September 2011 Archives

The National Bureau of Economic Research just published "School Choice, School Quality and Postsecondary Attainment" by David J. Deming, Justine S. Hastings, Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O. Staiger. Tom Kane, of course, heads the Gates Foundation's $400 million dollar "Measuring Effective Teaching" experiment, and yet his work provides little or no support for the policies preferred by Gates and other "reformers." In fact, the study confirms the judgments of teachers and education researchers who the accountability hawks condemn as the "status quo." If Gates and Kane had had any idea that their research would yield the results reported in this and other recent papers, it is hard to believe they would have started down their market-driven path.

As usual with the Gates crowd, the actual evidence found by these economists is as solid as their interpretations are convoluted and strange. They acknowledge that progress in improving urban high schools has been disappointing compared to elementary and middle schools. Kane and company add the weird explanation that research has been "largely limited to test score gains as outcome measures" because they were focused "almost entirely on elementary and middle school students,"as if the data-driven accountability movement has not played a role in defining student performance by that single metric.

When reporting the results of an ambitious "reform" in the Charlotte Mecklenburg school system based on "choice," they seemed to forget that the Gates' $400 million "teacher quality" movement was based on the hypothesis that improved instruction could be the key to increasing student outcomes. If the head of that effort had found that students, who were freed from the lowest quality schools and were given an opportunity for the supposedly better instruction in the high quality schools, had improved test scores, the Gates PR machine would be proclaiming such a finding throughout the education world. If those efforts had been successful and reported during a week when the Charlotte Mecklenburg schools were being celebrated for their market-oriented, standardized test-driven policies, these economists might have remembered that the last decade of "reform" has been based on the idea that holding teachers accountable for academic outcomes is the key lever for change.

Regardless, the better schooling did not improve student performance in English or math. And the new study has gained no more attention than the other embarrassing revelation - the Charlotte Mecklenburg student performance "failed dismally in meeting academic targets for 2011."

Neither did Kane et.al mention that their findings were consistent with a large body of research by "the status quo." As explained by the old-fashioned research of James Heckman, Gordon MacInnes and E.D. Hirsch, the key to improving student performance is starting early, nurturing socio-emotional skills, and teaching reading for comprehension by third grade. Once children "learn to read," so they can "read to learn," the "Matthew Effect" takes over. Those children learn how to learn, almost without regard to teacher quality, while it is virtually impossible for high school teachers to make up for those deficits.

The headline of "School Choice, School Quality and Postsecondary Attainment" should have been the study's inadvertent confirmation of the Matthew Effect and the limits of high schools alone to remedy deficits from the early years, but it is better late than never. In fact, if the conclusions in the report's last page were presented in the introduction where they would have received equal prominence, I would be leading the cheers for the paper. Buried in the report's last page was the reminder that the so-called high-quality schools failed to improve English Language Arts performance of kids from low-quality schools and the extraordinary statement, "Provided that these results could be replicated in other settings, they have important implications for the design of school accountability policies. It makes little sense to hold schools accountable for outcomes that they cannot control."

The actual headline, however, was that lottery-winners from the lowest-performing schools, attended high-quality schools that did not prove to be better in adding value in terms of test score growth. But these students were 8.7% more likely to graduate from high school and 5.7% more likely to graduate from college.

Kane et. al explained:

Unfortunately, we cannot say much about the underlying explanation for the gains experienced by lottery winners from low-quality neighborhood schools. Because the choice schools were often magnet schools, with specialized programs such as career academies, arts education, and intensive college prep, the benefits could come primarily from improved student engagement in high school. It is possible that having demographically similar but more able peers led to increased student learning and engagement inside the classroom. Better peers could also have an impact on behavior inside and outside of the classroom.

It is looking more and more like research by scholars supporting data-driven and market-driven "reform" is providing support for the traditional reforms that the
accountability hawks have ridiculed. By now, Kane and other Gates economists
must be worrying that their money and talent would have been better
invested in traditional academic research and better funding the
educational systems previously known as "the status quo."

What do you think? Will this research cause any of our leaders to re-think their approach?

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.

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Last September NBC brought us the first Education Nation, developed in coordination with the release of the pro-charter documentary, Waiting For Superman. The network ran into a few bumps in the road, catching flak when it was pointed out that panels were loaded with "superheroes" like Michelle Rhee, and critical voices like Diane Ravitch, and those of classroom teachers, were largely absent.

This year, NBC has made an effort to be a bit more balanced and inclusive of teachers voices, and the Teacher Town Hall yesterday made a start in that direction.

On a stage dominated by the largest golden hood ornament I have ever seen, Brian Williams interviewed mostly teachers, while Tamron Hall roamed about the audience taking comments from the crowd.

The comments from the teachers present are worth a listen, but my mind kept dwelling on the interview with Melinda Gates. First, here are some of the things Brian Williams said about Mrs. Gates and her husband.

At the top of the show, we were told:

We're also going to be joined by Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates Foundation, one of the sponsors of this event, and the largest single funder of education anywhere in the world. It's their facts that we're going to be referring to often to help along our conversation.

Then, in his introduction of Melinda Gates, Brian Williams said:

You could refer to our guest as the top funder of education in the world. A partner and sponsor of this year's gathering. Also spending half a billion dollars to devise a way figure out what makes a great teacher, what makes them most effective. The estimates are the Gates Foundation has already spent, obviously a record for any education spending, spent or committed to spending five to seven billion dollars.

But I want to focus on what Mrs. Gates said, because there is something deeply disturbing about the way the issues have been framed. And since this foundation is, according to Brian Williams, the source for the very facts that are guiding this conversation, it seems crucial to understand the thinking that is behind their work. Please review her thoughts, and see what you think of the reasoning that is at work.

Brian Williams asks:

You and your husband have always said this all comes back to a single relationship a student and a teacher. What have you learned about what makes a great teacher?

Melinda Gates responds:

Everybody says 'you can't just look at test scores at the end of the year, because there are so many factors, there's poverty and other things that go into this.' But nobody had done the research to say 'how do we know that a teacher's making a difference in a student's life?' So we set out to do this enormous piece of research. Three thousand teachers signed up in six different districts. We videoed the teachers, and we said 'at the end of the day, what is predictive of great teaching? What besides that test score?' And it turned out a teacher who's good one year is good usually in the second year. It turned out you could look at the test scores and see in terms of value added, how had they moved kids up in the system. But then you could also look at student perceptions. It turned out that student perceptions of a teacher were also predictive of how they would do at the end of the year and whether they learned all that material.

Brian Williams:

How do you keep that from becoming a popularity contest?

Melinda Gates:

We learned you have to have multiple measures of what make a great teacher. Right now teachers are observed by their principals at regular intervals. We need to have peer observations. But we need to know that the tool that we're using -- there are ten different tools for peer observations. But which ones actually predict whether the students learned the material at the end of the year? So we need to test the peer observations, and the principal observations, and we need to look at the scores at the end of the year, and we need to look at the student data. When you ask the students did you have an effective teacher, you ask specific questions, 'did the teacher help you when you didn't understand the homework, or what you missed on your homework? Did they go help you learn that? Did the teacher get a sense of when he or she didn't explain the information well, and help get your class on track? Did your teacher manage the classroom well? It turns out there are about six questions you can ask the students - not 'did you like the teacher,' but what they did in the classroom that actually measures and correlates to whether the test scores got better at the end of the year.

Do you notice what is bothering me? Mrs. Gates begins by acknowledging that good teaching cannot be reduced to a test score - or at least that this is often said. She then asserts that the half billion dollars they have spent on research in this area have uncovered a number of things that can be measured that allow us to predict which teachers will have the highest test scores. A great teacher is defined over and over again as one who made sure students "learned the material at the end of the year."

If you look closely at how she describes peer observations, the method at work is even clearer. Teachers tend to support peer observation, because it can be a valuable basis for collaboration, which yields many benefits to us beyond possible test score gains. But what does Melinda Gates say about it? It can be worthwhile, BUT: only the models of peer observation that have been proven to raise test scores should be used. And presumably we can count on the Gates Foundation to provide us with that information.

In spite of all the billions they have spent, it appears that the Gates Foundation is laboring under the same logical fallacy that doomed No Child Left Behind. In a way which employs circular reasoning, they have defined great teaching as that which results in the most gains on end of year tests, and then spent millions of dollars identifying indicators of teaching that will yield the best scores.

The most deceptive strategy is how they then try to pretend that these indicators are "multiple measures" of good teaching. In fact, these are simply indicators of teaching practices associated with higher test scores. In spite of Mrs. Gates' feint at the opening of her response, everything she describes, all these things that supposedly go beyond test scores - peer observations, student perceptions - are only deemed valid insofar as they are correlated with higher test scores.

Melinda Gates begins with the question "How do we know a teacher's making a difference in a student's life?" That is an excellent and complex question. However, when we look at her answer, we find she commits the logical fallacy known as "begging the question." One begs the question when one assumes something is true, when that is actually a part of what must be proven.

The question she begs is "what defines great teaching?" This is not answered by finding teaching methods associated with higher test scores. This question remains hanging over the entire school reform enterprise. Until we answer that question, we are devising complex mechanisms to elevate test scores assuming this will improve students' lives, when this is manifestly unproven. In fact, I would argue that many of the strategies used to boost scores are actually harmful to our students. And many dimensions of great teaching are not reflected in test scores -- and are systematically undermined when educators are held ever more "accountable" for these scores.

This episode should remind us of the crucial need to teach critical thinking in our schools - and apply such thinking to the dilemmas we face.

The other thing that was rather disturbing was the omnipresence of the Gates Foundation's largesse. Towards the end of the show, Brian Williams offered this advice to viewers:

This is a couple who have decided to give away their fortune. I heard two educators earlier today, one said to the other, "they never set out to do anything other than put money into education and help kids." So thanks to our audience for being mindful of that.

There was some pushback, however, and NBC deserves some credit for giving space for some differing views. New Haven teacher Matt Presser was one of the winners of an essay contest, and he offered his thoughts:

Too often school reform is something that is happening to our students as opposed to with them or for them, and so many decisions are being made by people in board rooms, people in the White House, when the real people who know what our students need are the people here today, the people in our classrooms every day.

This must have seemed to be a bit ungrateful to Brian Williams, because he then asked,

We just had Mrs. Gates here. This is a guy, I think the Forbes latest figure is $60 billion...here's the Gates family, spending upwards of $7 billion so far, haven't broken a sweat yet, trying to talk to you guys, ask you questions, including students, asking questions about what's working, what's not working. Do you support their efforts? Do you think it's money well spent?

Matt Presser replied,

I think it's a shame that we have to rely on philanthropy to support our schools, to make up for an educational debt that has accrued for generations. I think certain communities, especially in urban areas, have been neglected by education for so many years, we have so much to make up for - not just in education, but in housing policy and job discrimination. In so many areas across the country, that even those efforts to get more money into our schools, there needs to be more a wholistic approach, instead of just something that is thrown at our schools.

But perhaps the most potent counterweight to the Gates approach was offered by teacher John Hunter. He said,

My first job interview, I asked the supervisor, what should I do? She said "What do you want to do?" As a teacher, to be given that kind of open space, that kind of mandate-less position to be in where you can create out of the emptiness, it allowed me to create that kind of template for my students, where I could ask them, "what would YOU like to do today? What is your passion? What drives you?" If the students have the interest and you build towards that, then they can come with more passion for learning.

He took advantage of this latitude to create a now-famous eight-week long interactive game where his students are challenged to solve world problems. Was this great teaching? Do we have to wait until we see how his students performed on the end-of-year standardized tests to find out?

What do you think? Does the Gates Foundation's research into great teaching beg the question by relying so heavily on test scores? How does this affect the direction of education reform?

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Last week, one of Stephen Colbert's guests was a former mail carrier named Phil Rubio, who raised the alarm about the potential demise of a basic government service, the US Post Office. Dr. Rubio explained that the Post Office is a rather strange government/business hybrid, where it is controlled by Congress, but expected to cover its expenses through the revenue it generates. Yet it is not supposed to compete directly with the United Parcel Service or FedEx.

When Stephen Colbert asked Dr. Rubio why we should care about the Post Office, he replied: "Universal service." He pointed out that the Post Office adds two million addresses a year, takes care of our changes of address, and charges the same flat rate for a letter whether it is bound for an address around the corner, or one in the farthest corner of the nation.

There are now about 4,000 local post offices scheduled to be closed, though we have heard little about this from the media.

Instead we hear that this service is wasteful, and that it must be privatized.

The dialogue about the Postal Service sounds eerily familiar. Universal service is the hallmark of our local public schools as well. Unlike private, parochial and many charter schools, we accept all students, from all walks of life. The Post Office cannot refuse to deliver to an address because the road is too bumpy, and we cannot refuse students who come to school hungry or traumatized by violence.

Like the Post Office, our schools have been assailed as bastions of lazy, union-protected government workers. The very idea that we might be motivated by a desire to serve our students is denied. It was revealed more than a year ago that teachers spend more than a billion dollars from our own pockets to support learning in our classrooms. Teachers often provide basic supplies, like binders, pencils and paper. And as these supplies are cut from school budgets, even greater burdens fall on teachers.

Unfortunately, the fact that many of our schools serve the poor and disenfranchised does not offer us much credit in some quarters. As John Kuhn, a local school district superintendent from Texas, declared last Spring, "We say, send us your poor, send us your homeless, the children of your afflicted and your addicted. Send us your kids who don't speak English, y nosotros le hablamos en español. Send us your special needs children, we will not turn them away." However, the most conservative among us do not believe we should even offer a free public education to students who are undocumented immigrants.

The very idea of public service has been tarnished by those who have blind faith in the wisdom of the marketplace. But our schools, like our post offices, are not driven only to make money. Public schools are a service which depends on government funding. Some conservatives have turned taxes and government itself into the great bogeyman of modern society. And just as with mail delivery, there are eager profiteers, currently posing as "education reformers," ready to take over profitable segments of the education "market." The demise of the public sector is a very real possibility - and local public schools may soon join post offices across the country, if we do not rally the support of our communities.

Our teacher unions have been vilified for negotiating on behalf of teachers. But unions are the original grassroots organizations, and as we see class sizes soar across the country, we are reminded that the working conditions our unions negotiate for teachers are the learning conditions for our students. If our unions are eliminated or silenced, we will lose a powerful voice for public education.

Next Tuesday, Sep. 27, there will be rallies in local communities to save the post office. Go here for more information. Let's take a stand for public service!

What do you think? Are our public schools, like local post offices, members of an endangered species? How can we generate support for public service?

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Guest post by John Thompson. Part two of two.

Last week I read Paul Tough's New York Times Magazine article, "What if the Secret to Success is Failure?," about the approach being taken by the KIPP schools and others, inspired by the work of Martin Seligman. Two big issues came up for me. The first were some practical concerns, regarding what happens when public schools attempt to implement a "no excuses" model. The second were some larger philosophical questions about the moral lessons being taught, and the roles our schools play in this arena. Yesterday's post addresses the first set of issues. Today, part two addresses the second set.

Let's just say it is the 1990s and you are a young educator pioneering methods for overcoming poverty. You have developed a system of rewards and demerits designed to train middle school students not only in fractions and algebra but also in "perseverance and empathy." Wouldn't the next step be obvious? After all, once they move on, who will care about 8th grade test scores? Clearly, your students' future will be determined by their "grit," and resilience.

A system of rewards and punishment might be fine as a short term tactic, but then a teacher would then need to wean students off of its artificiality. Training kids to respond to external control might be a necessary evil, as long as you coax them towards self-control. Creating metrics to guide behavior falls under the category of "fake it until you can make it." But, your students must learn that merits and demirits cannot be more than a temporary expedient towards becoming an inner-directed adult. As teens move on to high school and beyond, they must put aside those childish things, develop an internal locus of control, build perseverance, and learn to learn.

Of course, KIPP co-founder Dave Levin saw it differently and the rest is history. To his credit, Levin did not buy the most reductionistic versions of data-driven accountability. He never claimed that teaching to a narrow portion of the brain to raise scores in bubble-in tests, rigorously keeping score, and demonstrating high expectations could be scaled up, transforming the entire nation's schools and ending poverty. He abjured the gamesmanship of other "reformers" who brazenly twisted numbers and claimed that neighborhood schools could replicate those results with an unflinching focus on classroom instruction. On the other hand, Levin has not been particularly vocal when "reformers" exaggerate his record in order to narrow the curriculum, create nonstop test prep, bash teachers, and undermine collective bargaining.

Also to his credit, Levin learned from his first students. In 1999, his 8th grade graduates produced the fifth-highest scores in New York City. He got 90% of them into selective high schools and 80% went to college. Even with that elite group, however, only 33% graduated from college. Levin realized that "the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence."

Paul Tough's New York Times Magazine "What if the Secret of Success is Failure?" brings us to the second phase of Levin's intellectual journey, and it is even more surprising. Tough tells the story of Levin, and the principal of the elite Riverside School, and their experiment with the psychology of success. Years of scientific research was combined into the "manual of the sanities." After a collaboration with psychologists who had studied patterns of behavior throughout history, they developed a list of seven character traits for success - zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity

The principal of the elite private school was equally committed to the goal of building moral character, but he rejected the idea of grading kids on it. "For Levin," writes Tough, "the next step was clear. Wouldn't it be cool, he mused, if each student graduated from school with not only a G.P.A. but also a C.P.A., for character-point average? And if you were a parent of a KIPP student, wouldn't you want to know how your son or daughter stacked up next to the rest of the class in character as well as in reading ability?"

Personally, I would not want to know how my child's moral character grade stacks up against other children's scores. In fact, the idea sounds creepy to me.

But I could support KIPP offering of "dual-purpose instruction." They deliberately work "explicit talk about character strengths" into every lesson. A KIPP dean lost me, however, when he said, "character conversations like that one isn't academic instruction at all, or even discipline; it's therapy." They use "self-talk" to understand and overcome unconscious fears and self-destructive habits. "The kids who succeed at KIPP are the ones who can C.B.T. themselves in the moment," the dean explained.

Tough then contrasts the way that the rich school and KIPP put this research to different uses. The elite school basically used the new psychological findings the way most educators would. It upgraded traditional teachings about moral character. KIPP, though, now seeks to scale up "'performance character,' which includes values like effort, diligence and perseverance."

On one hand, my experience confirms the work of Levin, James Heckman, and others that socio-emotional skills are the key to success in school and beyond. On the other hand, as an inner city teacher, I have often worried that I was engaging in psychotherapy, on a wholesale level, without a license. Years of consulting with school counselors about our role in addressing child abuse, suicide alarms, and potentially deadly conflicts and illnesses have made me an adherent of the principle of "First, do no harm."

For example, whenever our school loses a student, counselors teach educators how to watch for signs of depression and other symptoms in their classmates. Recently, though, we have been warned against encouraging too much discussion by grieving students. We are briefed on the latest research on PTSD and on the dangers of dwelling on trauma, and thus urged to refer students to counselors while moving more quickly back into a routine. I am not qualified to judge our newer advice, any more than I am qualified to evaluate C.B.T. It would be the height of arrogance for me to ignore the medical experts. On the other hand, my classroom experience would not be grounds for hanging out a shingle as a medical professional.

I cannot conceive of a non-professional engineering a system of cognitive behavioral therapy, and imposing it on entire schools. Worse, consider the hubris of grading kids on a scale of one to five on 24 "character indicators" and using all of KIPP's marketing skills to acculturate (or indoctrinate?) kids into the system.

Tough thus reveals a complex quandary. In English Arts, we want students to probe the deepest of the human emotions. In social studies and Psychology, we want class discussions that wrestle with humanity's most profound conflicts. In football, we want to inculcate aggression and a "nose for the ball." In teaching students to be students, we must socialize them into the values, like delayed gratification and self-control, to be a success in life, as well as school. But do we have another "Pygmalion" here? And how precisely should adults aspire to control the maturation process? Do we really want amateur Cognitive Behavioral Therapists practicing on vulnerable teens?

And that brings us back to the question that prompted Levin's experiments. Levin sought to scale up his best instructional practices, and in doing so he pioneered a controversial, and controlling, commitment to metrics. Levin, and others, have expanded this quantitative process into an effort to engineer "a better teacher."


What do you think? Do we really want to mass design a better student? Should anyone, no matter how sincere, dare to grade people's moral character, much less train a better human being?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by John Thompson. Part one of two.

Last week I read Paul Tough's New York Times Magazine article, "What if the Secret to Success is Failure?," about the approach being taken by the KIPP schools and others, inspired by the work of Martin Seligman. Two big issues came up for me. The first were some practical concerns, regarding what happens when public schools attempt to implement a "no excuses" model. The second were some larger philosophical questions about the moral lessons being taught, and the roles our schools play in this arena. This post addresses the first set of issues. Tomorrow, part two will address the second set.

In his article, Tough quotes a principal:

"The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure," Randolph explained. "And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything."

In inner city schools, there is plenty of failure but rarely is there an effort to cultivate grittiness, resilience, and skills for rebounding from failure. Tough's article hints at the reason why, and hints even more broadly at a better way to improve urban schools.

Tough started with KIPP co-founder Dave Levin who developed a system of rewards and demerits designed to train middle school students in fractions and algebra. Levin also saw the need to nurture perseverance and empathy, and that was one reason why he incorporated songs, chants, slogans, and exhortatory techniques in his schools.

I wonder what would have happened if systems across the nation had adopted Levin's entire philosophy. But not surprisingly, high-challenge schools started with the easiest of Levin's methods and put up signs saying "Whatever It Takes!" and "Failure is NOT an Option!" So, I am curious about the number of teachers who then saw the following pattern as systems cherry-picked Levin's model.

First, principals and teachers who supported Levin's vision would start by calling a faculty meeting and proclaiming an unflinching focus on instruction, as well as a system for providing remediation. Levin's concerns about the socio-emotional aspects of learning would immediately be forgotten. But a system of rewards and punishments for students and teachers, along with additional paperwork would be announced. In my experience, some teachers would push back, others would remind their colleagues of the number of times this basic model had been tried, and most would silently vow to stick with the new system until it worked or, more likely, failed and was abandoned.

In my experience, at first, these initiatives always worked pretty well, and often they were spectacular successes. After a few weeks, however, the issue for teachers would become the minority of students who failed to comply. It might be the same handful of "hallwalkers" or the 5 to 10% of the chronically disruptive kids. It might be the 20 to 25% of the school who couldn't or wouldn't make it to first hour, or the few who steadfastly refused to come to class on time or to do detention. Or perhaps, the push for higher standards drove up the failure rate to above the 20 to 25% quota on F's.

Of course, the above percentages vary. The problem, however, is the raw numbers. Educators in neighborhood schools, in my experience, are just as skillful as those in "No Excuses" schools in dealing with individual cases. It is the sheer number of challenges that is overwhelming. And with district administrators having proclaimed that, "Failure is not an option," acknowledging the failure of students to meet "Expectations!" is not an option.

The issue for administrators invariably became the teachers - and not just the minority of teachers who failed to comply with the new system. Earlier in my career, by October teachers would become louder in pushing for consequences, and then our faculty meetings would degenerate into shouting matches. Eventually, the system managed to ban those complaints as "Excuses!," and teachers became sullen as they abandoned these initiatives. Sometimes, though, principals would expend their political capital and get approval to refer some of the most high-profile discipline problems to alternative schools. By that time, however, alternative services would be full, and soon we would get those students back, along with dozens more who were not ready to return to regular schools.

I have always wondered what could have happened if the entire "No Excuses!" model had been adopted and if the system had invested as much political capital in teaching perseverance and empathy. What if the failure to meet classroom behavioral standards had not been dismissed as the teachers' failures with classroom management? Think of the difference it would have made if educators in neighborhood schools had the ability to draw a line and enforce standards. Then, the failure of a student to control his or her behavior could have become "a teachable moment." We could have helped students develop the resilience required to be a good citizen in class.

The failure of large numbers of students to meet attendance and tardy standards could have been an even greater opportunity. We could have used our wonderful data systems to identify truants and we could have used this as an chance to reach out to parents. It would have also created another "opportunity" to chip away at an even tougher dilemma. Students can't learn for mastery if they are not in class, but enforcing the attendance policies would have sent the failure rate through the roof. Once students gained the rational expectation of passing, even though they miss dozens of classes, it becomes much harder to learn for mastery.

Professor Emeritus Lynn Canady has a "smart ass" proposal, saying we should make students "fail faster." Canady asserts that, "Repeated failure does no good for anybody." He says that by the fall we already know which students are hopelessly behind, but we have no option but to let them continue to fail until June. Instead, Canady proposes a schedule where those students are pulled out of their classes at the six week mark and given a second chance. They would be placed on a contract in new classes within the building, and given the support necessary to return to their original class in January, as long as they fulfilled their contractual obligations. In doing so, educators could have taught the stick-to-it-ness required to turn setbacks into lessons for life.

Of course, there would be endless other opportunities to use failure as a starting point for teaching students to be students, and the KIPP model is not the only way to address the socio-emotional. In fact, KIPP does not accept nearly as many children who have undergone deep trauma, meaning that the interventions required in neighborhood schools must be much more intensive. But, had we been just as serious about teaching students to be students as we were about teaching subject matter, could we have avoided our reform wars?

What do you think? What are other ways of turning defeats into opportunities to teach life skills? How many readers have participated in successful experiments to replicate the "No Excuses!" approach to failure, and how many have primarily had experiences like I describe?

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 10:40 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Recently we have heard news of more and more parents taking a stand against standardized testing, acting in what they believe to be the best interests of their children. Two of the leaders of this movement are Tim and Michelle Slekar, of Pennsylvania. I asked them if they would share their perspective.

What led you and your wife to take a public stand on opting out?

Tim Slekar: There is a simple answer and then there are all the academic and philosophical reasons. Let's start with the simple answer. Last year my wife (Michelle) and I went in for a parent teacher conference with one of Luke's teachers. We were concerned because he was really starting to demonstrate some negative attitudes towards reading and language arts. During the conference it became very obvious why he was having issues. While I was talking about the fragile nature of literacy and middle school boys, Luke's teacher spoke up and rather candidly said, "I understand what you are saying but my job is to get Luke ready for the PSSA. I don't have time to teach literature." Michelle walked out and I stayed to point out all the research that essentially condemned teaching to the test as a method of teaching language arts to middle school boys. I knew it wasn't going to make a difference but I had to try to at least let Luke's teacher know that teaching to the test was not only unacceptable to us as parents but that as a pedagogical strategy was not in any of her students' best interests. It was that specific interaction that caused us to "opt out" Luke from PSSA tests.

Also, I have relentlessly critiqued the "reform" movement for the last 20 years. I have been a 2nd grade, 5th grade, 7th grade, and 8th grade teacher, teacher educator, and administrator in higher education. I know the research. I have worked with children. I have worked with new teachers. I frequently visit the local schools as part of my job being Coordinator of the Education Program at Penn State Altoona. I work with public school administrators. I have seen first hand the slow and steady dismantling of the public school system. I finally said to myself, "No more. You will not use Luke as a pawn to produce test scores that will be used to eventually punish his school." The testing and accountability movement was never about "high standards" and "closing the achievement gap." From the beginning this movement was a deceptive attempt (and it worked pretty well) to convince the public that public schools were failing and the tests and results were used as "objective evidence" to prove that something drastic had to be done. The real problem however, was that the testing and accountability movement was the drastic action that was taking place.

Michelle Slekar: After four years of being involved in the schools as a room mom/grade wing rep/PTO & PVC volunteer and 3 years working in the schools as a special education paraprofessional, I saw teachers faces change and hearts break as they were forced by the state to give a test that does not help the children and that they can not help the children. I saw the teachers aching to help and angry at not being allowed to help. As teachers slowly learned the goal of the PSSA it got more intense: they were afraid to lose their jobs, they were afraid to speak out. The teachers were angry because they no longer controlled their classrooms and no longer were respected as professionals and to add insult to injury they were not even allowed to see the tests after scoring to use for their own evaluation of their students. The biggest reason of all, to stand up was to put the smiles back on the children's faces, to take the hurt and anxiety away, to put real learning back in the classrooms and the teaching back into their teachers' hands (who they look up to). To give them time to do projects they can be proud of and allow papers to be written from the heart, to allow learning and comprehension and questioning to drive the classrooms again. To put the heart of learning back into the schools. To get rid of the PSSA and allow self confidence to shine through and positive learning to drive the school.

How have you seen tests affecting your children?

Tim Slekar: That's an interesting question. Luke and Lacey are both successful when it comes to school. They don't get anxious about school and tests, but that is probably because Michelle and I have told them from the time they started school that they should never worry about school. We told them directly that when they take standardized tests to "do your best but don't get upset if you don't know some answers. It's okay." We have also told them that as their parents that the scores mean nothing to us. Instead we want them to learn and enjoy school and find it a place where their curiosity could run wild. So, no, the tests have not affected them in that way. However, as I said earlier the test prep has all but destroyed Luke's belief in the academic aspect of schooling. He does fine, but after 7 years he "gets it" and knows that most of his teachers are teaching for the test.

Lacey (our daughter) so far has been lucky. She's had good experiences and a great 2nd grade teacher last year. She had a teacher that refused to teach surface material. She gave Lacey a great experience. In fact I wrote about it here. This year Lacey is in third grade. I'll be blogging about her experience as the year proceeds.

Michelle Slekar: Luke had fantastic teachers in elementary school, engaging and creative and full of life but when PSSA's came around his teachers changed, he changed. He was not the happy go lucky kid, it was harder to wake him up the morning, he questioned the point of going to school other than to see his friends. He loves Science, he's a thinker but he would say his favorite subjects were gym and recess. He resented having to sit at a desk so long and without talking and not being allowed to leave the room, even if he was done with the test. He felt it was unfair to make them take a test that ultimately did not benefit him, his teachers, and school. He felt betrayed when he realized the goal of the test was to close his school down! Fire his teachers. Would he lose some of his friends? What school would he go to then? Would he still be able to play sports?

Lacey had a different experience. In first and second grade she would comment on how Luke didn't seem to like school and she thought it was weird that he had to take those long tests and she felt lucky that she didn't have to take them and that her teachers let them read and create and write stories and draw pictures. She even wrote a story about a Gingerbread girl that I am working on getting published (with the recommendation of her teacher). I am worried for her this year as she loves to learn and create and I wonder what is going to happen as she enters the world of "test prep time". Will she lose her love of learning? Will she be mad at the school? Will she be mad that her teacher can't do the normal stuff because they have to prepare for the test? We are opting her out this year as well. I'm nervous for her but ready to stand up for the amazing teachers in our school district.

What are the consequences for schools when parents opt their children out of testing?

Tim Slekar: The consequences for schools are pretty straight-forward. According to NCLB regulations, 95% of student populations (minority, English language learners, special education students in a school must participate in testing programs. If 6% of a student population does not take the tests, the school automatically fails to make AYP. Failure to make AYP in consecutive years results in mounting sanctions--eventually closing the school. This is where "opting out" gets a little tricky and people get confused as to our motives. On the surface "opting out" appears to be directed at public schools. However, as I stated earlier, opting out is the only form of action that can save public schools from high stakes testing. Teachers and administrators that actively work against the system can be reprimanded or worse. Politicians on both sides of the aisle won't listen. Therefore, when a parent opts out, it is the ultimate action in support of public schools.

What are the legal rights parents have regarding these tests?

Tim Slekar: This is a tough question. NCLB is a federal law but education is the specific responsibility of the states. So each state sets policy on testing procedures. Here in Pennsylvania there is language the specifically allows parents to opt their child out of PSSA testing for religious reasons. Other states do not have specific language or policies and typically tell parents that opting out is not permitted. However, federal law specifically gives parents the ultimate authority in making decisions about education. A logical application of this should mean that all parents have the right to opt out.

There has been a recent upsurge in interest in opting out. What is happening?

Tim Slekar: I think there are a number of people involved in public schooling (parents, teachers, even some administrators) that are finally realizing that the standards movement and high stakes testing is not helping. In fact, I talk to more parents and teachers that are outright critical of the entire process. Parents see the time wasted on test prep and the shrinking curriculum. Teachers are tired of being treated as low-level technicians and being labeled as "crappy." And some communities see the damage a full-fledged "reformation" of public schools has on local neighborhoods--closing schools hurts communities.

Considering all of the above, citizens are looking for a way to make strong statement of support for public schools. By opting out of corporate reforms (high stakes testing), you are demonstrating your disdain for the reformers' approach to the dismantling of public schools, and demanding that neighborhood schools be given back to the local communities. Politicians aren't listening. The media isn't listening. Therefore strong acts of civil disobedience are the only tools left in this battle to save public schools.

How are schools responding to the "opt out" movement?

Tim Slekar: We don't really have good data to make any generalizations about schools' reactions. Anecdotally, and off the record I have met a few administrators and many teachers that are very supportive of the "opt out" movement. However, some schools still don't really understand the "opt out" movement. They still see it as an attack on the school instead of as a protest against the schools being taken over by corporate reformers. Also, some states are not sure what to make of the movement. We really caught them off guard. They never planned for this type of negative reaction by parents and many states lack any real policies regarding opting out. This has led a few states to "assume" the state has the power to enforce mandatory testing and not allow parents to opt out. However there is a decent amount of Federal law that upholds the parent as the ultimate authority over their child's education. It makes for some interesting debate when parents confront state departments of education.

I would add that if you are an administrator or a school board member, please understand that opting out is not an attack on you or your school. It is an act of civil disobedience to call attention to the damage being done to community based public schools by the high stakes testing regime implemented by the corporate reformers.

How can parents find out more?

Tim Slekar: Great question. A group of activists (United Opt Out) consisting of teachers, parents, teacher educators and concerned citizens have organized a Facebook site and a website called United Opt Out National to help explain "opting out" and how to take action and support the "opt out" movement. Also, anyone can email me at tds12@psu.edu.

What do you think? Could the Opt Out movement have an impact on our test-driven education system?

Tim Slekar is a founding member of United Opt Out. He is also the
Head of the Division of Education, Human Development, and Social
Sciences, and Chair of The Education program at Penn State Altoona.
Tim also presented and marched at the Save Our Schools rally in July.

Michelle Slekar just finished 3 years in the role of Behavioral
Support Multi-task Special Education Paraprofessional in the Bellwood-
Antis School District. She has returned to the role of stay-at-home
mom to help support her husband Tim in the fight against NCLB and to
take care of their family. She plans to opt out both her children
(Luke and Lacey) this school year and proudly marched in the Save Our Schools March this past July in support of public schools and public school teachers.

Image of the Slekar family used by permission.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A few days ago, Fox News personality Ann Coulter sparked outrage when she asserted that kindergarten teachers "have useless jobs," and suggested their work be turned over "to vouchers, to charter schools. They fight for every last dime, they get summers off, they're off at two, and they make more money than most of those pipefitters who no longer have jobs."

Coulter is known for saying outrageous and provocative things, but she has a canny way of revealing the vicious thinking that actually seems to be driving some of our policies. Because over the weekend we heard an urgent call of distress from teachers in the state of Michigan. A letter from activist Dan Quinn was posted Saturday at Fred Klonsky's blog. At Dan's request, I am sharing part of it here.

It is hard to believe that things in Michigan could get worse than they already were. As you already know, Michigan has been under assault all year long. It began with the passage of the Emergency Financial Manager package, continued with the taxing of pensions for retirees, and culminated in the defunding of almost a billion dollars of education funding from K-12 schools; in exchange for $1.8 billion in corporate tax cuts. Tell me how any of these improves education or improves the unemployment situation in Michigan.

This summer we also saw the attacks intensify with a tenure "reform" package that eliminated due process and just cause for dismissals, eliminated seniority, added a list of prohibited subjects of bargaining, and imposed an evaluation system that will require 50% of a teacher's evaluation be based on test scores. Tell me how any of those improves education or improves the unemployment situation in Michigan.

And last week, the Governor signed Senate Bill 7 which requires all education professionals and municipal employees to pay 20% of their health care, regardless of income or previous concessions to keep health care for members. Eventually, health care will cost some support professionals more than they take home in salary. Insane!

And on Thursday, it was reported that Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville plans to introduce something called "Right to Teach" which is a right to work law aimed just at teachers.

(Note: You can read more about the "Right to Teach" bill here.
Many states have "Right to Work" laws that prevent unions from collecting dues from bargaining unit members. These states, not coincidentally, have weak union representation.)

It appears that these lawmakers are seeking to take away from teachers one of the means we have to affect the decisions that are made about our schools - our ability to be organized into a union. As Quinn explains, the Michigan Education Association has been active in back recall efforts targeting certain politicians that have been hostile to teachers.

This push, and the rhetoric from Ann Coulter, is similar to the drive that took place last spring to strip Wisconsin teachers of their collective bargaining rights. Then, as in this case, teachers are accused of being greedy for wanting the basic rights we once took for granted. Affordable health care benefits and a decent retirement are forms of compensation that have been won over the years through collective bargaining. The fact that many private sector employees have lost these over the past decade is a disaster, but we should be seeking to expand these benefits for all, not strip them from the last vestiges of our middle class.

What do you think? Are our colleagues in Michigan in danger of losing important rights?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Back in 1992 the Mattel Corporation released a line of talking Barbie dolls that uttered the phrase "Math class is tough!" Reaction from parents and consumers was strong, and the company recalled the dolls.

This month we revisit the controversy over messages about school, this time in the form of stylish t-shirts. First came JC Penney, which included in its back to school line, a girl's t-shirt that read "I'm too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me." The company has withdrawn the shirts after more than 1,600 people signed an online petition.

Now Forever 21 has gotten into the act with a t-shirt that reads "Allergic to Algebra." Other shirts in the line include one that says "I (heart) school -- not...", and another that simply states "SKOOL SUCKS".

The Mommy Files blog has photos of these shirts, and informs us that a petition addressed to Forever 21 has been started. The petition is actually very thoughtful, and says, in part:

Why is this shirt harmful? Messages such as "Allergic To Algebra" can lead to sterotype threat for women and girls, which serves to widen the gender gap in math and science at a time when female involvement is critical. Stereotype threat refers the risk of confirming a negative stereotype about one's group. Since 1995, there have been innumerable research studies within the field of social psychology confirming that stereotype threat regarding one's race or gender can be incredibly detrimental to one's personal achievements. More information can be found at reducingstereotypethreat.org

I believe stereotype threat is a real phenomenon. Once our students get a self-appraisal that they are "bad" at something, it becomes almost impossible to convince them otherwise. These shirts did not invent the idea that it is cool to hate school, or to be bad at math, but they are encouraging and reinforcing that idea, in everyone who wears or even sees this clothing.

What do you think? Is "stereotype threat" real? Should retailers be pressured not to promote this sort of message?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:10 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Dr. Jeffrey N. Golub.

The story goes that, some years ago, a Midwestern university decided to build a new library on its campus. So an architectural firm was commissioned to design and build the building. Within weeks after its opening, however, the new library began to sink into the ground. Seems the architects had not factored in the weight of the books.

Oops!

This tale, it turns out, is actually an urban-legend that has been circulating among students on college campuses and elsewhere for years and years. The situation never actually happened, but I mention this story anyway because it seems a pertinent analogy to describe the problem that plagues the Common Core Standards that have only recently been 'built'. They, too, are not 'well-grounded,' so to speak, because the authors of the standards have failed to factor in some crucial elements or aspects of instruction. This failure of foresight and insight will surely cause the standards to 'sink' - to become ineffective, inappropriate, and intolerable. The biggest problem with this 'sinking' that is sure to happen is that the students, teachers, and indeed, whole school systems that will labor under these burdensome 'goals and expectations' will sink right along with them.

Some of these neglected and omitted aspects of instruction include the following critical elements:

1. The standards may be standardized, but the students are not.

Students are different. They have different needs and abilities, different interests and concerns; they come from different backgrounds and bring different life experiences and different work habits to the classroom and to their study of the content. Imposing a restrictive structure and set of expectations - and insisting they all move through the same content at the same time and in the same way doesn't make much sense, does it?

2. Reading comprehension involves much more than simply learning information from the text.

Of course it is important for students to gain knowledge from informational texts, but competent and comprehensive reading instruction engages students in practicing and developing so many more skills with so many more kinds of literature. Reading poetry, short stories, novels, and so many other literary genres engages students in constructing, negotiating, comprehending, and communicating meanings, and these thinking skills and language competencies are the central business of just about every English class. Where are the goals and expectations for students' ability to engage in transactions with literature (Rosenblatt) and create envisionments (Langer) and experience the universe of discourse (Moffett)?

3. The world of the future that students will inhabit may not be exactly the same as the current world.

The stated goal of the standards is to prepare students for college and careers, but we don't know for certain what careers and opportunities will become available by the time the students complete their Secondary education. What specific job-related skills and competencies will be necessary? Will they be the same as the competencies required today? Maybe. Maybe not. But, if we are to successfully prepare our students for what lies ahead, we had better look to the future and develop envisionments that will inform our current educational efforts.

One envisionment that may have some merit is to adopt a curriculum that develops students' creative, logical, and critical thinking skills. No, the idea is not to teach these skills through direct instruction - such an approach could too easily lead to the establishment of a constrictive and restrictive listing of microscopic sub-goals that would soon reveal the same deficiencies of insight exhibited by the current standards schemes.

Instead, the goal would be to design an increasingly complex series of projects to pursue and real-world problems to solve that would immerse the students in these kinds of thinking skills. The idea is to set up situations in such a way that students would need to draw upon, and thereby develop, their creative, logical, and critical thinking skills. Marion Brady, a distinguished director of instruction, teacher educator, author, and newspaper columnist in Florida, has already designed such an innovative curriculum in which the students engage in what he calls 'Investigations.' His curriculum guide, titled "Connections: Investigating Reality - A Course of Study" and available for free download on his website, outlines collaborative projects in which students investigate and explore patterns of information, relationships, people demographics, environment, shared ideas, and the dynamics of change, among others. Such a series of projects and problems depend heavily on students' thinking skills and reflective behavior. You can't put this kind of instruction on a standardized test...nor should you.

4. The teachers are a critical and integral part of any curriculum development and assessment effort.

Teachers are a critical, integral part of the educational enterprise: they are the designers and directors of instruction, after all, and are decision-makers, too. They make hundreds and hundreds of instructional decisions every day: what to teach, and when and how to teach it; who needs extra help and extra time with the work; what choices should be made available to the students for ways to complete the activity or assignment; what texts and other resources should be used for the content under study...and the list goes on and on.

No high-stakes test can replace the many kinds of ongoing formative assessments and kid-watching strategies that teachers use in their classes every day to determine next steps. Teachers in their day-to-day observations and evaluations of students' language performance, coupled with their own judgments of their students' needs and progress, help teachers to shape and shift their instruction to be continually responsive to the students' emerging competence and literacy through language.

Teachers do not have a problem with accountability. They are responsible for making learning happen for their students, after all, so they welcome authentic assessments of the progress that they, and their students, have made. But they do object, and rightly so, to a situation in which they are being held accountable for a curriculum over which they have no control.

The various standards schemes - with their accompanying high-stakes tests - have substantially taken away teachers' control of their instructional efforts and hampered their work in the classroom. Currently we have a situation in which the teachers' designing and decision-making functions are no longer valued and are severely constrained, a state in which assessment has deteriorated into a frequent, debilitating series of high-stakes tests that leave teachers with almost no time for authentic, substantive instruction -- instead they must devote their and their students' precious classroom time to 'test-preparation' that may or may not have anything to do with developing students' communication competencies and language performance.

It is unfortunate that the teachers and their pivotal instructional roles in curriculum development and assessment are ignored in the Standards, as well as the other crucial elements described above. And so we are left with a 'sinking' document that cannot provide a satisfactory foundation for instruction. But this unfortunate result - an unnecessary and unproductive consequence of these omissions - doesn't have to happen if the authors and other sponsors of the Common Core Standards will stop what they are doing for a moment and consider the critical, integral elements of instruction that they have 'left behind' - that they have not factored into their scheme and structure. These elements are there whether the standards authors acknowledge them or not. To ignore them will surely sink this enterprise. To address them may result in a workable document we can really use to guide our instruction and develop our students' communication competencies and literacy in authentic, engaging, thoughtful, coherent ways.

What do you think? Has the Common Core Standards left the critical role of teachers out of the equation? Can this enterprise be rescued?

DR. JEFFREY N. GOLUB, teacher, author, and consultant in Seattle, Washington, worked for 13 years as Associate Professor of English Education at the University of South Florida [USF], preparing students who wished to teach English in the public schools. For 20 years previously, he taught English, speech communication, and writing classes at both junior and senior high schools in Seattle. In 1990, while teaching at Shorecrest High School in Seattle, he was one of 10 English teachers in the country to win the State Farm Insurance Company's "Good Neighbor" Award for innovative teaching, and in 1994 he was awarded the University of South Florida's Teaching Excellence award. And he loves chocolate. He can be reached at golub62@comcast.net.

REFERENCES

Brady, Marion. 2011. Connections: Investigating Reality - A Course of Study. Available at www.marionbrady.com

Langer, Judith A. 1995. Envisioning Literature: Literary Understanding and Literature Instruction. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.

Moffett, James. 1968. Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston, MA. Houghton Mifflin.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. 1995. Literature as Exploration. Fifth Ed. New York: Modern Language Association.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. 1978. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

The author wishes to thank Yvonne Siu-Runyan, NCTE President, for her considerable help in revising drafts of this article.

Image used by permission of the author.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 7:02 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I present here a rebuttal to the interview I carried last week with management expert Steve Denning. It was written by a Massachusetts teacher who goes by the name Chemtchr.

Guest post by Chemtchr.

Steven Denning's Forbes essay on "The Single Best Idea for Reforming K-12 Education" was welcomed by teachers, because it deplores some of the egregious management practices imposed on public school systems in the name of corporate education reform.

Mr. Denning was then kind enough to answer some interview questions for teacher-blogger Anthony Cody on Edweek, and this led to a lively discussion in the comments.

Denning made one central assertion in that interview with which teachers would seriously disagree, and I'd like to follow up by exploring that disagreement. I'm addressing primarily teachers, but also Steve Denning and businesspeople of good will. I'd like it if we could actually talk them over.

Denning wrote,

If the issue is framed as an education issue, "how do we improve education?" there is a risk that anachronistic management ideas will be implicitly assumed as self-evident and imposed on the sector. ...By framing the issue as a management issue, "what does the world know about running knowledge organizations?" then the whole array of evidence can be brought to bear on the discussion.

He justifies the leap because of his management consulting experience in the software development industry, which he contrasts to outmoded factory management thinking.

We actual educators know education issues need to be framed as education issues. Education is absolutely not a subset of the software industry, where profit is made from proprietary products and delivery systems, any more than it is a subset of factories. In spite of Denning's idealistic writings about good businesses managing themselves to delight their customers, the goal of business management is profit. Public education is no kind of business.

I was disappointed that Denning twice ducked my challenge to address the issue of the aggressive drive of the new "public-private" interface, to manage education as an entrepreneurial sector. He has written repeatedly of his ambition to remake the "education sector", and I wonder what he means by that.

I would be more comfortable with his management advice if he would comment on the corporate reform model of bringing public institutions under the control of private management. Privately selected management shares in government regulatory control, through "accountability" legislation, but serves its for-profit "partner's" business goals instead of the public.

Denning's dismissal was strange:
"Please tell Chemtchr not to hear music that isn't being played. I have never suggested moving public sector schools into the private sector."

Mr. Denning, that music is being played.

My question has nothing to do with "moving schools into the private sector". The public-private partnerships demanded by Gates, Broad, and Duncan leave the schools in the formerly public sector, with its public revenue stream, which is all brought under private control.

Here are the Gates Foundation, Pearson, and Microsoft, playing the melody line. Microsoft is already developing computer games which can be aligned to Pearson's standardized tests on the Gates/Pearson common core curriculum materials.

Here is Denning humming along, in his July 29 Forbes blog, "Wake-up Call for the Gates Foundation.

Denning reiterates (without quarrel) the same tired Gates lies about "lessons learned" (teacher unions and government monopolies are obstacles to education improvement), but he counsels Gates to think "bigger" by adopting Denning's management formulation. Denning himself makes this reply to a commenter, "As you predicted, the $600 billion Government run system has proven more enduring than might have been hoped, although the results are even worse than expected."

Please open the link above, to see Denning's diagram of the "sage on the stage" model he claims teachers follow now. There is a one way arrow from teacher to each student, and no arrows between the students. Colleagues, is that true of any teacher you know?

In Denning's more enlightened management vision, all participants are gathered around the "internet". There is an arrow for student-teacher, and between students, but most interactions are through the internet, and all the arrows suddenly become two way. Neither of these diagrams, of course, reflects the reality of relationships among teachers, students, and the world they interact with. We frame the questions as education ones, not management.

For instance, I would draw all my arrows two-way already, within my students' laboratory teams, and between the teams. Mr. Denning may not be aware that most teachers already do something like that, because his arrows are management arrows and not real communication arrows.

Teachers also work, as educators, to preserve the human and community core of American education. Deborah Meier can give some references. We help our students build those precious two-way arrows that lead out of the box. These are their own experiential connections, between themselves and the world that is really around them in the physical universe, and in their communities.

Denning omitted those from his diagram. At his management system's heart is, not the student or the community or the world, but a red box labeled internet. Rather than a tool in students' hands, it has become a conduit through which educational services, testing, and virtual "experiences" can be dispensed and managed. Should the digital transformation be a business management decision, or an educational one?

Bankrolling the "Pearson Foundation" and "Gates Foundation" are two of the most insatiably expansionist for-profit entities history has ever seen.

I am disappointed in Denning's answers, so far, because we need knowledgeable people who aren't auditioning for the Gates juggernaut. Unfortunately, it looks like he's talking to us because we took the stage, finally, on July 29. We went over his head to our people. Let us not be eager to hand our microphone over to him. We need to take back the narrative ourselves, because these are education issues.

Diane Ravitch also responded to the Forbes call for ideas about what its wealthy readers might do to improve public education. She (alone) didn't suggest they take it over, but instead offered ways actual philanthropists could work more humbly to alleviate the horrors of child poverty.

What do you think? Is Chemtchr's critique on target? Or is there value in Denning's framing of the issues?

Chemtchr teaches science and advises a student service club at a public high school in a diverse low-income community in Massachusetts . She is a graduate of UC Santa Cruz and MSU Bozeman, and has taught in urban community-based programs and at a tribal college, as well as in public districts. She's active in Citizens for Public Schools, and in local and state councils. She thanks Susan Ohanian for links used in this commentary.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by John Thompson.

There is more to the job of teaching than encouraging students to relentlessly pursue knowledge. We also have to sign in and out, take attendance, teach capitalization and spelling, wash our coffee cups in the faculty lounge, and post grades on time. Above all, our job requires a respectful attitude towards everyone.

Perhaps that is why a recent Education Week Commentary, "Putting Myself to the Test," by Ama Nyamekye has been bothering me. Nyamekye explains that she had been an opponent of standardized testing until she had been challenged by her principal to prove that her students were "really getting it." Nyamekye started using Regents examinations to assess her students, and she concluded that the tests made her a "smarter" teacher.

I should start with the disclaimer that the following are the musings of a high school social studies teacher. Clearly, it is more important for elementary teachers to know with precision whether their students are mastering essential skills. With teenagers, though, can we even identify the "it" that we hope our students are getting?

I have no problem with any educator using standardized tests, as long as he or she doesn't impose that preference on others. Despite the evidence presented by Larry Cuban and others that data-driven instruction is not ready to compete with the professional judgments of veteran teachers in terms of giving timely and accurate feedback, young teachers, especially, might benefit from frequent assessments. After all, Nyamekeye was still new enough that she listened to her principal ...

Seriously, there was nothing in the commentary by this young educator that made me doubt her claims that testing made her a better teacher by forcing her to work on her weaknesses. Before embracing standardized testing, Nyamekye, "was teaching to her strengths instead of strengthening her weaknesses." Great! Her dedication is praiseworthy. But, what is so wrong with teaching based on her strengths?

Since NCLB, we have been constantly remediating teachers and students. We seemed to have abandoned the idea that teachers and our students should be primarily concerned with building on our strengths. Being a gardener, I have been increasingly dismayed that young educators were being socialized into being the type of stick-in-the mud who strolls through flower beds but only sees the weeds. But that could not be grounds for a valid criticism of this teacher's commentary, unless I also was developing too much of an eye for weeds ...

Nyamekye confesses to being better at teaching literary analysis, but testing improved her students spelling and punctuation. Fine. I am a critical thinking coach who rarely has gotten around to those tasks. Then, my suspicions were raised by Nyamekye's statement that she also, "discovered holes in my curriculum." Well duh. This is 2011. If we tried to completely cover our curriculum, and had a 100% time-on-task rate, our students might cover the high school curriculum by the time they are thirty!

Again, there was nothing in the essay to justify criticism of a fellow teacher. It did not bother me, I finally realized, that Nyamekye had access to prime educational real estate - the Commentary page of our profession's journal of record - and she used it to proclaim her support of standardized testing. What bothered me was that Nyamekye praised testing because it helped her learn, "my job wasn't simply to encourage students to relentlessly pursue knowledge."

Still, I could not articulate why it upset me that a dedicated young educator was so preoccupied with covering the curriculum. Then I read, Youngjoo Kim's "The Case Against Teaching as Delivery of the Curriculum." Kim had asked his Education School class about the role of teachers and a teacher/student "cheerfully volunteered 'teachers deliver the curriculum.'" Worse, Kim's class found that a valid definition of a teacher. One chimed in that a teacher is "the conduit to a curriculum." Kim was equally dismayed to learn that "one student after another" expressed the self-image of a "teacher as deliver of curriculum."

Now, I'm convinced that Kim's article should be a must read for teachers in an age of "reform." He worries that an educator who sees himself or herself as covering the curriculum is being socialized into a "Clerk of the Empire." Kim said we need teachers who are "letter writers," not "mail carriers."

Once a teacher sees the job as making sure that there are no holes in the material covered by the tests, how can they not "resist the experience of education in the moment?" If teachers are "conditioned to feel guilty" when they deviate from the curriculum, will they still learn how to take full advantage of "serendipitous 'teachable moments?'"

Kim frets that teachers who owe such loyalty to the curriculum will suppress student voices. I would never imply that Ama Nyamekye, or any other individual, has done such a thing. But, what if we backed off from "teaching the subject," and allowed educators who want to be free to "teach the student?" As Kim explains, "every child begins with a voracious thirst for knowledge." Every teacher is a former child with " hunger to understand." Should that not be the rock on which we build our schools? Teachers with one set of intellectual taste buds could build on their talent for teaching spelling and punctuation. Release teachers who hunger to be teach analysis, synthesis, and problem-solving to satisfy that appetite. The key would be recruiting teachers with the full diversity of strengths, in order to reach the variety of talents of our students.

What do you think? Is it possible to fill the holes in any secondary curriculum? Are we neglecting our strengths and our students' strengths as we focus on remediation? What would be wrong with seeing the teachers' job as simply encouraging students to relentlessly pursue knowledge? While pursuing that goal, would we not develop deep understandings of the individuals in our classes? Do we not need a more profound vision of teaching than delivering the curriculum, or have I been too hard on Ama Nyamekye's philosophy of education?

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 9:25 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A couple of days ago I was surprised to find an insightful post in Forbes Magazine, offering us "The Single Best Idea for Reforming Education," by columnist and management expert Steve Denning. I wrote a post describing his idea, and also sent him some questions, because I think he offers some useful ways to reframe our concerns around the current direction of our schools. Here are his answers.

Interview with Steve Denning:

What would you say is the biggest problem with our educational system today?

The biggest problem that the education system faces today is a preoccupation with, and the application of, the factory model of management to education, where everything is arranged for the scalability and efficiency of "the system", to which the students, the teachers, the parents and the administrators have to adjust. "The system" grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and parents alike.

Given that the factory model of management doesn't work very well, even in the few factories that still remain in this country, or anywhere else in the workplace for that matter, we should hardly be surprised that it doesn't work well in education either.

But given that the education system is seen to be in trouble, there is a tendency to think we need "stronger management" or "tougher management", where "management" is assumed to be the factory model of management. It is assumed to mean more top-down management and tighter controls, and more carrots and sticks. It is assumed to mean hammering the teachers who don't perform and ruthlessly weeding out "the dead wood". The thinking is embedded in Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind.

These methods are known to be failing in the private sector, because they dispirit the employees and limit their ability to contribute their imagination and creativity; they frustrate customers, and they are killing the very organizations that rely on them. So why should we expect anything different in the education sector?

When the problems have been caused in the first place by introducing the practices of "management", then a more rigorous pursuit of this type of "management" only makes things worse. It is like medieval doctors trying to cure patients by bloodletting, using leeches, which only made the patients worse.

The inapplicablity of these methods is aggravated by the changes in the economy. Not so long ago, we could predict what jobs and careers might be available for children in their adult life. The education system could tell little Freddie or Janet what to study and if he or she mastered that, he or she was set for life. Not any more. We simply don't know what jobs will be there in twenty years time. Today, apart from a few core skills like reading, writing, math, thinking, imagining and creating, we cannot know what knowledge or skills will be needed when Freddie or Janet grows up.

How would you go about changing this?

Given this context, I believe that the single most important idea for reform in K-12 education concerns a change in goal. The goal needs to shift from one of making a system that teaches children a curriculum more efficiently to one of making the system more effective by inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy.

This is a shift from running the system for the sake of the system ("You study what we tell you to study, when we tell you, and how we tell you, and at a pace that we determine") to a focus on the ultimate goal of learning ("Our goal is to inspire our students to become life-long learners with a love of education, so that they will be able to learn whatever they have to.") All parties--teachers, administrators, unions, parents and students--need to embrace the new goal.

Once we embrace this goal, we can see that that many things will have to change to accomplish it. We can also grasp that most of the thinking underlying current "reforms" of the system can be seen in their true light as schemes and devices that are actually making things worse.

Some of the implications include:
1. The role of the teachers and parents: Education has to shift from imparting a static package of knowledge to a dynamic goal of enabling students to create knowledge and deploy skills to new situations, whatever they turn out to be. In this world, teaching by transfer of information doesn't work well. Instead the role of teachers (and parents) becomes one of enabling and inspiring the students to learn, so as to spark their energies and talents.

2. The role of administrators: Administrators have to realize that managing the teachers through the control of a traditional hierarchy using carrots and sticks isn't going to work any better than it does in industry. Unless teachers are themselves inspired, they are unlikely to inspire their students. The role of the administrator has to shift from being a controller to an enabler, so as to liberate the energies and talents of the teachers and remove impediments that are getting in the way of their work.

3. The role of tests: Instead of the teacher or the administrator being the judge of progress, there are explicit criteria where both the students and the teachers can understand themselves how they are doing (in real time) and thus learn how to improve.

4. Respecting Goodhart's law: The current focus on testing has tended to make test results the goal of the system, rather than a measure. The change in goal means recognizing that a test is only measure. Using tests as the goal infringes Goodhart's Law: when measure becomes the goal, it ceases to be an effective measure.

5. The mode of accountability: Instead of measuring progress through top-down tests and bureaucracy, the education system must be linked dynamically to self-driven learning of the students themselves. Education must abandon accountability through the use of detailed plans, rules, processes and reports, which specify both the goal and the means of achieving that goal. Instead, what is needed is "dynamic linking", which means that (a) the work is done in short cycles; (b) the teacher sets the goals of learning for the cycle. (c) decisions about how the learning is to take place is the responsibility of the students; (d) progress is measured in terms of the questions the students are able to generate, not merely answers that they are able to regurgitate; (e) students must be able to measure their own progress--they aren't dependent on the teacher's tests. (The ELLI assessment tool is a promising approach to achieving these measurement goals.)

6. Communications shift from command to conversation: i.e. a shift from top-down communications ("the sage on the stage") comprising predominantly hierarchical directives to horizontal conversations ("the guide on the side") that helps the student discover new resources, solve problems and generate new insights.

7. An implementable agenda: Unlike many other ideas now being pursued in education, the shift in goal doesn't require years of research or armies of consultants or vast funding. It doesn't involve reinventing the wheel. Thousands of Montessori schools have been on this track for many years, with extraordinary results.

8. From outputs to outcomes: Implicit in the shift in goal is of course also an implicit shift from delivering outputs (numbers of students who pass a standardized test) to outcomes in terms of what students are able to do as a result of their education. At its heart, it's a shift from a focus on things to a focus on people, and the true goal of education.

What do you think about the drive under way to make our schools more competitive globally through raising standards and rewarding success?

I am all for making schools competitive globally, raising standards and rewarding success. Those are all good things in principle.

But everything depends on how they are implemented.

If by "making schools competitive globally, raising standards and rewarding success", one means making the system teach children a curriculum more efficiently in a top-down bureaucratic manner, by adopting scores on standardized test as the goal of education, and by hammering teachers unless scores improve, then obviously this is a travesty of true education and utterly counterproductive, for the reasons I have described above.

What's more, it focuses the education system on the needs of the 20th Century economy, namely, generating docile workers who did what they were told, had specific knowledge and could answer questions based on that knowledge.

The needs of the 21st Century economy are different. As the economy goes through increasingly rapid change, the economy needs people who can learn new skills quickly and who are as good at deciding what are the right questions as they are at finding the right answers. By and large, today's curriculum tends to discourage learning and creativity and today's standardized tests don't do a good job of measuring those dimensions. As a result, the preoccupation with international standardized test scores is leading to efforts to push the system to produce students who would be good for the 20th Century, but not the 21st Century.

If on the other hand, by "making schools competitive globally, steadily raising standards and rewarding success", we mean inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting global economy, with the standards and measurements that truly reflect that goal, then I am all for those things.

In this regard, it's important to remember what's wrong with bean counting. It's not that counting is wrong. Counting is good. We desperately need to know what's working and what isn't. The problem with the bean counting is what's being counted. It's a focus on solely counting outputs and things, rather than outcomes and the dimensions of life related to people. It's perfectly possible to measure educational dimensions like learning capability and creativity, but today's standardized tests don't do that. They measure dimensions that are easy to test, and ignore the dimensions that matter most.

What experiences or research has led you to these ideas?

Education is a type of knowledge work. Over the last couple of decades, the battle over how to manage knowledge work has been fought out most notably in the field of software development. The issue had to be resolved in this sector, because if a software program doesn't work, you are looking at a blue screen. When a firm has spent a hundred million dollars developing the project, this is more than mildly upsetting. In other fields, like sales, finance, health or even education, people can argue about what is success or failure. In software, there is no argument. The difference is horrifyingly obvious. It either works or it doesn't.

At first, when managers encountered these problems in software development, they did what is now happening in education. They disciplined people. They tried tighter management. They asked for more detailed reports. They sent the developers on death marches. They fired them. But the replacements did no better. The amounts of money involved were so large that a solution had to be found.

And the solution was found, largely by organizing the work in self-organizing teams in short cycles, drawing on the talents of the team, and getting direct feedback from users at the end of each cycle. This way of working (dynamic linking) turned out to be immensely productive for the organization, much more satisfying for competent people doing the work and much better for the people for whom the work was being done. So there is now a huge global movement to manage software in this way, under names like Agile or Scrum. And the approach is spreading to all forms of knowledge work, under the name Radical Management. When the whole organization successfully adopts this way of working, the organization tends to become astonishingly profitable.

So we shouldn't have to go through another multi-decade battle in the education sector to discover what we already know: bureaucratic management doesn't work in knowledge work. Leaders in education can learn from what's happened in other fields, and stop wasting people's time, money and lives.

Many of our schools in areas of high poverty are struggling. How would your approach change the way students there experience education?

Income inequality is obviously a major determinant of educational performance. I will not pretend that the changes in educational approach that I describe above can by themselves overcome the handicap of poverty.

Nevertheless an education system that focuses on learning, and encourages students to learn by exploring issues that are of interest to them, has a greater chance of overcoming some of the constraints of poverty than a top-down system that proceeds from a prescriptive approach such as "You study what we tell you to study, when we tell you, and how we tell you, and at a pace that we determine"

You are also an expert in leadership. As educators, we often feel as if our voices are not heard, because the Department of Education and White House seem to listen much more to business leaders than to teachers. How would you suggest we make our voices heard?

It's important how the issue is framed. If the issue is framed as an education issue, "how do we improve education?" there is a risk that anachronistic management ideas will be implicitly assumed as self-evident and imposed on the sector.

Knowing where these ideas come from and how they are faring in the factories and workplaces from which they emerged is crucial to being more effective in these discussions.

By framing the issue as a management issue, "what does the world know about running knowledge organizations?" then the whole array of evidence can be brought to bear on the discussion.

This in turn implies that if leaders in the education sector are to win these arguments, they need to be aware of what is happening in management beyond education and become versed in what is known about running knowledge organizations, from fields such as Agile, Scrum and Radical Management.

What do you think of the framework Steve Denning has offered? Can this help us make our case against the status quo of high stakes testing?

Steve Denning is the author of six business books and consultant to organizations around the world on radical management, leadership, innovation, and storytelling. His most recent book is the Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century (Jossey-Bass, 2010). Other books include The Leader's Guide to Storytelling (2nd ed, 2011) and The Secret Language of Leadership (2007). He worked for many years at the World Bank: as the director of knowledge management (1996-2000) he spearheaded the introduction of knowledge management as an organizational strategy.

You can follow him on Twitter at @stevedenning.
His daily column on Forbes is at http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/
His website is at www.stevedenning.com.
Image of Steve Denning used by permission.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Usually when business magazines like Forbes offer advice on education reform, I prepare to cringe. But this week we got a surprise. Management guru Steve Denning offers us "The Single Best Idea for Reforming Education," and it actually makes a great deal of sense.

Denning starts with a critique of the status quo.

...the biggest problem is a preoccupation with, and the application of, the factory model of management to education, where everything is arranged for the scalability and efficiency of "the system", to which the students, the teachers, the parents and the administrators have to adjust. "The system" grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and parents alike.

Unlike many education "reformers," he follows through on this critique, and indicts the "efficiency" minded managers, who seek to improve schools through better management and incentive systems. He writes:

It is assumed to mean more top-down management and tighter controls, and more carrots and sticks. It is assumed to mean hammering the teachers who don't perform and ruthlessly weeding out "the dead wood". The thinking is embedded in Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind.

Denning echoes the critique voiced by Yong Zhao, seeing that in an ever-changing social and economic context, the faith often put into "world-class standards" is misplaced.

Denning's key conclusion is this:

...the single most important idea for reform in K-12 education concerns a change in goal. The goal needs to shift from one of making a system that teaches children a curriculum more efficiently to one of making the system more effective by inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy.

As he notes, the implications of this paradigm shift are profound. This affects how we use tests, the role and form of accountability, the ways we communicate, and the way decisions are made in our systems. As a former teacher, I am especially interested in how he frames accountability. He writes:

Instead of measuring progress through top-down tests and bureaucracy, the education system must be linked dynamically to self-driven learning of the students themselves. Education must abandon accountability through the use of detailed plans, rules, processes and reports, which specify both the goal and the means of achieving that goal. Instead, what is needed is "dynamic linking", which means that (a) the work is done in short cycles; (b) the teacher sets the goals of learning for the cycle. (c) decisions about how the learning is to take place is the responsibility of the students; (d) progress is measured in terms of the questions the students are able to generate, not merely answers that they are able to regurgitate; (e) students must be able to measure their own progress--they aren't dependent on the teacher's tests.

These recommendations connect well with the critique many educators have offered for the past decade and more, as the test-driven mechanisms for accountability have become all-powerful in our schools. It echoes the approach of Paolo Freire, and progressive educators in this country as well. In particular, I appreciate the idea that we measure not what our students are able to memorize, but rather their capacity to come up with questions, to have original thoughts and apply them. I was guided by this idea when I developed my approach to teaching scientific inquiry a while back. I wrote at the time:

As science educators... we wish our students to develop an understanding of a number of specific science concepts, such as density, or states of matter. Beyond these content goals, we also wish them to be capable investigators of the natural world. My central objective this year has been to equip my students with this ability.

As an urban educator, I have found that my students will not engage in active study of science if they do not feel ownership of the subject matter. Furthermore, I define active engagement in science as not merely the ability to follow directions in a science "cookbook," but the ability to actually define questions for oneself, and answer them through investigation and experimentation.

It is a good sign that these ideas are percolating into the pages of business journals. Perhaps when this wisdom originates beyond the realm of educators, it might have a chance of being heard in the places where policy decisions are made.

What do you think of Steve Denning's ideas for education reform?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 12:41 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The New York Times today reported that many environmentalists are expressing frustration at recent policy decisions by the Obama administration. The story carries some strong echoes of the way educators have felt for the past two years, as Secretary Duncan has extended and intensified the worst aspects of No Child Left Behind.

In the past week more than a thousand demonstrators have been arrested at the White House in protest of the administration's unclear stance on the licensing of a pipeline that would carry oil from Canadian tar sands. Even former administration staffers, and Dr. James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, participated in protests and were arrested. And this concern has deepened as the White House has abandoned its plan to strengthen air pollution standards.

It is eerie how this parallels our Save Our Schools March a few weeks ago. We did not subject ourselves to arrest, but thousands of educators from all over the country converged on the White House to make clear our unhappiness with this administration. Our speakers included some of the most prominent supporters and advisors to the administration, including Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera.

The New York Times reports that one of those arrested last week was Coutrney Hight, who was the youth vote director for the Obama campaign in Florida in 2008. She said this: "If the president decides not to permit the pipeline, he will reignite the enthusiasm many of my friends and I felt in 2008. But if he approves it, it is just human nature that the disappointment will sap the enthusiasm that drove us to work so hard last time."

This sentiment is very similar to what educators have been saying for almost two years. After I started the Facebook group, Teachers Letters to Obama, we heard from hundreds of people who had actively campaigned for the President's election, but feel deflated as a result of his poor record.

When we went to DC to protest, the White House invited us to meet the day before our rally, but was not interested in speaking to us thereafter. Apparently they wanted to give the appearance of listening. The organizations behind this week's environmental protests report that they have "heard not one word" in response from the White House.

What will it take for this administration to realize they have a serious problem here?

[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 3:01 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by John Thompson.

Mark Simon's "High-Stakes Progressive Teacher Unionism" is a must-read. Simon's contributions to I Used To Think... And Now I Think.... are the reflections of a pioneer in the "new unionism" of the 1990s. Even back then, he realized that if the union did not advocate for "reforms that preserve the integrity of good teaching and real learning," that the alternative would be "Taylorist teacher-proofing." Now he knows that data-driven "reformers" attacked us with more self-righteousness than could have been expected. "Today," writes Simon, "the antiteacher and antiunion reform approach has hit with such a vengeance that it is clear, with hindsight, that progressive union leaders, always in the minority, moved too slowly."

I think Simon is too self-critical. We have seen an amazing increase in teachers coming over to his position that, "the teacher union is the organized voice of teachers," and it must be "focused as much on curriculum, instruction, assessment, and evaluation issues as on pay and hours."

I hope that non-teachers will read Simon's piece in conjunction with another contribution to the anthology, Deborah Meier's "Rethinking Trust." The first step towards achieving Simon's vision is to build the trust within schools to allow for the hard conversation that it requires. As Meier explains, teaching is "so personal and raw" that we often seek to close our doors and just concentrate on on own classes. The second step requires a deeper trust where we agree to take risks by cooperating with people outside of our schools who are not necessarily as trustworthy. It is a tribute to union leaders that they have been able to encourage the rank-in-file to take so many risks on both fronts in only one generation.

Simon also admits that he was once one of "the well-meaning, enthusiastic, do-gooders" who taught before getting "a real job." Now, he thinks that the "mythology" that "anyone can teach if you just believe that all students can learn may be the biggest lie undermining teaching." Those with the "hubris" which claims that "blind enthusiasm" is enough "are just kidding themselves."

Now Simon thinks that the union must have a plan that envisions better schools, and "correctives to misdirected accountability strategies - and then fight like the dickens for that teacher vision." He emphasizes that our vision must be tough on teachers. We must be like 19th century craft unions that were "the guardians of quality control in the face of employers' tendency to try and cut corners."

Simon's vision means that teachers must ask the toughest questions of what it takes to overcome the legacy of generational poverty, and then we must, "talk truth to power." We must resist the temptation to circle the wagons in the face of teacher-bashing. After all, the next generation of teacher leaders are likely to face threats that are even more complicated.

What do you think? Have teachers moved quickly enough to modernize our unions? What is the best approach to resisting the attacks on our profession and our schools?

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 5:07 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend