August 2011 Archives

Last week during Arne Duncan's Twitter Town Hall there was one phrase that keeps sticking in my mind. John Merrow asked him what his message is for teachers who feel under attack.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's response included this:

"We have to do everything we can to support teachers. I worry about losing too much of our great young talent."

It is hard to disagree with this. I spent the last four years leading a program in Oakland designed to do just that. We created TeamScience to give novice science teachers a professional community to belong to, offering them experienced colleagues as mentors as well as workshops, curriculum and professional development. We did this because we have a huge turnover issue among our science teachers. Most of the vacancies are filled with interns from Teach For America and other programs, and three years after they start, 75% of these teachers have left the District.

I served as a mentor myself to more than a dozen of these interns over the past few years. As with almost all beginning teachers, they start out very green and have a great deal to learn. These interns have usually only had a six-week long summer training program to prepare them, so the learning curve is steep.

We wanted to retain these teachers for a number of reasons. First of all, it takes a huge investment of energy and resources to support beginning teachers. The District pays thousands of dollars to underwrite their recruitment and summer training. In our TeamScience program, we pair them with mentors who meet with them weekly, and offer them extensive support. We tailor much of our professional development to serve beginning teachers, to make sure their students have access to a solid hands-on science curriculum. These novices are learning a great deal in their first three years. When they depart, they take this investment and expertise with them, and the students get a fresh recruit in their place, usually inexperienced and far less effective.

Our efforts made a dent in this problem. We were able to reduce the turnover of these interns somewhat, though the long-term outlook is less clear. The problem is that there are a number of systemic factors that promote turnover in urban districts like Oakland. Here are some of them:

1. When you recruit people into the teaching profession for a two-year commitment, and present the classroom as a stepping stone to greater career opportunities (as does Teach For America), it is not surprising that people leave after completing two or three years.

2. These interns are being placed in the most challenging teaching environments possible. These schools are often in neighborhoods where unemployment, poverty and violence are high. The interns are often unfamiliar with the culture and language of the students. The schools are under-resources, and overcrowded. This can be overwhelming for any teacher, let alone a beginner.

3. Our high needs schools continue to be under intense pressure to increase test scores. While Secretary Duncan deplores teaching to the test, almost every policy initiative he promotes raises the stakes attached to these tests. As a result, these schools tend not to be places where innovation and creativity are encouraged. Furthermore, the schools with the highest levels of poverty, and with the largest number of English learners, are likely to find themselves in that bottom 5% when the test scores come out, which subjects them to the "turnaround" strategies mandated by the Department of Education itself. This subjects teachers and administrators at these schools to the risk of mass firings or reassignments. These are not stable places in which to base one's career. They are made unstable by official policy.

4. Oakland, like many urban districts, has so many demands on its limited state funding that teacher salaries lag behind many neighboring districts. That means even interns who decide to remain in the profession tend to move to another district, where they can earn thousands of dollars more each year.

So the question is, why are Secretary Duncan and many of our would-be education "reformers" so focused on retaining great YOUNG talent?

Sometimes it seems as if our education reformers have decided that one of the problems with our schools is that we have too many OLD teachers, because many of the "reforms" seem to undermine this group. We have concerted efforts to cut pension benefits. We have new policies being enacted that remove seniority protections for teachers, and instead allow layoffs to be decided based on "effectiveness" (usually determined by how well a teacher has raised test scores). As I wrote last month, the efforts of the education "reform" non-profit Teach Plus in Indiana were focused on protecting "promising young teachers" from the effects of layoffs. From Memphis, Tennessee comes news that an initiative funded by the Gates Foundation led the district there to choose to hire novice teachers rather than experienced ones. And last December, with no apparent opposition from the Department of Education, Congress acted to change the definition of "Highly Effective Teacher" within No Child Left Behind to explicitly include poorly trained interns, after a court decision ruled them out.

So why are young teachers so attractive?

Young teachers are cheap. These teachers in their first few years are at the bottom of the pay scale, and may earn only 60% of what a senior teacher might make.

Young teachers may be just as effective at raising test scores as experienced teachers. Many of the intern programs put great emphasis on effective test preparation, and schools that are under pressure to raise scores may find this very desirable.

Young teachers are malleable, and can be easily fired. They will not even have due process protections for their first few years, and can be released pretty much at will by the administrator.

What do we MISS when this sort of teacher becomes the solution?

A certain magical balance can be reached when you have just the right mix of experienced and novice teachers. The novices bring energy and fresh ideas, but the veterans bring precious knowledge of the school, the community, and the needs of the students. In Oakland some of our schools have lost that balance, as they may experience turnover of half or more of their teachers in a given year. Turnover of administrators is high as well, so it is not uncommon for schools to begin the year with the majority of staff starting anew.

Teachers are the heart and soul of a school. I was at Bret Harte Middle School in Oakland for 18 years, and when I started there, a number of my colleagues had been there for more than a decade, some more than thirty years. We were connected to the community, and taught generations of students from the neighborhood. This kind of connection to the parent community builds real accountability for student learning. When teachers turn over at high rates, continuity is broken and this kind of connection is much more difficult.

Students suffer because great teaching goes way beyond test scores, and many of these dimensions beyond tests deepen as a teacher gains experience. More experienced teachers learn how to connect more with individual students, how to better differentiate for diverse learning styles, and how to connect with a larger range of students. They learn more about the students' cultures, and the specific issues that exist in the community, and this knowledge can help them connect on more levels with more of their students.

More advanced professional growth suffers. Beginning teachers are likely to be focused on learning how to manage their classrooms, or getting their basic curriculum together. They are less likely to seek out more in-depth practices like scientific inquiry, or Project-Based Learning. They may not be ready for things like National Board certification, Lesson Study, or teacher action research. If there is a critical mass of experienced teachers, then novices may join in and benefit greatly from this sort of activity, but lacking that, they are usually not going to be ready.

Experienced teachers see the novices come and go, and may not have the energy to invest in mentoring this revolving staff. Cohesion suffers, as do consistent management policies that keep schools running smoothly. Without experienced colleagues to offer support, novices are left to reinvent their curriculum and procedures, at great expense.

When we designed TeamScience, we wanted to retain experienced teachers as well. So we did our best to build a collegial community, and provide opportunities for the mentors to grow and be recognized for their expertise. While I agree with Secretary Duncan that we need to retain great young teachers, I am even MORE concerned about the great experienced teachers we are losing. For this reason it concerns me that when he is asked about teacher retention, he only voices a concern for the young ones. It also concerns me that many urban districts have come to rely on interns who make a relatively short commitment to the teaching profession, and turn over in high numbers.

We need to address the big reasons we are losing teachers, and fix these problems. Getting more "great young talent" to fill these vacancies is not a systemic solution. And while we may make some minor gains when we try to retain them, my experience in Oakland suggests that until we address the underlying issues that drive this turnover, more short-timers will not fill the void.

What do you think? Have we put too much focus on retaining "great young talent"? What about us old-timers?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

George Orwell might well be proud to see how Arne Duncan has risen to the challenge of using language to disguise government actions. Watching the Twitter Town Hall yesterday was an exercise in frustration. Unfortunately, the Department of Education has released only tweets that digest his responses down into little nuggets, so to hear what he really said requires careful listening. I took some time to take down some of what was said in the first five minutes, when interviewer John Merrow focused on No Child Left Behind and the process Duncan is setting up to grant waivers.

Merrow: Why is (NCLB) still the law of the land? It expired in 2007!

It should have been reauthorized a while ago. I desperately hoped Congress would reauthorize and fix it in a bipartisan way.

It is too punitive, too prescriptive, dummied down standards, narrowed the curriculum. Congress hasn't acted. So as we move into September we are going to go out with a waiver package, work directly with states, and provide a lot more flexibility for states and districts and teachers to give them the room to hit a high bar.

We will have a high bar, but where states have college and career ready standards, and 45 states have adopted there, where states are being creative around teacher support and principal support and evaluation, and taking on low performing schools. For me the grand tradeoff is where they're really showing courage and setting a high bar, we need to give them more flexibility and a lot more room to move.

Well, it's not more control over education. It IS saying where states are raising standards, we want to give them room to hit those higher standards. Right now under the current law, they get penalized for doing the right thing. And I just think we have to give a lot more flexibility, a lot more autonomy, so I would argue it's a narrower, a smaller federal footprint, a lot more autonomy, a lot more flexibility at the local level. I am frankly trying to get Washington out of the way.

Merrow: But they don't get waivers unless they agree to do what you want'em to do.

If they're doing the right thing. We could debate that. If they have low standards, if they are dummying down standards, lying to parents and children, that's not someone I want to partner with. We've seen this huge amount of courage around the country. Forty-five states have raised standards. Where they're not taking on achievement gaps and low performing schools, where they're accepting the status quo, that's not someone I want to partner with. But we're seeing huge courage there. We'll see what happens.

Merrow: Some people are saying the real lesson of NCLB is that Washington cannot run education.

Washington can never run public education. We want to be a good partner. We want to reward courage, excellence and creativity. We want to hold folks accountable to a high bar. But education has always been and should be at the local level, and the best ideas in education are never going to come from me or anyone else in Washington. They're always going to come from great teachers, great principals at the local level. We want to hold them accountable but give them lots more room to move and to do the right thing for the children in their community, where they know best what those children and that community needs.

These unwise policies are the definition of "courage" in Secretary Duncan's dictionary. And these policies greatly enlarge the federal footprint in education, because they dictate even more pressure to raise test scores down to every single classroom in the nation. This gives us "room to move" only in the same test-driven direction that NCLB has led us in from the beginning. As in Orwell's classic novel, we are told war is peace, and ever-more prescriptive policies "give us more room to move."

What do you think?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by John Thompson.

It is a truism that when an attorney does not have the evidence, he or she argues the law. When lawyers do not have the facts or the law on their side, they tell a good story. Steve Brill's new book, Class Warfare, exemplifies that principle when indicting teachers and unions.

According to Brill's brief, teachers unions have a long history of outsmarting school systems. So, New York City Chancellor Joel Klein persuaded the union to streamline the dismissal process. Then, Klein and a Wall Street lawyer, Daniel Weisberg, recruited a "squad of lawyers to help principals paper their files." It should only take a "preponderance of evidence" to terminate a teacher, but the union lawyers still continued to defeat Klein's and Weisberg's elite team. Rather than evaluate the evidence that arbitrators found persuasive, Brill just cites Klein's opinion that the real standard for dismissal had become "beyond a reasonable doubt."

According to the evidence, however, the American Federation of Teachers has a long history of working with collaborative school leaders. Since 1981, the AFT has taken the lead in using peer review, known as the Toledo Plan, to mentor and efficiently remove ineffective teachers. From 2003 to 2008, 8% of educators evaluated under peer review were removed. In July of 2009, Brill "happened to read The Widget Effect," a report by The New Teacher Project (TNTP), which falsely claimed that only .9% of Toledo teachers were removed for performance. It also happened that the misleading and inaccurate report was authored by Dan Weisberg, the Wall Street lawyer hired by Klein to battle the AFT.

The facts are that the TNTP "reconciled" its numbers and promised to change outright inaccuracies in a new edition of the report, although they were not very gracious in correcting either their mistakes or their mis-characterization of the Toledo Plan. Brill, however, ignores the evidence and changes his story line so that it can conclude with an argument with a Harvard professor who he claims hung up on him.

On the next page, Brill writes, "Toledo might have been a mirage. Pittsburgh (which also adopted peer review) wasn't." Brill then praises peer review and other innovative evaluation systems developed by the AFT and the National Education Association. This raises the question of why Brill slanders the granddaddy of teacher accountability systems, and then lavishly praises the reforms it inspired.

Brill's story is that AFT President Weingarten would have never stopped protecting incompetents had she not been forced to do so. So, he rewrites history and, thus, denies the legitimacy of longstanding reforms undertaken by the union.

It is a shame that Brill dismisses the history of education that preceded his introduction to school reform. Brill's story would have been more rich had he looked into the nuance involved in peer review. He could have started with Anthony Cody's account of his two years as a peer review evaluator. Cody wrote of the teachers who he mentored:

In many cases the teachers were, in fact terminated, or forced to retire. As a union member I felt it was my responsibility to make sure that the teacher was evaluated fairly and given a chance to improve. But my top priority as a PAR (peer review) coach was to make sure those students got the education they deserved.

John Thompson was an award winning historian, with a doctorate from Rutgers, and a legislative lobbyist when crack and gangs hit his neighborhood, and he became an inner city teacher. He blogs for This Week in Education, the Huffington Post and other sites. After 18 years in the classroom, he is writing his book, Getting Schooled: Battles Inside and Outside the Urban Classroom.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A story broken by Parents Across America, and thus far not even covered by local newspapers, reveals that school administrators in Kansas City, Missouri, are introducing an unprecedented experiment. According to this story, contributed by a Kansas City teacher who has remained anonymous out of fear of retaliation, here is what is under way as the school year begins:

Last week at a school board meeting, Kansas City, MO School District superintendent John Covington told the school board that there is no research that supports reduced class size linked to increased student achievement. During the meeting, Covington cited the views of Bill Gates, who has minimized the importance of class size and suggested that teachers be paid more for teaching larger classes.

Covington went on to say that his staff had identified the "best" teachers in the district and would be giving them additional students. This was less than a week before school was scheduled to begin. The day after this announcement, teachers in the early grades received their class lists. Some first grade teachers were assigned 37 students per class, and some kindergarten teachers had 25-30 - compared to other teachers in the same schools, who had twenty students per class. Interestingly, some of these larger classes were staffed with brand new Teach for America recruits.

Then on August 19, Covington hosted a breakfast for eight elementary classroom teachers from about six schools out of 23, in grades 3-5th, whom he identified as "the best in the district." He did not explain how he determined that they were the best. He told them that if they were willing to take 6 to 8 additional students, he would give each of them $10,000. This would mean they would have class sizes in the mid to upper thirties. Superintendent Covington and his administrative team have taken the power of assigning teachers and children to classes away from school principals.

Last year Superintendent Covington introduced what he called a "Right Sizing plan" which closed 40% of the city's schools and laid off 300 teachers. This was strongly supported by the Chamber of Commerce.

Covington is a product of the Broad Superintendents Academy.

Bill Gates wrote a commentary last March in which he argued:

What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise.

This appears to be the inspiration for Superintendent Covington's experiment.

I wrote an open letter to Bill Gates at the time, which focused on the effect this is likely to have on teacher turnover. And I see from this report that some of these classes will be staffed by Teach For America interns, who turn over at even higher rates. But as Parents Across America points out, the chief concern this raises is the effect on children. There is extensive research showing that class size is one of the most basic things we can do to improve student outcomes.

The students and teachers of Kansas City are about to experience a large-scale experiment, testing a hypothesis that has already been proved wrong on so many counts.

• Paying teachers bonuses does not make them more effective.


• Paying bonuses to teachers you have somehow determined are more effective, then increasing their class size, is likely to greatly diminish their effectiveness.

Shifting critical decisions like the assignment of students and teachers away from the school site is likely to have terrible consequences, in that central District personnel are ill-equipped to make these decisions. This is also likely to undermine the authority of the principals, and decrease morale.

But these decisions are not so surprising when we have a system that, from the highest levels, declares schools failures in order to justify "dramatic" interventions. Not surprising, but nonetheless outrageous, when the education of our students is involved.

Here are some questions as we go forward:

• Where has Bill Gates' theory that we can increase class size in the classes of the "best" teachers been applied before? Where is there evidence that this will be good for children?
• What will the District save by doing this?
• How will this affect teacher turnover?
• How will this affect the morale of teachers, students and site administrators?
• How will this affect student achievement?
• Does the Chamber of Commerce in Kansas City embrace this as they did the school closures last year?
• Why are class sizes being increased for poor children in urban districts, while they remain low in the private schools attended by the children of people like Bill Gates?
• Will local or national media report on this unprecedented experiment?

UPDATE: Superintendent John Covington has suddenly resigned amidst an acrimonious dispute with school board members. It is unclear how this will affect class size plans.

UPDATE #2: John Covington will be taking a new position in the state of Michigan overseeing the state takeover of high poverty schools.

UPDATE #3: From the Detroit News comes this story:

Detroit -- The new chancellor of a statewide school district for low-performing schools could earn more than $1.6 million over a four-year contract.

At the end of his second year and each successive year, Covington will be eligible for an incentive payment, tied to performance, from $50,000 to $100,000. After his second year, the contract also calls for unspecified annual salary increases.

Sara Wurfel, a spokesman for Gov. Rick Snyder, said Covington would be paid with funding from a nonprofit. "Dr. Covington's salary will be covered through a 501c(3) entity with a mix of public dollars coupled with primarily foundation, individual and corporate donations," she said.

What do you think?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A few days ago I posted an invitation for people to share questions they have for Arne Duncan, in preparation for his Twitter Town Hall meeting on Wednesday, August 24th.

The questions that are emerging are a fascinating glimpse into the debate over our schools. I reviewed questions, and found some themes emerging. Perhaps it might help us be smart participants if we saw some of the big questions that keep coming up. Here are some key ones. Please keep posting and re-tweeting questions on Twitter, and share your favorites in the comments below. And let's pay close attention to how the key questions are addressed next Wednesday.

TeachMoore Renee Moore asks:

Question 1: Why have a Twitter town hall in middle of school day when many teachers can't participate (access or time issues)?

gtoppo Greg Toppo/USA Today asks:

Why, in #education, are people paid more the farther they get from students?

bjhutcheson Brian Hutcheson asks:

How do you evaluate art teachers using student test scores?

stansburyj Jack Stansbury asks:

Instead of imposing your will on the education community, chg Dept. Ed to do ed. research - find out what REALLY works!

janofmi Jan Pardy asks:

Studies refute contribution of merit pay to improve stdent learning based on ths data why continue to support pay for test scres?

clix Clickety Keys asks:

why do u allow the use of VAM in RTTT applications when we know that methodology is sketchy?

clix Clickety Keys asks:

Schools that've incorporated merit pay aren't seeing significant gains - or really, ANY measurable gains. WHY NOT? Doesn't it work?

audhilly audhilly asks:

NCLB is a train wreck, then "choice" of wreck or conditional waiver is govt by blackmail. need legal challenge to exec. power

janofmi Jan Pardy asks:

Why should schls have to compete for $ that should be for all students RTtT bureaucracy cost more than if $ was given to all schls

thefooshshow Richard Fouchaux asks:

Heritage Fndn sz vouchers most viable way to *dismantle* pub #education. Will u unequivcbly take v off table?

@ReginaNavejar asks:

Why does the fed gov allow WI voucher schools to accept tax $ but not kids with special needs?

democracysedge Chana asks:

A majority of scientific studies say that testing regime is damaging, deep learning for understanding best. why do you ignore this?

MaryAnnReilly Mary Ann Reilly asks:

At a time when we know information is unstable, why do you continue to believe in standards as THE organizing force for education?

jillsmo Jill asks:

Can every American opt their kid out of the state tests per Prince V Massachusetts?

JohnAbodeely John Abodeely

Why does the NAEP, when disaggregated, show an almost 1 to 1 correlation between SES and academic success?

matt_fry Matt Fry asks:

Controlling for poverty, US has highest test scores in world. Why not take that message to the public?

tfteacher TheFrustratedTeacher asks:

Why are America's affluent kids No. 1 in the world academically, but our impoverished kids are not? Does poverty play a huge role?

Thanks2Teachers Richard Lakin asks:

Why not institute a "No Unnecessary Testing" Policy rather than pushing programs that TEST kids ad nauseam?

tfteacher TheFrustratedTeacher asks:

Should trad. pub. schools be able to boot misbehaving kids and send them to the neighborhood charter, and keep the $$?

Teacheronthemic Angry Teacher Raps asks:

In ur opinion, why do 50% of urban teachers leave the profession w/in 5yrs? How can we fix this w/o absurd promises of $?

LilyDuster Lily Geffner asks:

How do you think class size affects teaching? Isn't class size is a measurable variable regarding quality of education?

jagrantier Jacob Grantier asks:

Instead of imposing unreasonable and demoralizing mandates can Depts of Ed work more to support schools with meaningful resources?

matt_fry Matt Fry asks:

If you want quality career teachers, why not declare TFA'ers looking for temp. jobs a noble but misguided endeavor?

matt_fry Matt Fry asks:

What does a child more good - a dollar spent on classroom supplies, books or a clean room or a dollar spent on a test?

EdSkeptic The Ed Skeptic asks:

How many cheating scandals will it take to convince #AskArne that high stakes tests create perverse incentives for school leaders?

audhilly audhilly asks:

Please name some education experts that you take counsel from.

janofmi Jan Pardy asks:

Why are teachers missing from panels and discussions when the admin gathers experts on education to discuss improving and reforms

LarrySmith259 Larry Smith asks:

Why don't you follow any teachers on Twitter?

The last three questions bring to mind a thought that occurred to me after a group of teacher activists I was part of held a phone conference with Secretary Duncan more than a year ago, at which time many of these same concerns were raised. I wrote the day after the phone call, that,

The funny thing about the conversation was that the whole time, they seemed to think we had questions, and their job was to answer them. We had actually approached the conversation from a different place. We thought perhaps they might want to ask US questions, or hear our ideas about how to improve schools.

As interested as I am in hearing how Secretary Duncan responds to these tough questions, a much more productive conversation still awaits, when he and the administration realize they do not have all the answers, and start to ask teachers, parents and students, rather than business leaders, how we ought to improve our schools.

What do you think about the questions that are emerging for Secretary Duncan's Twitter town hall? What question would you most like to have him answer? What would you like to tell him about your school?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Department of Education announced Tuesday that Secretary Arne Duncan will participate in an #AskArne Twitter Town Hall on next Wednesday, August 24, at 1:30 p.m. EDT.

Veteran education journalist John Merrow will moderate the town hall that will also be broadcast live on the Department of Education's ustream channel.

Twitter users can submit questions to the Secretary using the hashtag #AskArne.

Many of us will be teaching at that time, but questions can be submitted at any time prior to the event.

A couple of weeks ago, on the eve of the Save Our Schools March, I wrote about my own experience asking Secretary Duncan a question in person.

After pursuing answers from this administration for the past year and a half, I have come to the conclusion that they do not have very good ones. After one of Secretary Duncan's press secretaries accused me of misrepresenting President Obama's remarks a few months ago, I was allowed to pose several tough questions. The answers I got really did not address the concerns I was raising. But I feel the process of dialogue is still very informative. I do not believe in demonizing anyone in this debate. As teachers we want what is best for our students, and we start from that place, and our own observations of how policies are affecting them, and we do our best to hold our leaders accountable for what is happening. I want to take advantage of every possible forum to make it crystal clear that, contrary to the Department of Ed's assertions, teachers are NOT in favor of Race to the Top, and we have major concerns about where we are headed.

A search on Twitter reveals the questions have already started. I would like to encourage people to share your questions in the comments below -- whether you tweet or not. If you see a question you especially want answered, retweet it. Let's get this Town Hall started!

Here are some of the questions that have been tweeted in the past day or so:

Martha Infante asks:

Teachers and educators have not been tapped for their expertise to help shape federal policy. Will this continue in 2011-12?

Clickety Keys asks:

If Finland, Korea, Singapore have better ed systems, why are we not following their lead w/ more support for teachers & families?

Rachel Levy asks:

Many public school educators & families have lost confidence in your admin's policies & leadership. What will you do to regain it?

Regina Navejar asks:

Comment on WI voucher schools taking fed tax $, not having qualified teachers (some), & not being required to post test scores?

I would like to ask the same question I asked Secretary Duncan two weeks ago:

If u label bottom 5% of schools failures, and subject teachers to firings and stigma, who will choose to work in high poverty schools?

What question would you ask? Please share below -- and remember, tweets are limited to 140 characters, including punctuation and spaces!

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

President Obama has some very large problems heading into 2012, and one that might surprise those inside the DC beltway is an area that should be a bulwark of support for any Democratic candidate: education. Democratic candidates tend to support public services, and the unions that represent teachers and classified workers are supportive in return. Going into the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama played to this strength when he spoke to members of the NEA, promising to "fix the broken promises of NCLB." The NEA renewed its endorsement of President Obama last month, but that does not mean he is home free. On the ground, among teachers I know, the President has some big problems.

As I posted a few days ago, most of the leading candidates in the Republican primary have taken clear stands against NCLB and the further expansions of Department of Education influence that have occurred under this president. This resonates with a conservative base that instinctively rejects "big government" telling states and local school districts how to run their affairs. But it also resonates increasingly with teachers and parents who are fed up with their schools being labeled as failures, and with poorly conceived reform proposals being mandated as a condition of federal dollars.

There are about six million teachers in this nation. More than half of them belong to unions. Many of the "reforms" that have been pushed forward recently greatly reduce the ability of unions to represent their members, in that they eliminate seniority, or strip the contract down to bare bones, meaning that only salary and benefits are negotiated, and other critical matters such as working conditions, length of day and school year are left up to the discretion of the district. Teacher unions run the risk of becoming largely irrelevant if they lose the ability to protect teachers' rights to due process, and to effect the conditions under which we teach.

The Obama administration has been rather coy about this wave of reforms, suggesting that they support collective bargaining, while also supporting many of the policies that reduce the due process and seniority rights that teachers have had.

From the start, Secretary Duncan has specialized in doubletalk. He has given innumerable speeches calling for us to avoid teaching to the test, at the same time his policies mandate that teacher pay and evaluations be based in part on test scores. When President Obama called for a reduction in standardized tests this year, Secretary Duncan insisted he was "on the same page," even though the Department of Education has put in motion a tremendous expansion of the frequency, scope and importance of tests.

Teachers have noticed these discrepancies. Jim Sturgios reminded us this week of the list of grievances prepared at the NEA convention last month. Teachers remember when Obama promised to "put on his walking shoes" and stand with workers if collective bargaining were to come under attack. He missed his chance this spring in Wisconsin, and recently he has responded to such questions by suggesting public employees ought to "share the burden," by accepting cuts to pay and benefits.

What could be the cost?

At this point, teachers are getting politically involved not to support Obama's candidacy, but to protest his policies. The Save Our Schools March a few weeks ago was attended by grassroots activists from dozens of states, many of whom are getting even more organized as they return home. Many of us were active campaigners and fundraisers for Obama in 2008. Not this time. This time, that energy is going into organizing to defend the schools in which we work from the policies his administration continues to pursue. It is Republican candidates who are promising to reduce the level of federal interference, though I have little confidence that they will actually do much to improve our schools. But at the very least, many politically active teachers have been removed as supporters of the President, and in a tight race, this loss of support could be decisive.

How could this be turned around?

What is called for is a shift in the trajectory of federal policies. Secretary Duncan has called NCLB a "slow motion train wreck," but his approach has been to use the terrible momentum of this law to push us down the wrong track of his favorite reforms. This is bad policy and is contrary to the law that set up ESEA in the first place. The Department of Education needs to step back and fundamentally reinvent itself as a listening and learning organization. Lynn Stoddard's petition captures this idea well:

Change the U.S. Department of Education from a dictator of school policy to that of a research, advisory and resource organization.

This shift would have huge implications. Secretary Duncan is fond of praising dedicated teachers for the work that we do, but when President Obama recently convened his roundtable of advisers on education, not a single teacher was even in the room.

President Obama knows where to find us. And the six million teachers in America could be decisive come November, 2012. But the way things are going, we are left feeling as if we can support him just about as well as he has supported us. Which is not very much at all.

What do you think? Will educators play a role in President Obama's campaign?

[Editorial note: Education Week Teacher is not affiliated with the Save Our Schools event; the views expressed in this opinion blog do not reflect the endorsement of Education Week or Editorial Projects in Education, which take no editorial positions]

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The recent debate among candidates for the Republican nomination for President has raised anew the proper role of the Federal government in our schools. Several candidates, including Herman Cain and Texas governor Rick Perry, have decried the expansion of federal influence. Michelle Bachman has likewise been critical of NCLB, and has even called for the abolition of the Department of Education.

Blogger Bob Sikes is actively following the ins and outs of the Republican primary, and he sees a split developing within conservative ranks. George W. Bush, and his brother Jeb, have been major players in the education "reform" movement, which means they have promoted NCLB and the Common Core standards. Rick Perry takes a divergent view. In an April interview in the National Review, Perry calls NCLB "a monstrous intrusion into our affairs." As Valerie Strauss describes, Perry has taken Texas on a different path for several years, including rejecting the Common Core standards.

Sikes suggests:

Perry's presence in the race along with another NCLB opponent in Michelle Bachmann will at the very least cause a platform fight over education at next summer's GOP convention in Tampa. If education policy becomes an issue in republican primaries before then, an even better outcome could be in the offing.

Educators have tended to support an active role by the Federal government in education affairs, because of decades-old history. Back in the 1950s Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops down to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce school desegregation. The government expanded its role as defender of the disenfranchised with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, as part of the War on Poverty. The original law explicitly prohibited the adoption of national educational standards, because people wanted to ensure that the federal government not become all-powerful.

But this law was fundamentally changed in 2001, when it was recrafted as No Child Left Behind, and became a lever for the promotion of "school reform," as defined by those in power.

No Child Left Behind has become hugely unpopular across the country. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama got big applause when they criticized the law on the campaign trail. However, as we look towards 2012, President Obama may have a big problem with his approach since taking office. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has embraced and extended the essential features of the law, which make the federal government tremendously powerful at the local level. If you go into any public school in the nation you are likely to see test scores and data charts posted on bulletin boards that once featured student art work or projects. Time set aside for teachers to work with one another is often consumed by "dates with data," where colored spreadsheets are pored over to figure out how to target troublesome standards, or particular students.

And now, as the law shifts from draconian to absurd, and threatens to label more than 80% of the schools in the nation failures, Secretary Duncan is planning to offer waivers to states that are willing to embrace a menu of reforms not even contained in the legislation to begin with. A law that was intended to provide supplementary resources for impoverished students has become a powerful lever wielded by the Department of Education to enforce the policies and standards they desire.

From a different perspective, a retired educator named Lynn Stoddard has created a petition calling for a fundamental shift in the role of the Department of Education. Dr. Stoddard has a project called Educating for Human Greatness.

He writes:

The U.S. Department of Education has wasted billions trying to impose counterfeit reforms on public education. High stakes, useless testing has demoralized teachers, narrowed the curriculum and left parents on the sidelines. Student achievement has not improved. The DOE can help by changing to a research, resource and advisory organization. As stated in the 10th Amendment, we should leave public education as a state responsibility.

So we created a petition to The United States House of Representatives, The United States Senate and President Barack Obama, which says:

"Change the U.S. Department of Education from a dictator of school policy to that of a research, advisory and resource organization."

So we seem to have a convergence of views, with both progressives and conservatives challenging the Department of Education's expansive role.

The split between established Republicans like the Bush family and rising upstarts like Rick Perry, Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain may be partly ideological and partly an attempt to capture popular sentiment that is so opposed to NCLB. In either case it creates a real problem for the Department of Education and Barack Obama. On this issue, we have a shift that could make education a big liability for this administration as we enter a campaign where every vote will count.

What do you think? Has the Department of Education become overly intrusive? Will this play a part in the 2012 presidential campaign?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by John Thompson.

Sometimes it seems like every five foot tall male 8th grader is convinced that he will make it in the NBA. Teachers have to gently explain the need to study in case, by some fluke, a teenager does not become a first round draft choice.

The Washington Post's education columnist Jay Mathews recently made a comparable mistake, and I want to be equally nurturing in reply. I kid Mr. Mathews, because he has great integrity, but sometimes I fear that he assumes that everyone is as upright as he is. (And besides, Mathews has been generous in allowing me to guest post for him.)

Mathews wrote that principals should have the "same powers that baseball general managers have--they can hire and fire whom they want, whenever they want, in order to produce a team that plays together and wins. ... If the general manager's team doesn't win--in school terms doesn't find a way to significantly raise student achievement--he or she ought to be let go, and have someone else give it a try. But the general manager should always have the ability to remove players who don't want to be part of the team, who complain and create dissension and do things their way."

The my-way-or-the-highway system that Mathews supported might make sense if every principal had the same sincerity as Mathews, and big-league abilities. And if the average salary for millions of teachers was comparable to the average of $3.3 million earned by 844 major league baseball players, maybe principal/managers would have talent to burn when running the team as they saw fit.

In high-challenge neighborhood schools, those principals would have to have a rare combination of superstar skills and moral courage. For instance, those leaders would have to explain to their bosses why classroom instruction, by itself, can not overcome the legacies of intense concentrations of generational poverty. Then, even if the central office mandated suicidal policies (such as scripted and paced instruction, nonstop test-prep, etc.), principals would have to accomplish something that has rarely been done - raise test scores without fabricating numbers and/or "creaming" the easier-to-educate students. And if these big league principals failed to work miracles, presumably they would have the moral character to fall on their own sword rather than blame teachers ...

The issue that prompted Mathews to call for such powers for principals was the controversy over a teacher who claimed that he was fired for practicing the free expression of ideas contrary to those of the principal, and not because of his alleged ineffectiveness as a teacher. D.C., we should recall, was one of the first systems to impose litmus tests on educators. Michelle Rhee famously said, "If a teacher doesn't believe it is possible for a teacher or a school to overcome those factors, that is actually okay. That teacher should teach in Fairfax County ..."

A D.C. newspaper also told the story of a prospective educator who was not hired because she gave the wrong answer to the question, "pretend you are a teacher at a cash-strapped urban school who just found out, a week before school starts, that you're going to use a curriculum the rich suburban district has been using."

The most extreme example of this group think was the Chicago "TeacherFit" aptitude test that "blacklisted" 30% of applicants. Prospective teachers had to give the right answer to questions probing how they would feel if too many disruptive students were assigned to their class and whether they would be "willing to work for free."

I could go on with examples of "magical thinking" that is being imposed on teachers, but I suspect that most readers have more than their share of their own horror stories. Instead, I want to make two points. The question is not whether there are numerous individual teachers and individual students who have overcome extreme adversity to produce excellence. The issue is whether we allow Orwellian practices to censor the discussion of how we can provide systemic and sustainable improvements for kids. Had D.C. allowed for an evidence-based analysis of the best methods to help low-income students, the district might be producing better results for its schools in the poorest neighborhoods.

Secondly, how do I know about poor performance in those schools, despite Rhee's spin, and the Washington Post's support of her reforms? We know these inconvenient truths because they were reported in the Post. The Post editors and owners may disagree with their reporters. But the Post, like our schools should be, was built on a heritage of respect for the free flow of ideas.

And how do I know of Rhee's litmus test? I read about it in Jay Mathews' column. Mathews was supportive of those policies. But Mathews embodied the principles that American democracy, journalism, and public schools are based on. He respected persons with diverse viewpoints, and welcomed dissent.

So, maybe Mathews was half-right. Schools should be a team, but a team that puts the intellectual journey of teaching and learning over putting up points on a scoreboard.

What do you think? How should schools balance the legitimate need to build teams of educators with constructive attitudes, while still allowing for policy debates? Are "reformers" driving freedom of speech and thought out of school systems? Do you have any ideas on this subject that can not be expressed in school level policy discussion, but which could help us better serve students?

John Thompson was an award winning historian, with a doctorate from Rutgers, and a legislative lobbyist when crack and gangs hit his neighborhood, and he became an inner city teacher. He blogs for This Week in Education, the Huffington Post and other sites. After 18 years in the classroom, he is writing his book, Getting Schooled: Battles Inside and Outside the Urban Classroom.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Over the past decade I have served as a mentor teacher to more than a dozen beginning teachers in the challenging schools of Oakland. Most of them have been interns, fresh out of college, with just a few weeks of summer training, and a "bag of tricks" that they were given by their only slightly more experienced trainers. They are trained to focus on the data. Start testing early, and make sure the students understand how important those scores are. Set BIG goals, such as that 80% of your students will score well. Track progress using big graphs on the wall with each student's name or number. Develop reward systems to manage behavior. Step into one of these classrooms, and you will find elaborate systems that are designed to "incent" good behavior, and impose costs on bad. You may even find a whole economy, complete with currency - the "behavior bucks," handed out in $100 bills prepared on the school photocopier.

But as my mentees near the end of their first year, many of them have begun to question this approach. They find that after a while the novelty of the rewards offered for good behavior wears off. Students tire of being manipulated, cajoled and bribed into learning. And these systems of rewards take a huge amount of energy to maintain, and this energy is often a distraction from the real reasons we hope our students will learn. These systems foster dependence rather than autonomy. They are all about pleasing the teacher, rather than building on students' natural curiosity.

This is a tough lesson for these novice teachers to learn, because once you discard the gimmicks, what is left? How then do you inspire students to care about the subject you are teaching? This is when we really begin to face the awesome challenge before us. This is when we begin to probe what it is that our students care about, and the reasons they are in their seats every day. This is when we start creating challenging projects that draw them into investigating - and changing -- the world in which they live. This is the deep skill of teaching, and it is one that takes years to develop.

Our Department of Education is still making rookie mistakes by trying to drive reform with Behavior Bucks. Perhaps they should be called "Duncan Dollars." Yesterday we learned that the latest application of this principle will be applied to turn the dismally failed No Child Left Behind law into yet another set of rewards and punishments to promote the behaviors the administration has decided are good for us. The exact guidelines have not been spelled out, but all indications are we will get more recipes from the Race to the Top cookbook. The Department proposes to allow states to stop the use of Adequate Yearly Progress to label most of their schools failures, while still requiring that the bottom tier of schools be so labeled. Other "reforms" popular with the Department include tying teacher pay to test scores and evaluations, and the adoption of the Common Core standards, and tests tied to these standards when they arrive. More and more tests, and Duncan Dollars tied to each and every one, in every possible way.

Unfortunately, we are seeing the limitations of test-driven reforms manifest before our eyes. The National Academy of Sciences report offers rather a definitive conclusion. Nine years of test and standards-driven reform has yielded virtually no increase in student learning. Programs in Texas and New York designed to pay teachers more for test scores have not even yielded higher scores. The cheating scandals unfolding in "poverty is no excuse" urban districts like Atlanta, Baltimore and Washington, DC, are showing that the whole system of values we have built up around test scores is crumbling. More test security will not rescue this.

Just as in our individual classrooms, this is a crisis of values. When class management starts to get out of control, a system of behavior bucks may salvage things for a while. But our students are in school to learn, not to earn points or prizes. Our classes really perform and behave well when students have a real awareness that what they are doing is challenging them, and that they are growing stronger in their knowledge and abilities. Whole school improvement is no different. Teachers are not working for Duncan dollars for better test scores. The very idea is an insult to us. Those of us who work at high poverty schools do not need the threat of having the school labeled a failure to motivate us to improve. We need support, inspiration, time to investigate and collaborate, and resources to meet the needs of our students.

I hope states and Congress will say "no" to Duncan dollars. It is time to end the failed experiment of No Child Left Behind, and provide Federal education dollars to districts based on the needs of our students, rather than using these funds to promote policies that have not been shown to work.

What do you think? Have we learned enough from these experiments with behavior bucks?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

One of my hopes is that our spirits can be sustained in the tough months ahead by revisiting some of the inspirational words we heard this weekend. In that spirit, I am doing my best to collect videos from the Save Our Schools rally and post them here.

Jon Stewart's message of support -- the dog ate his car (actually I hear he was in Afghanistan with the troops):

Jose Vilson's poem: Not On the Test!

Taylor Mali: What Teachers Make

Texas Superintendent John Kuhn: WOW!

West Coast teachers interviewed:

Marching to the White House

An interview done by John Fensterwald with me about a month ago:

What do you think? Have you found any more videos to share? Please post the links below.

[Editorial note: Education Week Teacher is not affiliated with the Save Our Schools event; the views expressed in this opinion blog do not reflect the endorsement of Education Week or Editorial Projects in Education, which take no editorial positions]

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend