, and are often the refuge for our students in the greatest need.

Governor Christie had a glint in his eye as he self-righteously condemned schools for being the root cause of hopelessness in his cities. But he and Arne Duncan, and every other politician who jumps on this bandwagon, have made a dangerous miscalculation in launching this war on teachers. Drug addicts and criminals were not truly to blame for the troubles laid at their door a decade or two ago - but they could not fight back. They couldn't even vote, once they were convicted. But teachers are not only not to blame, we are capable of standing up and fighting back. Teachers in Florida showed us all how this could be done last spring when they defeated Senate Bill 6, which threatened to destroy their rights and tie their pay and evaluations to test scores.
Tuesday morning NBC's Education Nation features a panel with the odious title, "The Lessons of New Orleans: Does Education Need a Katrina?" So we see what we are up against. They're trying to wash us away and start over, with charters and TFA interns. This media hurricane is formidable. They have billionaires and Oprah, NBC news "reporters" and propaganda films, non-profit and for-profit charters and others who stand to gain from this, all waving the banner of this phony crusade.

We, the teachers, parents and students who know better, have ourselves, and our capacity to get organized and take a stand for our public schools. This Tuesday we at Teachers' Letters to Obama will hold a REAL Teachers' Round Table discussion, "Stop Griping, Start Organizing," where we will hear from leaders in the effort to defend our schools from this onslaught. Our guests will include:
Jesse Turner, who recently marched from Connecticut to Washington, DC, to protest education policies, creator of the Facebook group Children are More than Test Scores.
Chris Janotta, of Million Teacher March.
Amy Valens, creator of the documentary movie, August to June, which offers a compelling portrait of what a nurturing school can be.
Leonie Haimson, a parent activist and founding member of Parents Across America
Lily Eskelson, NEA Vice President, who has been calling on teachers to become more active.
Children's advocates Angela Engel and Dr. Anthony Dallman Jones.
Please sign up here.

What do you think? Are teachers being made into scapegoats? How can we be heard?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As we approach what appears to be a week-long exercise in propaganda, NBC's Education Nation, we need to arm ourselves by understanding what portion of what is said is true, and what is a lie. Although the fundamental critique of our profession is groundless, there are a few half-truths hiding here and there, and we need to acknowledge real problems where they exist, and offer real solutions based on our on-the-ground understanding of how things work in the schools.

Central to the "Education Reform" narrative is the idea that teachers and our unions are implacable foes of change, unwilling to recognize flaws in ourselves or colleagues. In fact, there is a different story unfolding - and we need to tell it loudly, because we are being silenced by the crescendo of criticism they are heaping upon us.

So let's take a look at some of the false and partly true assertions that are being made this week:

If only we got rid of the bad teachers, our schools would shoot from the bottom of international rankings to the top (asserted on Oprah Monday, without foundation by the very inexpert Bill Gates).

Teachers alone can make up the difference in achievement between disadvantaged children and those who live in wealthy communities. (Judging from the outlines of the panels this will be the central theme of Education Nation)

Teachers have tenure, tenure is granted automatically, and this means we have jobs for life. Teacher evaluation is so broken it is worthless, and the bad teachers are just shuffled from one school to another.

The first two of these are simply false. There is zero evidence that America's teachers are any worse, on a whole, than those in the countries who are outscoring us. There is tremendous evidence that the proportion of our children in poverty is a huge factor here. Finland, which consistently outranks us, has a child poverty rate of about 2%, while we have more than 22% of our children living in poverty. The chronically low-performing schools that are the recipients of special scorn and abuse are often FULL of children living in poverty and violence. Teachers can make a difference, but the VERY STUDIES that are used to prove this, also show that while teachers account for most of the in-school variability in test scores, 60% of the total variability comes from out-of-school factors like poverty, access to quality pre-school, stable families, etc. So while teachers make some difference, it is absurd to suggest that teachers alone can make up the difference between relatively wealthy and disadvantaged students.

Then we come to the question of teacher evaluation. There is a grain of truth here, and I speak from some personal experience. I worked for several years with the District's Peer Assistance and Review process, first as one of the union's appointees to the Joint union/administration committee that oversaw the program, and then as a consulting teacher, who was assigned the task of observing and helping the teachers identified by the evaluation process as needing to improve - or be fired. I saw dozens of evaluations over those years. Many of them were not done thoroughly. Many principals, especially those in the toughest schools, are coping with so many crises small and large that they lack the time to do solid evaluations. Teachers who should not be in the classroom remain there sometimes, not because there is no process to remove them, but because their schools are dysfunctional and the administrators responsible for their evaluations lack the time to do the job properly. So our evaluation systems need to be improved.

The current reform paradigm proposes that we do this by allowing test score data to make a large part of these evaluative decisions for us. "Value-Added" is the favorite model, because it focuses on growth attributed to the individual teacher. This sounds better than NCLB's practice of comparing this year's student's scores with last years, but in reality, it has many flaws. (to read a far more detailed analysis of these flaws, check out this report by scholars from the Economic Policy Institute.)

On the afternoon of Monday, Sep. 27, I will be on a panel with several players in this drama, including Jason Felch, the Los Angeles Times reporter who wrote their recent series which published the names and test scores of teachers, "good" and "bad." So I have been thinking about the real flaws in our evaluation system, and how the use of Value Added data might or might not help us. And rather than focus primarily on what is wrong with the the VAM approach, I thought it might be more constructive to look for the useful things it might offer, and see if I could describe a truly powerful and effective teacher evaluation process.

The reasonable idea here is that schools ought to provide teachers with data showing how their students did on their tests, and that this data should be part of the evaluation process.

But the LA Times takes this several degrees beyond when they suggest test scores are a reliable indicator of a teacher's quality, and go so far as to publish names and test scores for individual teachers.

This project is based on the assumption that if you want better quality, you take out the bottom five percent and provide incentives for the rest to meet your targets. This might work with car salesmen, but it is a terrible approach for our schools.

Our students need teachers to focus on strategies that attend not only to test scores, but to many other goals and values we care about, including creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving. What our students need most of all is continuity and commitment from a caring group of adults willing to work over the long haul to strengthen the school and connect to families and the community. In our poorest schools we find the highest turnover, and this strategy is likely to make turnover even higher.

I taught for 18 years at an Oakland middle school. We had a problem in our science department with turnover. We were losing two or three teachers every year from our department of ten. Rather than worrying about how to get rid of people, we wanted to keep our teachers, to build a stable community that could grow together as a staff. So each staff member took on a newer teacher to support and collaborate with, and the next year we lost nobody.

We worked together as a team to strengthen our assessment practices. We expanded our team to include the math department, because they were envious of all the collaboration we were doing. We observed one another teach, and followed a Lesson Study protocol to help one another reflect and improve. Two of us became National Board certified.
This sort of professional work is what makes us better as teachers, and what keeps us connected to one another and to our schools. This approach sees effectiveness not as a fixed thing, but as something we develop and grow.

Teacher evaluations should be embedded in and promote this kind of collaborative culture. We should be focused on KEEPING teachers in our schools and strengthening them, rather than going on a witchhunt to find the ones supposedly to blame for low test scores. A truly collaborative culture, where teachers open up their classrooms and share, will do far more to invigorate instruction than a hypervigilant administration with a mountain of VAM data. And I would also suggest this type of culture would be far more effective at getting rid of those unwilling to adopt more effective teaching strategies - because the doors will be open, and their poor ways of teaching will be apparent to everyone.

Another value that evaluation could add is to guide a teacher's professional growth. The trouble with teacher evaluation now is that most administrators do not have time to do a good job with everyone, so they do a cursory job with most teachers, and perhaps focus more attention on one or two they want to terminate. This makes evaluation either irrelevant, or a gotcha game. Adding VAM data to this broken system will not help.

If we can create a climate of trust between teachers and administrators, it should be possible for the two to sit down, take a hard look at the teaching standards, and identify some areas of growth. That sets us some goals to work towards through the year, through reflecting on our practice, work with our school team, or outside professional growth activities.

We should look at student performance, including test scores. But we need to be careful to look for different forms of student work, and not be driven solely by the data that is most easily accessible.

Those doing the evaluating should be trained, not just in observing, but in giving useful feedback. The main purpose should be to help inspire growth and build connections to the professional activities that help us grow more effective.

Why not do what they do in Santa Clara? There, teachers have the option of collaborating with a partner to investigating an instructional strategy, and preparing a report they share with their administrator.

How about what they do in Minneapolis? There, evaluations that reveal areas for growth are connected to teacher-led professional development that targets that area, and teachers conduct action research as they implement the new strategies they have learned.

How about expanding Peer Assistance and Review, the program that offers coaching to teachers that are struggling, providing them with feedback and a chance to improve. In my work with PAR, in almost every case, the union and administration members on the PAR board were in complete agreement as to who should be given a negative report, and who should be retained. This process can work as part of a strong evaluation system.

Most of what passes for school reform, VAM included, starts from the premise that we must force people to be effective, and chase them down and expose them if they are not. I would start from the opposite assumption, that teachers want to be effective, and we need to structure our systems to support them in becoming more so.

And I would close by pointing out that while teachers are the largest variable within a school, the difference they make is dwarfed by out of school factors related to poverty. And as the poverty rate soars so that one in four of our children is living in poverty, and our economy crumbles, isn't it strange that the media and billionaire education reform hobbyists have decided that the future of our nation hangs on weeding out the bottom 5% of our teachers?

Many of these ideas are explored in greater depth in a report I helped create, "A Quality Teacher in Every Classroom, An Evaluation System that Works for California," available here.

What do you think? Can we improve teacher evaluation?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

First of all, yesterday I posted about the Education Nation Facebook page. After taking a public relations beating for blocking me and a number of other parents and teachers from the site, the administrator has now allowed us all to post, and the site is full of lively discussion. Very refreshing! It is a model for what the Education Nation programming could have been, had NBC actually had some guts.

Here is what NBC News President Steve Capus had to say yesterday at his press conference defending their Education Nation programming from criticism that it is one-sided and lacking in the participation of classroom teachers;

NBC News [personnel] are not the experts in this place. ...the role of a news organization is to put a spotlight on these issues/challenges, and on the people who are doing incredibly strong work to try to affect change. The news division's involvement begins and ends with that spotlight. We're not coming at this from a policy angle.

Truly flabbergasting. NBC News has no experts on education policy. According to the material on their Education Nation website, "Education is key to the success of our country..." Education is "one of the most pressing national issues of our time." Yet this multi-million dollar news organization has nobody on their staff they consider to be expert in this crucial field? If this issue is indeed key to our success, shouldn't they have some expertise - especially if they are going to sponsor a week of programming on the subject?

Secondly, what is the role of a news organization? I thought the role of a news organization was to investigate and uncover the truth, and share it with the public. In the case of an issue where there is a real controversy, such as education policy in America, a news organization ought to give a balanced presentation of the controversy, with competing perspectives represented by the most reputable and respected advocates available. In this case, NBC seems to be pleading ignorance to the fact that there is another point of view - which they have conveniently omitted. (See the analyses by teacherken here and here to understand exactly who is represented.)

Many of the people that will be featured on Education Nation are doing incredible work, and the unfortunate thing is that by failing to allow a true dialogue, NBC has cast a pall over the whole event, which does a disservice to the work we should all join in celebrating. The point is not to condemn the hard work that has been done, or even the perspectives that will emerge through this programming. The trouble is that an opportunity for genuine dialogue has been lost, and NBC has done us all a disservice in their approach to this.

I am not a working journalist, but if I were, here are some of the questions I would ask Mr. Capus to answer.

1. Why is your spotlight only shining on people representing one point of view in an arena where there are clearly divergent approaches? Does not a dialogue require more than one perspective from a controversy to be represented?

2. Major civil rights organizations recently released a statement formally criticizing Race to the Top and the extension of NCLB-type policies by the Department of Education. Is this perspective represented?

3. What does it mean to say "We are not coming at this from a policy angle"? How can we discuss the future of education in America without a robust discussion of education policy?

4. What was the role of the Department of Education in the process of organizing this event? What role did they play in the selection of speakers?

5. According to the calculations of Sabrina Stevens-Shupe, only 13% of the attendees (not even speakers) are practicing teachers. As Sabrina pointedly asks, "We're important enough to merit 100% of the accountability for students, but not important enough to merit more than 13% of the national conversation about education?"

I have not seen the full coverage of yesterday's press conference, so I do not know if any of these sorts of questions were asked. I imagine NBC is reading my blog this week. Mr. Capus, could you answer my questions please?

Update: Thirty-six hours have passed since I posted this. It is now the "featured blog post" on Teacher Magazine and has been read by more than 1,000 people. Still no reply from Mr. Capus or NBC News.

What do you think the role of a news organization should be? Should we be happy with the welcome teachers have received at Education Nation?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 2:25 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

NBC's Education Nation has been promoted with a great deal of fanfare, with the event promising to inspire a rich dialogue about one of the most important issues our nation faces. But my voice has been shut out from the project's Facebook site, with the moderators implying that I have made personal attacks. This is untrue, and the incident seems to fit into a bigger pattern.

Update: I have now been unblocked. I do not know if that is true for others who have had this problem. Several questions remain. Why were we blocked for several days in the first place? Why did it take going public in this manner to bring about a correction? And why do the panels and Summit continue to be almost entirely lacking the voices of anyone willing to step out of line with the Department of Education's agenda? For more, read on:

The mission statement for the project states:

Education Nation seeks to engage the public, through thoughtful dialogue, in pursuit of the shared goal of providing every American with an opportunity to pursue the best education in the world.

When I discovered the Education Nation Facebook page a few days ago, I went there, clicked "like," and posted a link to the Teachers' Letters to Obama Facebook group, inviting the people there to come visit us and discover the rich discussions we have been having regarding the future of education in our country. We have had teach-ins this summer with guests like Dr. Yong Zhao, former Nebraska Commissioner of Education Doug Christensen, Diane Ravitch and many more. Over the summer, we developed a set of seven principles to guide Congress in reauthorizing NCLB, and collected numerous letters from teachers and parents expressing our views. These letters are now available for download and distribution here.

The moderator at Education Nation thanked me for the link. But that post has now disappeared, and what is more, I seem to be blocked from posting on the site. This image shows how their page appears to me. Notice anything missing? Most Facebook pages we visit have a little white box under each post that says "write a comment." No such box for me when I visit the Education Nation page.

In response to a visitor who asked why I had been blocked, the moderator wrote:

Hey Connie, We had some issues with personal attacks a couple of days ago so we did have to moderate discussion. Also some users have flagged others. We are working it out. As you can see, your comments appear on this page. This is a place for conversation and appreciate your stopping by. Please help us keep it civil. For the record, I made no personal attacks.

This morning, the moderator re-posted the link to Teachers' Letters to Obama that had been removed, but I remain unable to post there. (update: as of 8:30 am Pacific time this morning, I am now able to post once again.)

Readers of this blog know that while I have strong opinions, I am able to express them in a civil fashion. I certainly posted nothing hostile on the Education Nation page. So why have I been blocked? Is it because they do not actually wish to enter into a genuine dialogue about education reform? And this post by Gary Stager indicates I am one of many who have been blocked.

Unfortunately this fits into a larger pattern. A leading parent activist, Rita Solnet, reached out to me this week to share her experience trying to offer some balance to NBC as they prepared for their programming. She writes:

Is it Education Nation? Or, is it Education Castration? Well, for me, it's Education Frustration.

In June, I learned of the plans for this televised spotlight on education while in D.C. I wrote to the NBC News President, Mr. Capus, suggesting he consider Dr. Diane Ravitch as a featured guest. I relayed a paragraph or two on her extensive background and impressive credentials along with a link to her website. Several weeks later, I received a call that Diane was invited to participate; however, she had a scheduling conflict prohibiting her from being in NYC on September 28th. After speaking with Diane and realizing she would be fairly close to Burbank, I suggested the Today Show arrange a satellite hookup to accommodate her real-time participation. Yippee, we thought, it's arranged. In fact, two panelists were to be connected via satellite from NBC's Burbank studio.

One week ago when the Ed Nation press release appeared, Diane Ravitch's name did not appear. Another series of calls were placed by me to Capital Entertainment Group, NBC Universal, and NBC's Today Show to investigate this omission and correct it, if possible. I believe I could have reached the Queen of England herself and enjoyed a productive conversation with the time it took me to crawl through the many layers of seemingly unempowered, misinformed, and indecisive "event coordinators." Thus begins my story--the story of "Education Frustration."

Education Nation coordinators working with the Dept of Ed have just redefined Webster's definition of 'participation. ' Their dictionary apparently defines it as "listening in."

Teachers are invited to "listen in" which is what any of us can do online at msnbc.com Sunday at noon.

'Weighing in' won't truly be an option, as the production assistant whispers into the phone. You see, the teachers pre-selected by the Dept. of Ed to participate in Rockefeller Center, have evidentally passed the pro-privatization, pro-Dept of Ed education reform test already. If you hear a rare voice of dissent, my guess is that the moderator or another pro-supersonic NCLB reforms plant in the audience, will respond with a robotic line out of the Dept of Ed playbook.

In keeping with their own theme of presenting a unilateral perspective, my view is that this could not be more orchestrated if they tried! The setting--the newly built technology-laden Learning Plaza venue--sure to evoke ooh's and aahs at Rockefeller Center and "can only hold so many people". Every panelist; every commercial aired; every emotionally charged clip from Waiting for Superman; every walk on heart wrenching story; even the John Legend fade out music is all deliberately chosen to portray one notion--support privatization of public schools, support all the Dept of Ed's education reforms! High stakes testing is the way to go. Merit pay, firing teachers, closing schools is the way to go. And, privatizing schools is our only logical path now. It is downright unpatriotic if you think any other way!

I wouldn't be surprised if they cue up subliminal messages throughout the broadcast, "We must have more charters!" This will be their mantra. You will hear it on Oprah, you will hear it, I suspect, on CBS, and you will hear it in grand fashion at this one sided NBC propaganda extravaganza unless by some miracle they come to their senses and air other perspectives.

Of more concern to me is that any voice of dissent, if allowed to be heard, will be depicted as "tied to the status quo," "unable to change," "caused by the unions," or, worse yet, will be dismissed stating that "only ineffective, incompetent, lazy teachers" will dislike these reforms.

I can hear it now, can you? "America, you must realize we have a glut of incompetent, lazy, and ineffective teachers." "Aha, only bad teachers disagree with our whizbang accountability, value added measurement plan."

The dire situation public education is in, of course, cannot be blamed on the ever changing NCLB reforms. This cannot be blamed on ratcheting up the stakes for standardized tests every year to where the scores now signify survival of the fittest. This cannot be blamed on the sensationalism of charter schools--even while that's been debunked statistically.

No, by God, the fault lies with this glut of lazy, incompetent teachers and their overly protective unions. Let's privatize everything, break up communities, fire teachers, close schools, hire young people and burn them out in 2 yrs, cherry pick the best students, and let the chips fall where they may in poverty stricken areas. That's how we handle things in corporate America. If its not profitable, cut it loose. Just ask Michelle Rhee who isn't done firing teachers.

Now Ed Nation has a credibility issue.

1) Pre-selected teachers passed pro-Dept of Ed approval. That word is out there and the robotic, repetitive posts underscore that.

2) Parental involvement has been blocked. They point to their inclusion of one panelist they selected. That's it folks! That's the extent of parental perspective included.

3) Panelists--well, take a look at Ken Bernstein's thorough article on that. Frankly, I don't think they could possibly find a panel that is more unbalanced if they tried!

4) They have a quota of teachers to fill. Their goal is to register at least 100K teachers, hopefully 300K teachers, before 9/26. Problem is: Teachers say the registration process makes them feel that the DOE is lining up the infidels. Some teachers feel like they are being used to be placed on display as "more whiny teachers." Other teachers are concerned that this quota is another bragging point for Secretary Duncan to claim that he "dialogued and listened to" 300K teachers! Some teachers are reluctantly signing up out of curiosity. Our facebook pages are lighting up 24/7 with how wrong this all feels to teachers and parents.

After many discussions, emails, and messages, I believe it is the Dept of Ed and those who bankrolled Waiting for Superman, ie., Walden Media, who are calling the shots and running Education Nation, not NBC.

Maybe in the next few days, NBC will have an awakening and take over the reigns of this one-sided propaganda extravaganza. Their credibility is at stake. I pray every night, that their attention is diverted away from scapegoating teachers and back onto improving the quality of education for our children. Not one of these paths the Dept of Ed is on will get us to where we need to be.

As my new friend Dr. Jesse Turner says, we need to shout it from the mountaintops!

There you have it, my one-sided perspective on the planning of this event!

UPDATE: As of this posting, Diane Ravitch filmed an interview with NBC which will be incorporated into their programming. Whether or not it is played in its entirety remains to be seen.

Rita Solnet is a parent activist from south Florida. She joined forces with other parents and teachers and regularly began posting on a Facebook page, "Testing is Not Teaching." The site grew to over 11K fans and spun off more sites focused on education reform. Rita is one of the founding charter members of Parents Across America.

What do you think? As I ask for about the hundredth time on this blog, what will it take for us to have our voices heard? Will you raise yours?

PS:PS: If you would like to stand up and be heard, Teachers Letters to Obama will be holding our own Teachers' Roundtable, "Stop Griping, Start Organizing," on Tuesday, Sep. 28. Panelists will include Jesse Turner, who has just completed his walk from Connecticut to Washington to protest federal education policies, NEA vice president Lily Eskelson, Chris Janotta, founder of Million Teacher March, education advocates Angela Engel and Dr. Anthony Dallman Jones, and parent activist Leonie Hamson, of Class Size Mattersand a founding member of Parents Across America. The online event will take place on Tuesday, Sep. 28, from 8:30 to 10:30 Eastern, and 5:30 to 7:30 pm Pacific Time. Register here.

image provided by Rita Solnet, used by permission.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

From Wikipedia:

Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position.

As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda, in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda. Propaganda can be used as a form of political warfare.

I have not seen "Waiting for Superman," but in the one hour infomercial offered by Oprah yesterday, I got a pretty good taste, and I think I may avoid the heartburn it is likely to cause. Oprah's guests were Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, and the movie's producer, Davis Guggenheim. Guggenheim described his motivation for making the film as being from the guilt he felt driving his children to their presumably elite private school, passing by neighborhood schools along the way. So he has made a film that characterizes all those schools as hopelessly broken, and offers charters as the main hope.

And why are these schools so hopeless? Because they have bad teachers that are impossible to fire, that's why. Michele Rhee describes teacher tenure as "a job for life." Oprah says "After two years you have a job for life and you can't be fired! Who does that?"

Davis Guggenheim, the movie's producer, intones "Everybody gets it. It's automatic. You show up for two years, you got tenure."

That is a flat-out lie. In my district, which is known for a strong union, teachers do not get tenure unless their principal wants them to. Many teachers are released at the end of their first or second year. Tenure is by no means automatic. And there are indeed ways to get rid of tenured teachers, who do not have "jobs for life," but rather have rights to due process. In fact, a few moments earlier, we were told "Michelle Rhee has fired a thousand teachers and principals," many of whom had tenure. We do need to improve our evaluation systems, and I have written some suggestions here. But this is a lie, and it should not have been presented without a challenge.

Oprah tries to reassure those of us who might be having a reaction to this.

Everybody knows I love good teachers, and there are so many thousands of you great ones in this country, so we're not talking about you, if you are a good teacher. Okay? So save your time gettin' upset. And what I know is that you who are the good and great teachers out there, you also want good and great teachers, because you really care about the kids.

Here is the problem, Oprah. We do not trust the ways that are being cooked up to sort the good teachers from the bad. Especially the methods that rely primarily on test scores, which is what Ms. Rhee relied on to make her determination. As Linda Darling Hammond pointed out this week,

Unfortunately, as useful as new value-added assessments are for large-scale research, studies repeatedly show that these measures are highly unstable for individual teachers. Among teachers who rank lowest in one year, fewer than a third remain at the bottom the next year, while just as many move to the top half.

It is not that we "good teachers" want to protect supposedly "bad teachers." It is that we fear a witchhunt based on test scores will have disastrous consequences for ourselves, our peers, and the students we care about.

How is it the most of the rich countries supposedly beating the pants off us academically also happen to have strong unions for teachers? And that the states within this country that perform worst are often those with the weakest unions? But according to Bill Gates, all we need to do to move to the head of the pack internationally is get rid of the bad teachers. Never mind the fact that we lead the developed world in the proportion of children in poverty, with more than 23% of our students below the poverty level.

Then we meet Emily. Emily was the face of the child who would have been on the low track if she had stayed in her neighborhood public school. But Emily managed to escape her fate by going to Summit Prep Charter School.

Oprah asks, "If you had gone to your neighborhood high school, what would have happened?" Emily replies,

"The thing is, I'm very smart and intellectual, but I don't test well. If I had gone to my neighborhood school I would have been put in the low classes with the teachers who, you know, they have their tenure, so they're protected, but they're not really excited to teach you. I'd be with the kids who wouldn't be willing to learn. I feel like being in that environment I'd be on the road to failure, and it breaks my heart, and I'd hate to have to go to a school where everyone else wouldn't learn."

Oprah: "You articulated that so well!"

Oh dear.

Yes, students are tracked. But Emily has escaped to a track that is simply at a different site, and left behind her peers who are apparently unwilling to learn, and her teachers who have lost the will to teach them.

Charter schools are currently educating 3% of the nation's students, and unfortunately, the results we have seen thus far do not indicate they are doing significantly better than regular public schools, at least according to the test scores. (see a fuller discussion of charters here.)

If our schools are going to be improved, it is going to be through the work of people willing to invest in them, even in the ones with children who seem less willing to learn. We need the sort of resources that go into the schools to which Mr. Guggenheim sends his children. We need better evaluation practices NOT based on test scores, because then students like Emily, who doesn't test well, will not find herself to be the reason her teacher did not get a satisfactory evaluation.

This is the face of propaganda. Artfully presented to tug at our heartstrings, to manipulate our sympathies for these poor children, and arouse our anger towards those bad teachers and their unions that prevent them from being held accountable.

Unfortunately there is every indication that NBC's Education Nation intends to serve us up a heaping plateful of similarly one-sided pro-charter, pro-testing, anti-union propaganda. (their Facebook page has now apparently blocked me from leaving comments there, by the way.) I hope teachers make their presence known and share our belief in our schools, in our students and in our peers. There is late word that they have now invited recent national Teacher of the Year Anthony Mullen, who has some experience speaking truth to power. It should be an interesting event.

Oprah promises to have real teachers on her show this Friday, September 24. Will she include the voices of the many of us who question the agenda set by Rhee and Gates?

What do you think? Is this propaganda? How can we get our perspectives heard?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 1:36 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I wrote a column a couple of days ago that suggested that Education Reform has jumped the shark. Parent activist Leonie Haimson challenged me, saying

...please don't buy into their description of themselves as the education "reformers." Call them the billionaire's boys club, the privateers, the hedge hogs, or the corporatists; because we, or at least I, believe strongly in a separate set of reforms that would be far more effective and would improve our public schools.

Richard Kahlenberg writes in a similar vein,

All sorts of people are interested in education reform - very few are content with the status quo. Yet in the press, only those who embrace a particular type of reform get the label. To be a "reformer" you have to embrace ideas that teachers and their unions don't like - ideas such as non-unionized charter schools and teacher pay based on test scores.

Consider, for example, a recent article in the New York Times depicting the battle in three New York state Senate primary races. On the one hand were hedge fund managers and supporters of non-unionized charter schools who were identified as favoring "education reform" on four occasions, "school reform" on another, and simply "reform" on yet another. Opponents of charter schools were never given that label, even though teacher unions and others who don't think the track record of charter schools is very good in fact favor lots of reforms - such as teacher peer review to weed out bad educators; rigorous national standards; expanded pre-K programs; reducing economic and racial isolation in schools, and on and on.

Haimson and Kahlenberg are absolutely right. We need to challenge the very terms by which we are defined - and defamed. Language is powerful. Let's start by reclaiming the term education reform for those who actually seek to improve the institution of democratic public education in our nation.

And while we are at it, let's agree to reject some other labels.

How about "failing school"? Why should any school be labeled a failure? As Sabrina Stevens-Shupe so eloquently described here, this label has a way of triggering a cascade of events in a way that makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Even "low-performing school" is a term that characterizes a complex place based on one set of dimensions - its test scores. Even struggling schools have dedicated staff and students that are doing their best, and may be performing quite well in other ways. All of that is hidden when we only speak of test scores.

And Monty Neill of FairTest suggests that Value Added be renamed "Valueless Addition," since the information it provides is rarely of real value. He also suggests that "pay for test scores" is a more accurate descriptor of most "merit pay" plans.

In our current education reform debate, teachers that are "ineffective" are those who raise test scores at too slow a rate. These morph into the "bad teachers." As the panel description on NBC's Education Nation web site says, "Good Apples: How do we keep good teachers, throw out bad ones, and put a new shine on the profession?"

When the quality of teaching is reduced to test scores, hugely important dimensions of teaching are completely ignored. When I became National Board certified, I submitted a portfolio that showed my students' work over time, videos of my students engaged in group discussions, and contained my own analysis of the strengths of my teaching, and areas I needed to work on improving. This included how students were conducting scientific inquiry, how they were debating ideas with one another, and how they were expressing their ideas in writing -- little of which would show up on a test. This is the kind of process we should have as the basis for teacher evaluation, not some hunt for bad apples based on test scores. And when the hunt for bad apples commences, teachers are likely to hide, rather than open themselves up to criticism, especially when it may be for factors beyond their direct control.

And how about our terms for students? I have heard teachers refer to students as my "below basics," my "far below basics," or even by the acronym, "fbb". And some students - those that are able to lift our API scores if they just improve a little bit, are called "strategics," because if WE are being strategic, we will make sure these kids get the most attention. We begin to define our students by the only dimension that counts, and use test language to describe them. Whatever other strengths and abilities they may have are masked by their test scores.

What do you think? Who has earned the title "education reformer"? Are there other terms we should reclaim or reject?

PS: If you ARE an education reformer, and would like to stand up and be heard, Teachers Letters to Obama will be holding our own Teachers' Roundtable, "Stop Griping, Start Organizing," on Tuesday, Sep. 28. Panelists will include Jesse Turner, who has just completed his walk from Connecticut to Washington to protest federal education policies, NEA vice president Lily Eskelson, Chris Janotta, founder of Million Teacher March, education advocate Angela Engel, and parent activist Leonie Hamson, of Class Size Mattersand a founding member of Parents Across America. The online event will take place on Tuesday, Sep. 28, from 8:30 to 10:30 Eastern, and 5:30 to 7:30 pm Pacific Time. Register here.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I wrote a few weeks ago that we had reached a tipping point. It is strange the way these things work. The education reformers have invested billions in numerous ventures that promote their vision. This next week, the release of Waiting for Superman, NBC's Education Nation specials and teacher townhall, and Michelle Rhee and Bill Gates on Oprah -- all will create a crescendo of voices, images and the master narrative that has been carefully developed over the past decade. Our schools are failing. The only way to save them is to expand charters, remove due process for teachers so they can be fired, and further raise the stakes on standardized test scores.

But ideologically driven projects like this have a way of over reaching, over-promising, and overestimating their strength. And the moment that they reach their apex is actually the moment they begin to collapse. Education reform has finally jumped the shark.

The signs of its imminent collapse are all around us.

They begin with the fundamental problem the education reform movement faces. We are more than ten years into a massive reform effort revolving around high stakes attached to standardized tests, and there is no significant growth in actual learning - even in terms of the test scores most valued by proponents. Charter schools likewise have shown themselves to be, on the whole, no better - and many times worse, than the public schools they are supposed to replace. Firing teachers is a poor strategy for turning around supposedly failing schools, as we are seeing at Fremont High in Los Angeles.

We are seeing an enormous propaganda effort to bolster the education reform agenda, but the public has been lost.

The public has turned against the project's central device. The latest Time Magazine poll on education was released with fanfare for showing public support of education reform. But as Mathew Di Carlo points out on Shanker Blog, the poll actually reveals something quite different:

The vast majority of Americans believe that test-based accountability has either not worked or has actually been harmful. Asked about the "increased focus on standardized testing and data in public schools over the past decade," 33 percent feels that it has "had little effect," while 36 percent believes it has "actually done more harm than good." So, almost 70 percent say the testing explosion has had a negative or negligible effect. Only 22 percent feel that it has "done more good than harm."

Although the education reform agenda is nearly always justified by its supposed concern for students in poverty, voters have begun to reject it at the ballot box. The recent election of Vincent Gray in Washington, DC, means that Michelle Rhee will soon be gone. Mike Klonsky writes,

The vote was as much a rejection of Michelle Rhee's top-down, divisive, anti-teacher school-reform as it was of Fenty himself. It came despite frantic, last-minute campaigning from none other than the Sec. of Ed. Arne Duncan who has spent an inordinate amount of time recently, visiting schools with Rhee and Fenty, handing out obviously politically-motivated awards and grants, looking for photo ops and badly overstating the results of the Rhee reforms.

New York also saw pro-charter candidates defeated, as reported here:

Tuesday's primary was a disaster for charter school proponents and their hedge fund backers. They funded three insurgent state Senate candidates, only to see them lose by huge margins to incumbents viewed as hostile to charter schools: Sen. Bill Perkins in Manhattan, Sen. Velmanette Montgomery in Brooklyn and Sen. Shirley Huntley in Queens.

NBC has been promoting Education Nation, and soon will air a series of programs heavily dominated by the familiar voices of "reform." It is sponsored by the Broad and Gates foundations, and a handful of other corporations. Poorly represented on the main stage, teachers are given a special event of our own, the Teacher Town Hall, which promises to bring together thousands of teachers from around the country. Any time you bring people together, the results are unpredictable. Every teacher who wishes to have a voice should register and attend, and everyone with an organization and further opportunities for teachers to stay involved and vocal should be there as well, so teachers understand we will need to get organized and hold our OWN town hall events if we really want results.

Lastly, the November mid-term elections are fast approaching. Democratic party turnout is likely to be lackluster, and a huge reason is the administration's insistence on following a failed model of reform for our schools.

If Democrats do as poorly as projections indicate, they will need to do some soul-searching about this issue. Teachers and parents pushing for a change in education policy cannot be easily dismissed as "the professional left." We are, potentially, some of the most powerful grassroots support a political party could have - but that support will be largely absent this fall. Professional Democrats will have to decide if they can afford to continue to do without that support in 2012.

Politicians are getting wise to this, and are starting to speak their minds. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley said this week,

You leave no child left behind. You race to the top. Next year, you race to the bottom. Next year, you race to the side. Everybody's racing to something," Daley said. "Why can't you send us money to build our schools. ... All the teachers know that these are just political slogans. We should end it.

But projects of this sort do not fully collapse until a viable alternative appears. That means the ball is in our court to develop our vision for how schools can be improved. Organizations such as Teachers Letters to Obama have been organizing teachers so that our voices are clear and present in this discussion. Over the summer, we developed a set of seven principles to guide Congress in reauthorizing NCLB, and collected numerous letters from teachers and parents expressing our views. These letters are now available for download and distribution here.

Teachers Letters to Obama will be holding our own Teachers' Roundtable, "Stop Griping, Start Organizing," on Tuesday, Sep. 28. Panelists will include Jesse Turner, who has just completed his walk from Connecticut to Washington to protest federal education policies, NEA vice president Lily Eskelson, Chris Janotta, founder of Million Teacher March, and parent activist Leonie Hamson, of Class Size Matters and a founding member of Parents Across America. The online event will take place on Tuesday, Sep. 28, from 8:30 to 10:30 Eastern, and 5:30 to 7:30 pm Pacific Time. Register here.

Update: Grassroots teachers and parents organized and fought hard to defeat Senate Bill 6 in Florida, designed to win Race to the Top dollars by tying teacher pay and evaluations to test scores. Governor Charlie Crist became their hero by vetoing the law. Now, Democratic candidate for governor Alex Sink has put forth an ad showing what happens when teachers make themselves a force to be reckoned with. Take a look. More evidence that the tide is turning:

What do you think? Has education reform jumped the shark?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In the Arctic tundra a creature called the lemming undergoes wild fluctuations of population. Every few years, these small rodents experience a population boom, followed by a crash. At the height of the boom, lemmings carry out their well-known behavior of following one another into the ocean to drown. Ecologists seeking to understand this looked at predator/prey cycles, weather, and nutrients. They were surprised to learn that the critical factor was the availability of calcium, which gets depleted as the population of lemmings expands - and calcium becomes concentrated in their bones. When calcium gets scarce, the plants have trouble growing, and the lemmings run out of food. When food becomes scarce, the lemmings set out in all directions, even across water. Although the vast majority will drown, some small number may succeed in colonizing remote locations that have not been overgrazed.

It matters a great deal what factors we consider when investigating an ecosystem, because how we understand what is happening could be greatly influenced by what we consider, and what we choose to exclude. We want to make the system as simple as possible so as to be able to understand the variables, but we must consider all the relationships that might matter, because until we investigate, we cannot be sure which will be most important.

With our schools, we have identified a problem. Students are not performing at the levels we desire, and too many are dropping out. There is a problem with the way we are looking at this ecosystem, however. In the materials publicizing the latest education reform propaganda vehicle, Waiting for Superman, it is clear that, according to the "experts" in this film, poverty should not matter, family background, violent neighborhoods, all of this is of minimal importance compared to the all-important teacher.

There are lots of reasons why it would be convenient for this to be so. If all that matters is the effectiveness of our teachers, we can improve our schools significantly by getting rid of poor teachers and making those that remain even more effective. We can incentivize higher test scores and get teachers to prioritize instruction that will drive them upwards.

But there is a problem with this. It defines the ecosystem in such a way that the only relationship that matters is the one between the teacher and student. But there are many other factors that influence student performance. What if the scientists studying the lemmings decided that the only thing that mattered was the relationship between lemmings and their main predator, the arctic fox? It would be convenient. And in fact it looks as if the numbers of foxes rises as the number of lemmings rises, so this could be a viable theory. But this would miss the actual relationship that turned out to be the crucial one.

In the case of our schools, similar to the Arctic circle, there is a nutrient cycle that is driving student performance. There are clear and consistent scientific data that indicates that poverty is the critical factor affecting student performance.

As Stephen Krashen pointed out in this space a few months ago,

American students from well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore all or nearly all other countries on international tests. Only our children in high poverty schools score below the international average. The US has the second highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (22.4%, compared to Sweden's 2.6%) which of course pulls down our overall average. The success of American children who are not in poverty shows that our educational system has been successful; the problem is poverty.

This is more pertinent than ever, as we see the number of children living in poverty steadily climbing, at the same time attacks on teachers as the source of the problems in schools reach a fever pitch.

This does not mean we should ignore teacher effectiveness. We should pursue policies, such as improved evaluation practices and time for collaboration, that help make teachers more so. It is clear that a great teacher can make a big difference, and we need to do everything we can to create the conditions to support and spread excellence. However, we must look at our schools as ecosystems, look carefully at all relationships in this system, and be skeptical about those who offer simplistic models that exclude critical factors from consideration.

What do you think? Are teachers the key variable affecting student performance? Or does this miss other, more important factors?

Image used under Creative Commons license, by kgleditsch.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A report from the National Staff Development Council and the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education has just been published that reports that while the number of teachers who participated in professional development has risen to 88%, the percentage of teachers engaged in "cooperative effort" declined from 34% in the year 2000 to just 16% in 2008.

The report also indicates some serious weaknesses in the strength of the professional development that teachers are engaged in. From the report:

...there was a decrease in the intensity of professional development in other areas, including uses of computers for instruction, reading instruction, and student discipline/classroom management. In these areas, there was a dramatic shift away from professional development of a modest duration (i.e., 9 to 16 hours to professional development) toward shorter workshops of 8 hours or shorter in length.

In a review of nine research studies, Yoon and colleagues (2007) found that professional development that includes a substantial number of contact hours (ranging from 30 to 100 hours in total and averaging 49 hours) spread out over 6 to 12 months showed a positive and significant effect on student achievement gains. Meanwhile, professional development that offered 5 to 14 hours of contact had no statistically significant effect on student achievement. This suggests that the participation of our nation's teachers in professional development in most areas is likely to have little impact on the quality of their instructional practice and on student achievement.

So while there is a great deal of rhetoric and chest thumping about how important teacher quality is, the activities that are so important to improving that quality have been diminished.

When I began teaching in 1987, I was very lucky to land at an Oakland middle school with an active culture of collaboration. Our faculty was involved in a multi-year inter-disciplinary collaborative effort called the Mid-City Writing Project. Every month we gathered to hear from teachers of various subjects on how they were getting students to develop their and express their understanding through writing. I came to understand that although I was teaching science, I was also a teacher of reading, writing and even art. But even more important than the techniques I learned was the chance I had to collaborate with and learn from my fellow teachers.

Our students benefit a great deal when we collaborate. First of all, the sharing of knowledge that can occur is tremendous. Our colleagues at a school have a history with the community and the parents of our students. When we collaborate that awareness becomes shared knowledge, which informs the way we operate as a staff. We can set common expectations across the school, and figure out ways to effectively communicate them to our students and their parents. Our colleagues often have pedagogical and content expertise that is invaluable as well. The chance to share and reflect on our student work can also yield great results.

As teachers we can initiate this sort of collaboration informally, but it is much more likely to take hold when time is set aside for this purpose.

What has been your experience with professional development? Do you have time to collaborate with other teachers?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Sabrina Stevens Shupe was among the panelists at this week's Teachers' Letters to Obama Roundtable focused on "turnaround schools." She shared a very clear analysis of what is happening to these schools, and the way it impacts students and teachers. I asked her to share it with us. Here is her guest post.

Before I started working in low-performing schools, I shared the fairly common perception that the problems these schools had were largely the fault of their staff members. "Sure, it must be difficult to work in that kind of environment," I reasoned, "which is probably why they have such trouble retaining quality professionals." Once I decided to become a teacher and work in those schools, however, I was shocked by what I experienced. Though I considered myself well prepared to teach--I had a stellar education, prior experience as a non-classroom teacher in the same kinds of communities, and student-teaching experience in some top-notch private schools--I was completely unprepared for the other realities of working there.

I simply couldn't believe some of the problems our school had. Fundamentally, these weren't staffing issues, but issues that resulted from putting staff members in a certain kind of situation. After leaving the school, I still suspected that what we'd experienced there might be some kind of freak anomaly. It was just too bizarre. But once I started listening to teachers in similar situations around the country, I realized that what happened there wasn't that uncommon. The stories I hear from teachers in schools that are either under consideration for a turnaround, or that have already experienced one kind (transformation) and are under consideration for more intervention, share six common elements.

1. A perception of failure, and labeling.
When a school has low-test scores or fails to make AYP (adequate yearly progress) for too many years in a row, they receive a label like "needs improvement," "persistently failing," or "failing." Once labeled, they are treated as though the label reflects a fundamental truth about the school. As many of us know, there are a lot of reasons why students may have poor test scores, and many of them have nothing to do with their teachers or schools. But the label is powerful, and it can trigger unwelcome interventions.

2. Taking academic shortcuts.
True transformation in a school takes years of hard work, realigning resources, and support from the surrounding community. But when schools are pressured to make changes immediately, and without additional support, there is a powerful temptation to cut corners. Gimmicks like pre-packaged and/or scripted curricula, as well as more testing and test-preparation, are some of the ways schools attempt to look like they're making big changes in order to escape sanctions.

Likewise, targeting certain students who are on the cusp of moving into the next proficiency level has more of a "payoff" for schools looking to increase their test scores. Perversely, the testing culture encourages teachers to ignore their neediest students, because they are so low that the amount they're likely to grow won't help them to qualify as proficient. The same goes for targeting certain parts of the curriculum that are more frequently tested. Teachers are encouraged to be strategic about how they deal with those students and those parts of the curriculum, instead of trying to address each student and the whole curriculum.

3. An increasingly burdensome workload.
The paradox of the gimmicks and shortcuts is that it actually makes more work for staff members. Teachers and administrators end up spending more time on forms and reporting student data to their superiors, which either adds to their workload or supplants part of it, depending on how much energy and "free" time the individual has. Teachers also have to spend time and energy readjusting the curriculum to fit whatever time is left after testing is over, remediating for students who struggle to keep up with the quicker pace, and addressing behavior problems that arise when students are bored and frustrated.

4. A toxic work environment
Chronic stress can bring out the worst in people. Staff members may start turning on each other, blaming different people or groups for the school's situation instead of cooperating with each other and looking for workable solutions. Some people may also start doing dishonest things, like changing grades or test scores. They rationalize their attempts to game the system by telling themselves that they're doing what they have to do to protect students from harmful interventions, or to keep their staff members' jobs, or to keep the school open.

Meanwhile, all that stress takes a toll on people's health. I've seen and talked to many teachers who have struggled with things like getting sick more often, being diagnosed with stress-related illnesses like IBS, abusing alcohol, having dangerously high blood pressure, and so on. The kids suffer along with the adults as their distracted teachers become less effective, and when they see that staff members are unhappy (or directly bear the brunt of adults' frustration).

5. Harassment and retaliation
Most people in the situation will see how dysfunctional and counterproductive it is, but it will be difficult to challenge what's going on. When only a few people go out on a limb, they may face consequences for doing so. Harassment and retaliation are startlingly common in schools. Teachers who don't go along with the new regime might experience everything from losing certain materials or privileges, to losing their jobs entirely. When other teachers witness those consequences, they learn to keep quiet. But feeling powerless is demoralizing, and it makes teachers even less effective.

6. Failure
Those shortcuts, plus all of the distractions that limit teachers' and schools' ability to focus on the core mission of educating students, actually create more failure. Students may move on to the next grade level with serious gaps in their understanding, because they weren't given a fair chance to learn everything they needed to know. That will make things even harder for these students and their future teachers, who will have to work ever harder to catch up.

This doesn't have to happen. The federal government currently requires "failing" schools to choose from among four rigid choices in order to make change. But they could just as easily offer more flexibility, so that local actors can craft sustainable solutions tailored to the specific problems their schools have. Some schools may require more teacher release time, so teachers can plan lessons or interventions together, or receive more professional development. Others may benefit from updated facilities, or more supplementary staff to handle students' psychological or health concerns. Some schools (or districts) may require more oversight to ensure that they're meeting students' needs in an equitable way, and are holding themselves to the highest professional standards.

And most schools could benefit from more reasonable expectations of what they can and can't control, and more realistic timelines for creating meaningful change. After all, effectively preparing students for a rapidly changing world is tough, important work. We owe it to our students, and ourselves, to create conditions that give us the best chance for success.

Note: This blog carried a proposed alternative to current policies several weeks ago, offered by Congresswoman Judy Chu.

What do you think about the pattern described here? Does this reflect your experience? Are there better ways to help struggling schools?

Images provided by Sabrina Stevens Shupe, used with permission.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Our educational system is waltzing with a crowd of reformers who have the hubris to think they know a cure to every ill - and the cure always has something to do with test scores. The latest fix focuses on teacher quality, and proposes to improve evaluation by "unleashing the power of data," as Secretary Duncan put it. But a new report was released last week that suggests this data may be unreliable for the jobs it is being asked to do.

Some of the nation's leading education researchers, including Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, Eva Baker and Richard Rothstein, co-authored this report, entitled "Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers," and available for download here.

Here are some of the issues the authors highlight:

There are many factors other than teachers that have a significant effect on student outcomes. These include:

• Other teachers the student has had

• School attendance

• Learning at home and in the community

• Family support

• Mobility

• The effect of peers

• Summer learning loss - especially profound among low-income students

All of this means that when value added methods are applied to teachers of low-income and English-learning students, the teachers have a harder time achieving the expected growth.

Going beyond the limitations of the data, the authors raise concerns about the effect of focusing teacher evaluations on test scores. They write:

Research shows that an excessive focus on basic math and reading scores can lead to narrowing and over-simplifying the curriculum to only the subjects and formats that are tested, reducing the attention to science, history, the arts, civics, and foreign language, as well as to writing, research, and more complex problem-solving tasks.

They also point out that this trend will discourage teachers from choosing to work in schools with the neediest students. Here in Oakland we already see evidence of this, as turnover rates are the highest in the lowest-performing schools. Systems that reward teachers for their individual growth also can discourage collaboration by creating a competitive environment within the school.

When we think about the whole thrust of this effort, it is aimed at creating "accountability" for teachers. We can agree that we ought to be accountable for the quality of our work, but we must build that accountability on a solid foundation of shared values. If I were to evaluate a restaurant merely on the popularity of food it sold, Dunkin Donuts might emerge as the greatest in the land! Every serious consideration of this issue must return to this point.

Many of the values we actually seek to elevate in our schools - honesty, creativity, initiative, the ability to apply knowledge in solving problems - these things are not measured well by the tests we are using. We need systems of evaluation that are capable of encompassing the quality of teaching relative to these dimensions.

This week we heard that even in China, where the educational system has prized rote learning for millennia, Premier Wen Jiabao gave a lengthy speech calling for change. He said:

Students don't only need knowledge; they have to learn how to act, to use their brains. As Einstein said, imagination is more powerful that knowledge.

We must encourage students to think independently, freely express themselves, get them to believe in themselves, protect and stimulate their imagination and creativity.

If it is good enough for a billion Chinese people, it ought to be good for us.

Update: For a chuckle -- and a very serious point -- take a look at School Finance 101's post on the value-added issue. The author riffs on a satirical "news" clip from The Onion, which observes that students who do not care, tend not to score so well. And perhaps these students are not randomly distributed! Doh!

What do you think? Should we "unleash the power of data" for the purpose of evaluating teachers? Or should we keep data on a short leash?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend