October 2010 Archives

A twenty-year old document provides the teaching profession with something it needs these days more than ever - firm ground upon which to stand as professionals. Teachers were drawn to our work to help our students, and we have the capacity to be strong advocates for them. Perhaps because of this, we are facing unprecedented challenges to our status as professionals. The well-established fact that we are important to the success of our schools has been transformed into a terrible indictment - since we are so important, we must be responsible for all the system's shortcomings. And since we have not managed by ourselves to eliminate age-old gaps in achievement, and send all our students to college, we must have our output measured as if we are on an assembly line, and our instruction scripted and structured according to supposedly proven curricula.

Sometimes this criticism reduces us to a posture where we simply are defending ourselves. And we lose sight of the fact that we are indeed here for the children. If our classrooms are to be places that nurture them, our schools must nurture and support us as teachers. If our children are to find their voices and their futures in our classrooms, we must also have our voices heard in our schools and beyond. If we want our students to be nimble thinkers capable of tackling the immense problems they will face, we must create classrooms where such thinking is in use by everyone, most of all their teachers.

We must reclaim what it means to be a teacher.

Twenty years ago, education scholar Ken Goodman wrote a Declaration of Professional Conscience for teachers. It is worth revisiting today.

Dr. Goodman wrote:

A Declaration of Professional Conscience for Teachers

There is a time in the historic development of every human institution when it reaches a critical crossroad. Institutions, like people, cannot stand still; they must always change but the changes aren't always for the better. Human institutions are composed of people. Sometimes the people within the institutions feel powerless to influence the directions of institutional change. They feel they are swept along by a force beyond anyone. Yet people within institutions can determine the directions of change if they examine their convictions and take a principled stand.

That's what the founders of American democracy understood when they began the Declaration of Independence with "When, in the course of human events,..."

Education in the United States is at such a crossroad. At the same time that schools have rededicated themselves to equal educational opportunity for all, laws and policies are being imposed on schools that limit the ability of diligent teachers to use their professional judgment to further the personal development and welfare of their students.

There are strong pressures today to dehumanize, to depersonalize, to industrialize our schools. In the name of cost effectiveness, of efficiency, of system, of accountability, of minimal competency, of a return to the basics, schools are being turned into sterile, hostile institutions at war with the young people they are intended to serve.

As teachers we hereby declare ourselves to be in opposition to the industrialization of our schools. We pledge ourselves to become advocates on behalf of our students. We make the following declaration of professional conscience:

We will make the welfare of our students our most basic criterion for professional judgment. We have no greater accountability than that we owe our pupils. We will work with parents and policymakers to formulate programs that are in the best interests of our pupils. We will work with the kids to personalize these programs. We will respect all learners. We will cherish their strengths, accept and strive to understand their language and culture, seek to further their personal values, tastes, and objectives. We will oppose methods, materials, and policies that have the intent or effect of rejecting the personal and social characteristics of our students. We will, in all matters, and in all interactions, deal with our pupils fairly, consistently, honestly, and compassionately.

We will do all we can to make school a warm, friendly, supportive place in which all pupils are welcome. Our classrooms will be theirs. We will provide guidance and leadership to support our students in the development of problem-solving, decision-making, and self-discipline. We will help them build a sense of respect and support for each other. We will help them appreciate and respect those who differ from them in culture, language, race, color, heritage, religion, sex, weight, height, physical strength or attractiveness, intelligence, interests, values, personal goals, or any other characteristics.

We will not use corporal punishment on pupils of any age for any offense. We believe violence begets violence. We will not use marks or schoolwork as punishment. We will seek causes for problems and work with pupils to eliminate the causes of antisocial behavior rather than simply control the symptoms.

Neither will we use tangible, extrinsic rewards such as candy, prizes, money, tokens, or special privileges as a means of controlling behavior. We regard all institutionalized forms of behavior modification as immoral and unethical. We will work with pupils, building on intrinsic motivation in all areas of curriculum and development.

We will accept the responsibility of evaluating our pupils' growth. We will make no long- or short-range decisions that affect the future education of our pupils on the basis of a single examination no matter what the legal status of the examination. We will evaluate through ongoing monitoring of our pupils during our interactions with them. We will strive to know each pupil personally, using all available professional tools to increase our understanding of each and every one.

We are teachers. We are not actors following scripts. We are not technicians servicing an educational machine. We are not delivery systems. We are not police officers, babysitters, petty despots, card punchers, paper shufflers, book monitors. We are not replaceable by machines.

We are professionals. We have prepared ourselves for teaching by building knowledge of human development, human learning, pedagogy, curriculum, language, and cognition. We know the history of education. We know the competing philosophies of education. We have carefully built personal philosophies that provide us with criteria for making teaching decisions in the best interests of our pupils. We have a broad liberal education and an in-depth knowledge of the content areas in which we teach.

We will use our knowledge base to support our students in their own quest for knowledge. The real curriculum is what happens to each learner. We, as teachers, are the curriculum planners and facilitators. We will not yield that professional responsibility to the publishers of texts or management systems. We will select and use the best educational resources we can find, but we will not permit ourselves or our pupils to be controlled by them.

We will continually update our knowledge of education, of our fields of instruction, of the real world, because of our professional dedication to use all means to improve our effectiveness as teachers. We expect school authorities to support us in our professionalism and self-improvement. And we will oppose all policies that restrict our professional authority to use new knowledge or new pedagogical practices on behalf of our students.

We believe that schools can well serve pupils, parents, and communities if the teachers in them function as responsible, dedicated, and compassionate professionals.

To that purpose we make this declaration of professional conscience.

This statement is available as a downloadable document here. I share it with the author's permission.

What do you think? Is Dr. Goodman's Declaration of Professional Conscience useful for educators? Is there anything you would add?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Today I share an exchange between a Seattle, Washington, parent and her son's teachers, regarding his education. Sahila Changebringer writes:

Thursday 21 October, 2010... I wrote and sent this to my child's teacher, other staff, the principal and the co-chairs of the parent body at my son's school - Room 9 Community (public) School, in Shoreline, Washington...

Hi there Ms. A (and your fellow teachers)...

This is a bit meandering because its hard to tie it up in one or two short paragraphs... I apologise for the length and its convolutedness...

Ms. A - I wanted to thank you for the very informative time we spent at parent-teacher conference last week. I value your insight and feedback about how Connor is doing academically and socially. I also value your enthusiasm in your work and your obvious dedication towards and love for the children at Room Nine.

There are a couple of things that came up in that conversation that troubled and continue to trouble me, though.

I don't know if you are aware how active I am as an advocate working AGAINST the current wave of education 'reform' sweeping this country. I have been involved for the past 2.5 years, first within the Seattle Public School District and now more nationally, with other parent, teacher and community groups. I know a great deal about what's going on and the issues behind the agenda, as well as the research that disproves much of the agenda's justifications for this push.

Specifically, I (with thousands of other people around the country) am working against the implementation of more standardised (high stakes) testing, tying teachers' performance evaluations and pay to those test results, dissolving the concept of 'tenure', union busting, and allowing alternate routes to certification, such as Teach for America recruits.

How does this relate to Connor and Room Nine?

On this year's school contract form, I specifically asked that Connor not take part in any standardised tests. As a parent, my legal right to withdraw him from that testing supercedes the District's attempt to make standardised testing mandatory.

I take this stand for many reasons - all of which I am happy to discuss in person. One of the main issues for me is that education/learning is not about test-taking.

Another reason is that many of the tests on the market do not give teachers any data that is useful to differentiate their instruction, and two recent reports have specifically refuted that Value Added Measures (testing) is an accurate reflection of a teacher's effectiveness in class, with error rates as high as 25-35%. I have these references and am happy to provide them.

The more personal reasons I have for taking this position are these:

I think Connor is a bright, sensitive, curious child, eager to learn. His kindergarten year at AS#1 was a year of emergent learning through play, with very little formal structure or instruction.

Then, coming to Room 9 for grade one last year, he had a difficult adjustment to make. He complained often that he had to sit too long, that there was no 'fun' happening and he was afraid to commit what he knew to paper.

He was judged to be "at risk" on the DIBELS ... I thought this was a ridiculous position/label to put on a six year child, not valid given my own philosophy on learning through experience and not valid given the form of his kindergarten year. I did my best not to buy into the 'hysteria' of that label.

Connor began to read independently two weeks before school finished for the summer (we were offered summer camp but I turned that offer down)...

Over the summer he began to devour books and now he's reading (with comprehension) at the 4th-5th grade level, though his standardised test results do not show this...

Each child has his/her own rhythm... at some point you have to take your hands off the wheel and let them grow at their own pace - and that pace has nothing to do with "norms" or grade level expectations or standardised tests...

So, under the tenets of the current education 'reform' agenda, do I credit his teacher (Ms. M) with his progress or not - seeing he made all those strides over the summer on his own? Or should Ms. M be penalised because it took Connor until two weeks before the end of school to begin to read and theoretically he had failed to make adequate progress during the year?

Yes, I credit Ms. M for creating the environment where he could absorb all her effort and care and internalise the strategies she was imparting to her class, and carry it inside until it was ready to be processed and utilised...

And no, she ought not to be penalised because a child takes however long he/she takes to reach a developmental and educational milestone.

The point of all this is that we are operating in a nonsensical paradigm. Connor is 'performing' only 'averagely' on the computerised standardised tests, but he's reading 2-3 grade levels above expectations for his age, on the individualised tests he does one on one with you, Ms. A.

What factors explain this discrepancy, and which results should I believe? And should I (or the District) hold you, Ms. A, responsible for Connor's results on an unreliable standardised test?

We are always late for school, and we often miss part of math - surely then, some of the responsibility for Connor's 'performance' should lie with me? (And no, that is unlikely to change for a number of reasons:
▪ Connor still has a sleep deficit to make up, I don't believe children sleep because they are lazy - they sleep because they are tired, and I won't wake him to satisfy some factory-model time schedule...
▪ I am living in difficult circumstances and I am doing the best I can with what I've got...
▪ We are living to our own 'rhythm' and some things take precedence in our lives. Education is a synthesis of what happens in and out of the classroom and Connor is learning important lessons in other arenas, so I make a daily judgment call as to what is the first order of the day - sometimes getting to school by 9.10am does not make it to the top of the list or priorities. I do not say this with disrespect - I am concentrating on living life in a particular manner and there is sometimes a clash between my principles and the currently accepted/imposed 'norms').

I know you are an excellent teacher Ms. A, and I trust you with my child's learning process. I want you to use all your skill, your years of experience and your dramatic and artistic talent to make learning a wonderful adventure, not a boring chore, for Connor and his peers. And I expect the character of Room Nine as an alternative school to give you the scope to do that.

But last week, you talked at length about the District looking at the standardised test scores, and holding you accountable for them and judging your effectiveness as a teacher only on the basis of those results.

And you were pushing me to give Connor homework time (which I don't/won't do), so his "scores" don't fall further.

And I have seen for myself that the math work the children are doing in class now comprises more and more worksheets instead of hands-on activities. And guess what? The work sheets have multiple choice answers on them, with BUBBLES/CIRCLES to fill in...

And one (misguided) parent helper spent the time I was there a couple of weeks ago, admonishing children to make sure they coloured the bubbles within the lines.

This is not education, and it certainly is not "alternative" education....

This is teaching to the test, both in content and form...

This is holding children hostage - making them responsible/laying the burden on their shoulders for adult 'success'...

I do not want Connor participating in this fiasco...I will not enable it to go forward...

So, I hereby formally state that I withdraw my son - Connor T. Changebringer-McCoy - from any standardized testing held within the school and I ask that when he would be scheduled to take part in testing, he be given the work/activities he and his classmates would normally have been doing in that time.

And I hereby release Ms. A, the principal, the staff and Room Nine Community School from any liability/responsibility for my son's academic progress.

Please ensure that a copy of this communication is printed off and placed in Connor's file.

I am happy to talk with you in person about this issue.

Sincerely

Sahila ChangeBringer

and here is a reply I received from one of the teachers at the school...

Sahila,

I have great respect for your position. As the last of the "old guard" from the formerly alternative Room Nine I read your remarks with a bit of sadness. The type of learning environments you are describing have virtually disappeared from the public educational landscape. Some of this was our own fault--too many kids graduating from alternative schools who could not do math or write an essay. But they often had plenty of other valuable skills.

Personally I drank the John Dewey constructivist and Vigotsky developmental "cool aid", but there is not much room for these approaches anymore. They are difficult to implement and not scalable. I was attracted to the small schools movement because of this belief.

Educational policy is cyclical and perhaps our grandchildren will think all this emphasis on measurement and management was ill-conceived. We are certainly back to the old factory mentality in my humble opinion. Way too much of this is driven by politics obviously.

I believe that if you wanted to really make a difference in children's education you would put two teachers in every challenging classroom in America. Forget about all the rest of the window dressing---bloated professional development, wasted technology investments, misguided building upgrades, policy wonks, state bureaucracies, multi-million dollar testing program, etc. But the educational corporate interests and entrenched special interests do not have any motivation to revamp the system around student-teacher ratios. In Washington State the voters passed an initiative to bring these ratios down (and hire more teachers)..well the legislature ignored this and in fact has now increased class sizes and effectively frozen teacher hiring (or lay offs)

Yes. Teachers will fall into line with the reforms. Most teachers are "wired" to want to get "A's". Many also do not have much real world experience outside of the classroom. We will teach to the tests and scores will go up. Will children be better educated for the changing world? Hmm. I think some disadvantage children, who were previously written off by our culture, might get a chance that they would not have had without reform. So we will skim off more of the best and brightest out of the unwashed masses.

On the subject of reading: you and I are old enough to remember when the idea that kindergarten children needed to learn how to read and write would have been laughable. Some of us in kindergarten knew how to read but only because we wanted to and kept pestering our parents to read to us. Nobody in school expected any sort of reading proficiency in kindergarten. We played a lot and that was OK.

So it goes.

Sahila Changebringer works with other Seattle parents, including the editors of SeattleEd 2010 and members of the Seattle Shadow School Board to advocate for children Her blog is Bringing Change, Sahila-Style.

What do you think? Is this parent wise to shield her son from the tests? What would happen if more parents took this stand?

Image used by permission of author.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I am in my 24th year working in a medium-sized urban school district, and I have experienced school reform first-hand. Most often it takes the form of top-down programs that attempt to involve everyone in the District in a process that the superintendent (or state-appointed administrator) has decided will transform us from chronically under-performing to excellent in the coming year. Sadly, sweeping programs like these rarely make much difference, and leave teachers feeling as if they are not respected as professionals. This is not to say District level efforts are always worthless -- many of our elementary schools have greatly improved as a result of creative and intensive work by dedicated staff.

If systemic change is going to come, it must come from within. It must draw on the capacity of our own teachers to grapple with the challenges they face.

We hear a lot about "bad teachers" and "good teachers," but much less about the processes and practices that help teachers become better. The single greatest thing we could do to improve schools, without huge expense, would be to support processes that engage teachers in working together to examine their practice and their students' work, to reflect on what is working, and inquire into ways to improve.

What does this look like? Here are some examples of practices that work well.

National Board Take One!:
The National Board certification process has been shown to improve student learning by helping teachers reflect on what really matters in their practice. Take One! is a process that allows teachers to submit a single video portfolio entry for scoring. This entry can be used if the teacher decides to continue and complete the remaining portfolio entries for full National Board certification. Some schools or departments within schools have taken on Take One! as a collaborative professional growth experience, working together to improve their practice. Take One! costs just $395 for each participating teacher.

Collaborative Teacher Research:
Teachers work together to develop questions about their teaching practice which can be probed through a research process. Often teachers implement an innovative practice, and then reflect on how student learning changes as a result. When these lessons are shared at a school site, effective practices can be spread and move the entire community move forward. In Minneapolis, union leaders worked with the District to create an innovative pay structure that rewards teachers for engaging in this process, in a way that connects professional growth to the evaluation process.

Critical Friends Group:
The Critical Friends Group is described by the National School Reform Faculty as "a professional learning community consisting of approximately 8-12 educators who come together voluntarily at least once a month for about two hours. Group members are committed to improving their practice through collaborative learning." The NSRF web site offers an extensive bank of resources, including discussion protocols for looking at student work and exploring equity issues.

Lesson Study:
Originally developed in Japan, Lesson Study is now being practiced at many schools across the US. I have done some work with Dr. Catherine Lewis, a proponent of this method, whose web site describes the process thusly:
In Lesson Study teachers:

• Think about the long-term goals of education - such as love of learning and respect for others;


• Carefully consider the goals of a particular subject area, unit or lesson (for example, why science is taught, what is important about levers, how to introduce levers);


• Plan classroom "research lessons" that bring to life both specific subject matter goals and long term goals for students; and


• Carefully study how students respond to these lessons - including their learning, engagement, and treatment of each other.

In my experience, Lesson Study offers teachers a valuable structure for delving into how our teaching intersects with student thinking and learning. Schools need to be prepared, however, to make a sustained commitment of time to the process, because the value comes from the careful planning of the lesson, and the rich discussions that follow.

All of these process share a common set of essential elements:

• They build community and collegiality among participants.


• They make our teaching practices public, in that we are sharing what is actually happening, good and bad, in our classrooms.


• They are focused on evidence of student learning.


• They are active inquiries into our teaching and how it can be improved.

To this list I would add another, equally important element. Teachers must be allowed to choose the model of professional development they will pursue. I believe the four models I shared are all excellent and have the potential to yield good results, but if one imposes any of these models on a school, without actively involving teachers in the decision, the results will be disappointing. I think teachers should be empowered to choose from any model that combines the essential elements above, or even invent their own model for collective reflection and improvement.

Each of these processes works when it creates a sense of agency among the participants. Teachers conducting action research must select their question and design their own investigation. Lesson Study requires that teachers discuss what is important for the students to learn, and choose critical concepts as the focus of their investigation into learning. Critical Friends guide their groups to productive conversations focused on real issues members face. Those doing Take One! must create their own portfolio entries. This agency is critical to the enthusiasm and engagement teachers will feel, and this is the true root of accountability, which depends on our ownership of the work. If leaders adopt a top-down approach by mandating a particular model, or micromanaging the processes, by directing teachers to focus on particular research questions or follow particular protocols, teachers are likely to disengage, and actually feel LESS accountable for the processes, since they do not own them.

We all share a sense of urgency about improving our schools, so our students are better able to succeed, and fewer of them drop out. We must hurry deliberately, however, and not rush past the critical steps that engage and activate teachers in doing the hard, and ultimately very personal work of reflecting on and improving our teaching.

What do you think? Does the urgency of our situation demand that we mandate effective practices across the board? Or does true change require us to turn over some of the power to teachers to direct their growth?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Retired professor Stephen Krashen has become one of the nation's most prolific writer of letters devoted to pointing out clear truths about education in the United States. He often sees what many would-be reformers overlook. Today I am sharing two cogent comments he has offered recently.

Easy Money for California Schools, No Strings Attached
Sent to the Long Beach Star Telegram, October 11, 2010
I wonder if the new coalition to win Race to the Top funding knows what will happen if they succeed ("LBUSD joins other districts on education reform," Oct. 11). Acceptance of the money gives the federal government a huge say in how schools are run. This will include a tremendous amount of unnecessary and unjustified testing, far more than we had with No Child Left Behind, at a time when children are already over-tested. It will also cost billions, at a time when schools are facing severe budget cuts. There is no scientific evidence showing that increasing testing increases student learning.

If California is interested in the $700 million Race to the Top money there is an easier way. Also, instead of a single payment, California would save $600 million dollars every year forever, a move that by itself would take care of about 5% of the total budget shortfall. All we have to do is drop the high school exit exam: According to analyst Jo Ann Behm, the exit exam costs the state about $600 million per year. Studies of high school exit exams show that they are useless: They do not lead to higher employment, higher earnings, or improved academic achievement. In fact, researchers have yet to discover any benefits of having a high school exit exam.

The problem is poverty: Evidence from Gerald Bracey

The entire basis for the national standards/testing movement is our low scores on international tests when compared to other countries. Our scores, however, are only low because we have such a high percentage of children in poverty, compared to other countries that participate in international tests. When we consider only middle-class children who attend well-funded schools, our math scores are near the top of the world (Payne and Biddle, 1999).

Here is another analysis, using reading test scores, that comes to the same conclusion. The PIRLS test was given to ten year olds in 35 countries in their own language. Bracey (2009) presented this data, along with relevant socio-economic data on the poverty level of the schools American children attended (defined as participating in free or reduced price lunch programs):

American students attending schools with
- less than 10 percent in poverty averaged 589 (14% of students).
- 10-24.9% in poverty averaged 567 (20% of students)
- 25 to 49.9% in poverty averaged 551 (30% of students)
- 50 to 74.5% in poverty averaged 519 (21% of students)
- 75% or more in poverty averaged 485 (15% of students)

Clearly, students in schools with lower levels of poverty did better. Of great interest to us is the fact that American children attending low poverty schools (25% or less) outscored the top scoring country, Sweden (561). Bracey also points out that "if the students in schools with 24-49.9% poverty constituted a nation, it would rank fourth among the 35 participating nations" (p. 155).

The problem is poverty, not our teachers, our unions, the parents, or the children. The solution is to protect our children from the disadvantages of poverty, through health care, nutrition, and access to books. Geoffrey Canada claims that his approach is to attempt to do just that in the Harlem Children's Zone schools (NY Times, October 12, 2010; but see Krashen, 2010a,b).

Thus far, the Arne Duncan department of education has chosen to ignore this route (while praising the Harlem Children's Zone), and spend billions on useless national standards and national tests, focusing on measuring rather than helping.

Dr. Stephen Krashen

Bracey, G. 2009. Education Hell: Rhetoric Versus Reality. Alexandria, VA: Educational Research Service.
Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13.
Krashen, S. 2010a. A suggestion for Geoffrey Canada. www.schoolsmatter.info. October 12, 2010.
Krashen, S. 2010b. Shocking revelations from Goeffrey Canada's autobiography. www.schoolsmatter.info.
October 13, 2010.

What do you think? Would students be better served by re-directing funds currently going to the exit exams? Is poverty the root of our educational achievement gap?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Waiting For Superman director Davis Guggenheim, on the Colbert Report, explained, "...we are basically failing the American dream. Everyone in America, no matter who they are, no matter what language they speak, no matter how much money they have, deserve a single thing, which is a great education." He explained a bit more, "if they work hard, and they go to school, they have a chance at the American dream." Then he put this in economic terms. "...what happens to them affects all of us. It affects the price of your home, it affects how safe your neighborhood is, and it affects our economy. We're not producing enough skilled workers for the modern economy."

So according to Guggenheim, improving our schools is the key to a prosperous future for these students, and for America as a whole. This is the vision offered by the education reformers, from President Obama to Arne Duncan to Bill Gates. It sounds reasonable - even enlightened. What could be the problem?

They have the situation exactly backwards. These visionaries imagine that high wage jobs will magically appear when the workforce has been trained for them. But the jobs did not disappear because of a lack of workers, and I find it hard to believe that they will reappear just because we produce more educated people.

I invite you to watch a fifteen minute story from a BBC reporter Paul Mason, visiting Gary, Indiana. The focus of the story is on how federal stimulus dollars are impacting life in this most dilapidated of rust belt cities. We learn that manufacturing has departed, and walk through the modern ruins of once glorious theaters and concert halls. Then we come to the schools. "So far, most of the stimulus money has been allocated here, to the school system. Most of Gary's secondary schools have been closed and replaced by specialist colleges, like this one, dedicated to the performing arts. Many of these students come from neighborhoods classified as gang-infested. A small number are homeless." A student named Amber McMillan says, "Here at Emerson, we have very good training, and then we have the academics that would help us succeed. Because we can sing like Pavarotti, just like our teacher says, but if we don't have the education, we have nothing."

The reporter concludes this section by saying, "The benefits of money spent here will be felt, but in the long term. In the meantime, Gary has an improving school system, a collapsed city center, and an acute financial crisis. If they do make it, many of them know success will probably take them somewhere else."

It seems to me that Gary, Indiana, is a microcosm of our nation as a whole. We have a collapsed industrial base and our economy no longer produces things that the world wants to buy. Our corporations have figured out that most of what we used to make can be produced more cheaply elsewhere, and the owners are loyal only to their shareholders and the bottom line. According to economist Robert Reich, the gap between haves and have-nots has grown to the point that it is the same as in 1928. Reich recently explained

The evidence is all around us. It's no mere coincidence that 1928 and 2007 marked historical high-water points for shares of national income going to the top 1 percent. Today's median wage is now 5 percent lower than it was at the start of the decade, taking inflation into account, while top earners are doing better than ever. The core assets of most Americans are their homes, whose values are now 20 to 40 percent below what they were three years ago, while the key assets of America's wealthy are shares of stocks and bonds, whose values have declined far less. The official rate of unemployment is 4.4 percent for college graduates but 10 percent for those with only high school degrees and almost 15 percent for high school dropouts.

According to Reich, our economy cannot recover so long as wages keep dropping and unemployment remains high, because our economy is driven by consumer spending. And if the consumers lack the money to spend the economy will continue its downward spiral.

So where does that leave us in the schools? Watching the show about the situation in Gary, Indiana, brings to mind the old Roadrunner cartoon, and the moment when Wiley Coyote accidentally blasts away the cliff on which he is standing. The rock under his feet falls away, but for a few seconds, his feet spin wildly as he tries to run in mid-air. Our schools have had the earth pulled out from under them. We can continue spinning our feet for a while, keep students like Amber focused on a future we promise them will be bright if only they are well-educated. But the earth is disappearing underneath all of our feet, and unless we can rebuild a solid economy based on actually producing useful things, we may be headed for a fall.

What do you think? Will improved schools lead us out of economic troubles? Or do we need to focus more on fundamental economic changes?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This week some of the people our media has anointed the leaders of educational reform, including Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and a baker's dozen of school superintendents, released a "Manifesto" purporting to tell us how to fix our schools. But this is a manifestation of monumental misconceptions, that begs to be refuted. Let's take it point by point.

As President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents' income -- it is the quality of their teacher.

Unfortunately President Obama is wrong here. Most studies have shown that differences between teachers account for 25% to 40% of the variation in student achievement. The lion's share is indeed their zip code, parent's color and level of affluence. *[Please note update below]

The glacial process for removing an incompetent teacher -- and our discomfort as a society with criticizing anyone who chooses this noble and difficult profession -- has left our school districts impotent and, worse, has robbed millions of children of a real future.

Millions? There is no research that suggests that incompetent teachers are so numerous as to destroy the futures of so many children. Even the researchers that started this national obsession a couple of years ago put the estimate at around 5% of the teaching force. While it is true that our evaluation systems could be greatly improved, there is no evidence that the US suffers from a particularly high level of teacher incompetence, or that doing away with due process or seniority protection will, on the whole, drive improvement in the profession. In fact, the states in the US that have the strongest union representation for teachers also consistently perform the best on national tests. If you continue to attack the teaching profession in this way, what intelligent person will choose to make this their career? These attacks on our rights are likely to cause far more damage than the problem they are supposed to correct.

When teachers are highly effective -- measured in significant part by how well students are doing academically -- or are willing to take a job in a tough school or in a hard-to-staff subject area such as advanced math or science, we should be able to pay them more.

Unfortunately for these manifesters experience has not shown that financial incentives work the way they suggest. Time after time, school districts have learned that bonuses for test scores do not work. And the emphasis on scores drives a well-documented narrowing of the curriculum that robs students of a well-rounded education.

Just as we must give teachers and schools the capability and flexibility to meet the needs of students, we must give parents a better portfolio of school choices. That starts with having the courage to replace or substantially restructure persistently low-performing schools that continuously fail our students.

Here we arrive at the cruel signature of these brave bureaucrats. Declare schools failures. Close schools with low test scores. Fire staff and principals. Scatter students to the four winds. Ignore the fact that the students in Chicago where this was done under Arne Duncan's rule there did no better as a result.

We also must make charter schools a truly viable option. If all of our neighborhood schools were great, we wouldn't be facing this crisis. But our children need great schools now -- whether district-run public schools or public charter schools serving all students -- and we shouldn't limit the numbers of one form at the expense of the other. Excellence must be our only criteria for evaluating our schools.

Charter schools are being held up as models of what public schools ought to be, but the comparison is manifestly unfair. Most successful charters, including the ones featured in recent films, raise millions of dollars to support their programs, and their students get small class sizes and attention the public schools cannot afford. Second, many charters limit the population they will accept, and shift students who do not succeed, or lack parental support, back to the regular public schools. Lastly, the largest study ever done found that charters, on the whole, are not better than regular public schools. So why should we shift students and resources from our neighborhood schools to charters?

But the last paragraph is really the most staggering.

For the wealthiest among us, the crisis in public education may still seem like someone else's problem, because those families can afford to choose something better for their kids. But it's a problem for all of us -- until we fix our schools, we will never fix the nation's broader economic problems. Until we fix our schools, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will only grow wider and the United States will fall further behind the rest of the industrialized world in education, rendering the American dream a distant, elusive memory.

The gap between the haves and have-nots has grown steadily wider over the past two decades. Poverty is at its highest levels in decades, and more than 20% of our students are living in poverty. The rise in poverty has virtually nothing to do with the supposed "crisis" in education. Our nation's peak economic years FOLLOWED the last great crisis that the media and business leaders declared in education. Our current economic troubles have everything to do with the depredations of vultures on Wall Street and in the finance industry - many of whom are the millionaires and billionaires who have decided that they will sprinkle a bit of tax-deductable largesse on the schools.

Let's take this last paragraph and re-write it, from the point of view of our students in poverty.

For the poorest among us, the supposed crisis in education is someone else's problem, because the families we live in endure crises far more immediate and threatening - eviction from our homes, deportation by ICE, drive-by shootings in our neighborhoods, and the expiration of our parents' unemployment benefits. Our schools are a source of hope, but here the poverty strikes hard as well, as declining tax revenues mean we have no libraries, no counselors, and rising class sizes. And the favorite strategy of the bureaucrat, school closures, hits the poorest of us the hardest. These are our problems, and until we fix these, we will have a very hard time succeeding in school, or making four-year college a reality. The gap between haves and have-nots has grown not because of our schools. It has grown because of economic policies driven by the wealthy for their benefit. If the wealthy wish to do something about this, it would be best for them to start by taxing themselves and giving greater resources to the starving public schools they are so very worried about.

For some funny reason the poor have rarely been well-served by manifestos written on their behalf by the wealthy. And the wealthy have a funny way of defining crises in such a way that they are the fault of others, and have nothing to do with the concentration of wealth itself. The manifesto that will deliver poor people a measure of economic and educational justice will not be written by billionaires or their favorite bureaucrats. It will be written by poor people themselves, and will be far more accurate in placing responsibility where it belongs, and in identifying solutions with a chance of actually helping them.

*Update: A watchful reader sent me the following correction:

You wrote this:"Most studies have shown that differences between teachers account for 25% to 40% of the variation in student achievement. The lion's share is indeed their zip code, parent's color and level of affluence."

But, Diane Ravitch quotes others like this: "But this proposition is false. Hanushek has released studies showing that teacher quality accounts for about 7.5-10 percent of student test score gains. Several other high-quality analyses echo this finding, and while estimates vary a bit, there is a relative consensus: teachers statistically account for around 10-20 percent of achievement outcomes."

I stand corrected. Even I exaggerated the impact teachers make.

What do YOU think of the bureaucrat's manifesto for our schools? What would a teacher's manifesto say?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

My mother, Pat Cody, passed away last Thursday, at 87 years of age. She was quite a woman. Here are some of the lessons she taught me over the years.

Respond to the immediate needs of those around you. In 1967 the summer of love blossomed around the world, and Berkeley became one of the places where youth gathered. Every week, hundreds of youngsters would arrive with their belongings on their backs, looking for a new scene. My mother and father had a bookstore in the midst of this scene on Telegraph Avenue. Some of the local business owners wanted to make life as hard as possible for the youth, so they would leave. But my parents helped found the Berkeley Free Clinic in 1969, and for many years my mother served as the treasurer for the organization. This clinic has been a lifeline for thousands of people, and operates mostly on volunteer labor. Much of the funds for the project came in the form of spare change collected by young people on the street, who cajoled donations from passersby and split the proceeds with the clinic. My sisters and I did our part by counting and rolling the coins on the dining room table every Sunday night for years.

When personal tragedy strikes, build community with others and face it together. In 1971, my mother learned that DES, a drug she had taken to prevent miscarriages, actually caused reproductive damage to the children who were in utero. She discovered there were millions who had been affected, but there was very little public information available. She connected with others similarly affected and started DES Action, a group devoted to informing people about the effects of the drug, advocating for research and support for those affected. This group grew to have chapters in more than thirty states and in other countries as well. My mother was the linchpin of this group, and built a powerful network that included doctors, medical researchers, and the people affected by the drug. She personally responded to thousands of people seeking information and support, and was like a second mother to many.

Don't preoccupy yourself with credit or awards or power. Just do what needs to be done, and enjoy the company of others while working towards common goals. She gave me the example by which I have lived my life, and I will miss her.

Who were your first teachers? What lessons did they leave with you?

photo by John Vigran, used by permission.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There is an old labor movement song that I have sung with others in times of trouble.

We shall not -
We shall not be moved.
We shall not -
We shall not be moved.
Just like a tree that's standing by the water,
We shall not be moved.

I grew up in Berkeley in the 1960s, and in my youth I attended a number of protests. My mother took us to peaceful marches at Berkeley City Hall to protest the presence of US "advisors" in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. In the 1970s I was one of many who organized and marched to defend affirmative action in university admissions. As a student at UC Berkeley, I helped organize my peers to oppose President Reagan, and his wars of empire in Central America. In my last year there, I participated in actions demanding divestment from South Africa, and was honored to hear Nelson Mandela speak after the people were victorious there.

The struggle over the future of education is beginning to have a very familiar feel. As John Merrow pointed out this week, NBC's Education Nation did a great deal to solidify the lines that divide us. He writes:

...I'm looking hard for signs of a dialogue, but what I am finding instead are lines hardening between two camps. Scarily, it reminds me of the abortion/choice battle. Right now it's in the naming stage. Those who were excluded from Education Nation are calling their opponents 'anti-teacher' and 'anti public education,' while the Education Nation crowd is labeling its antagonists 'defenders of bad education' and 'protectors of inept teachers'. Naturally, both groups are working hard to wrap themselves in 'pro-children' garments.

Merrow calls on us to resist the temptation to demonize our opponents and declare ourselves holier than thou. But this is challenging when we have been marginalized and silenced.

We did not have to go down this path. When we launched Teachers' Letters to Obama almost a year ago, we clearly assumed good intentions, and offered our best ideas. We dug into the most challenging issues, and some of us produced a report with detailed recommendations for teacher evaluation. We have shared our thoughts for months, and the closest we got to a hearing was a frustrating 30 minute phone call with Secretary Duncan, who thought he was there to answer our questions rather than engage in dialogue.

But it has become clear that we are in the fight of our lives. Our public schools are in grave danger. The attacks on this institution are well-funded and coordinated. They are aimed at removing from teachers due process protections some of us have, making our unions toothless. We are seeing schools systematically de-funded, so that we have trouble even meeting the most basic needs of our students, while at the same time the demands for performance are ratcheted up.

We see individual teachers by the thousands publicly scorned by one of the biggest newspapers in the land, and this is supported by our President and Secretary of Education. The suicide of Rigoberto Ruelas two weeks ago reveals the human cost of this strategy of naming and shaming.

Some of this seems completely out of touch with reality. President Obama speaks of extending the school day and year at the same time most schools cannot even pay for staff for the days and hours we have now. The billionaires come along with grants and donations that have great big strings attached. This means that our school systems must choose to either starve, or become dependent on charity, with the result that local schools are no longer in the control of locally elected school boards, but instead answer to the billionaires.

John Merrow does not want us to call our opponents names, and I agree with this impulse. If we want dialogue, we must hold out some possibility that others hold good intentions for our schools. But this has begun to feel awfully close to a shooting war. When the powers that be choose Michelle Rhee as their standard bearer, it is hard to find that middle ground.

This polarization is unfortunate, but cannot be wished away. We need to develop our capacity to defend our schools. That means we need to get more organized. The folks at Rethinking Schools created a whole project called Not Waiting for Superman to respond to the propaganda, and are even passing out informational flyers at theaters. We need to defend our unions and the rights we have won over many years. The many teacher, parent and student groups that have sprung up to need to work more closely together. We need to be prepared to move past writing letters to the President and Secretary of Education, and begin to get more visible. Teachers and parents in Florida showed us how this could be done last spring, when their activism forced the veto of Senate Bill 6, which would have made teacher pay depend on test scores.

This has become a movement to reassert democratic control of our schools. Our schools should be controlled by locally elected school boards, by teachers, parents and students, not by billionaires. There is a place for charter schools, but they should not be promoted at the expense of regular public schools. Teachers deserve due process, and we must not equate effectiveness with the ability to boost test scores. Our students need a rich curriculum filled with opportunities to be creative, think critically and develop the capacity to work together to solve problems. Our teachers need opportunities to collaborate and reflect together, and to grow as professionals.

We are working towards these goals at Teachers' Letters to Obama, and held a discussion a week ago with a number of leading parent and teacher activists. You can listen to the recorded discussion here. We are forming action teams for those of us willing to get a bit more involved. Please come visit if you are interested.

What do you think? Is it time for us to get more organized and active?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Our national focus on education driven by Waiting for Superman and NBC's Education Nation programming is drawing to a close, and it leaves me with a disturbing concept of what it means to be a teacher in America today. One source is Geoffrey Canada, urging teachers to donate an extra hour a day to their schools. He was quoted as saying to one teacher, "You ought to stay until the job is done."

We have arrived at a disturbing concept of what it means to be a "good teacher" in America - especially if you choose to work in schools where the students live in poverty. When you accept this poorly paid job, you are expected to take full responsibility for the 160 students in your classes, and that means you should make yourself available to them at all hours, give up your lunch and free time, and stay at school ten hours a day. You must be "effective," which means that you are able to move their test scores up fast enough to recover the years they are behind and put them on track for admittance to a university. You must not worry about the fact that your school has no supplies and a reduced support staff, due to budget cuts, and you must use your own money to purchase supplies and even food for your students.

When you speak of your work, you may describe some incremental success you have had, but then you must acknowledge that whatever you have achieved "isn't good enough," because you still have students who are working below grade level. You must disavow the need for any job security because it sometimes means "bad teachers" are protected. You place blind faith in the administration's ability to know YOU are a GOOD teacher, and speak critically of others who cling to such protections.

This self-sacrificing stance allows you to claim the sainted title "good teacher." But of course, there can be no saints without sinners. The sinners in our schools are the teachers who arrive, put in their day's work, and clock out by 4 or 5 pm. Then they selfishly go home to their own children, and leave the school's children to fend for themselves for the rest of the day and night. They take home papers to grade, and they call parents when necessary, but they do not give their students their cell phone number. When students are below grade level and need extra help, they refer them to the after school tutoring program, rather than staying late to work with them themselves. Their students gain, on average, about a year's academic growth during their year in their class - but this is plainly immoral, because the students are below grade level, so these bad teachers are not closing this gap. Their classrooms are sometimes lacking in supplies because they do not spend much of their own money to buy them, instead selfishly spending their money on clothing and food for their own families.

I do not know if this duality is related to America's strain of religious beliefs, but it reinforces a very simplistic view of our profession. Coupled with the fact that our profession has traditionally been mostly female, this suggests that teachers are being asked to be society's self-sacrificing saints, taking on for all of us the burden we are unwilling to bear.

I have no problem with teachers who do many of the things the saintly teachers do. I have done many of them myself. But if I choose to spend my weekend taking my students on a field trip, or stay after school to help them with their homework, or spend part of my meager salary on classroom supplies, I want it to be out of choice, rather than to preserve my "goodness."

It is true that without extraordinary effort, students in poverty will have trouble succeeding in large numbers. But I have several problems with placing all this responsibility on the shoulders of our teachers.
• First of all, I remain skeptical about the viability of sending all our students, or even significantly more of them, to four year colleges. I see statistics that indicate the areas with the most job growth continue to be service sector positions, so I wonder if the jobs for college graduates will actually be there, and with costs rising, I think many high school students drop out when college admittance is made out to be the sole purpose for their education.
• Teachers have families as well, and ought to be allowed to enjoy and nurture them. They ought to be able to spend their spare time with their own children, and likewise not be expected to sacrifice their own family's budget to buy classroom supplies.
• Many students DO need extra help, but this should be organized and funded by the school system, and not rest on unpaid volunteer hours from teachers.
• A teacher's primary job ought to be to organize and engage his students in powerful lessons. This is a challenging thing, which requires imagination, collaboration with colleagues, engagement in professional growth, and time to plan. If a teacher is taxed with late days tutoring, he is not going to have the energy to plan an innovative and exciting curriculum.
• The very idea that schools are the only solution to intractable poverty in society seems a flawed one. If we simply produce more children ready for college, but college costs more than families can afford, what have we accomplished? If we produce more college graduates, but the jobs that used to be the foundation for the middle class are evaporating, how has this helped?
• We seem to have turned a basic concept on its head. Our schools ought to prepare students for a bright future that beckons them. But in our neighborhoods of poverty, no such future beckons. Unemployment and hunger surround these schools, but they and their teachers are expected to conjure hope up out of thin air.

We are a profession suffering a bit of traumatic shock from the public assault to which we have been subjected. There is most likely a political/economic drive underway to strip from us the due process protections we have secured in some states. We have even seen teachers publicly named as ineffective by a major newspaper.

Individual teachers may be able to reach the level of self sacrifice that has been demanded for a few years, but this is not sustainable over a career. We see evidence of this in the very high turnover rates in many high-poverty schools, and in charter schools such as KIPP especially, where ten to twelve hour days are the norm.

We need to reclaim and reassert what it means to be a good teacher. Of course good teachers can make a huge difference in the lives of our students. But we cannot be expected to deliver entire communities from the grip of generational poverty singlehandedly. And we must reject the need to be martyrs, sacrificed to atone for the sins of our selfish society.

What do you think it means to be a "good teacher" today? Should we redefine this?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend