February 2012 Archives

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Last week I wrote about the fairy dust of multiple measures that the Department of Education has been sprinkling on worthless Value Added Models, under the mistaken belief that this somehow renders them golden. Dept of Ed press secretary Justin Hamilton quoted Arne Duncan, who said, "here in the US teacher evaluation is all too often tied only to test scores which makes no sense." I replied "WHO uses test scores only? Can you name one district that evaluates this way?" The answer came last week, as newspapers in New York published the value added ratings of 18,000 teachers, and made teacher evaluation a public sport.

This news was accompanied by something rather strange - Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee both criticized the action, suggesting that these scores alone do not give a full picture of teacher performance. What we have here seems to be a classic case of good cop/bad cop, where Rupert Murdoch's New York Post plays the abusive bad cop, publishing the names of teachers, and singling out the city's "worst" teachers for public humiliation. And Gates, Rhee and the Department of Education ride to the rescue, offering the sweeter, but nonetheless damaging "multiple measures" evaluation models.

Bill Gates wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times that said,

Value-added ratings are one important piece of a complete personnel system. But student test scores alone aren't a sensitive enough measure to gauge effective teaching, nor are they diagnostic enough to identify areas of improvement. Teaching is multifaceted, complex work. A reliable evaluation system must incorporate other measures of effectiveness, like students' feedback about their teachers and classroom observations by highly trained peer evaluators and principals.

Here we have the good cop's case for "multiple measures," very neatly made against a counterpoint, the bad cop's use of test scores only.

But there is a big problem that remains. The evaluation model we are being offered is driven by several false assumptions.

Assumption One: Schools in our nation are saddled with a significant number of crummy teachers, and achievement will rise dramatically if we can bring in new evaluation systems to reliably identify and weed out these teachers. Bill Gates, appearing on Oprah in 2010, asserted that if only we could get rid of the bad teachers, our schools would shoot from the bottom of international rankings to the top.

First of all, our international standings have become a meaningless exercise in political grandstanding, with little attention to the underlying data they are drawn from.

Second, the idea that we can fire our way to better schools has a fatal flaw. It assumes there are fresh teachers ready to take the place of those we fire. Given that our high poverty schools already have turnover rates in the neighborhood of 20% a year, and about 50% of beginning teachers wash out in their first five years, the idea that we will improve our schools by firing even more is hard to believe. Where are the high quality teachers going to come from to replace those we fire? School improvement is much more complex than this, and the foundation has to be based on building the profession.

Assumption Two: Test scores, and a host of secondary indicators found to be correlated with higher test scores, are the means by which we determine teacher quality. This takes a very keen eye to detect, because Mr. Gates and the researchers he sponsors are not fools. They know that test scores have been somewhat discredited as a result of NCLB's single-minded focus on them. But the sophisticated measures that Gates offers are, unfortunately, mostly tied back to test scores. Those student surveys he mentions? As Melinda Gates explained last fall, the questions were checked to see which ones correlate with higher student test scores. The training the peer observers and principals get can make sure they are watching for teacher behaviors associated with better student achievement (test scores.)

If you visit the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, which is the flagship of the Gates Foundation work in this arena, you find that teacher quality is defined in terms of the ability of a teacher to produce gains in student achievement. Then the project seeks different ways to measure this ability. There is the direct measurement - the scores. And then there are a host of other indicators - observations, student surveys and so on. But the core idea of teacher "effectiveness" is tied to the "effect," which is defined as student achievement. And student achievement is always some sort of test performance.

Assumption Three: Teacher quality will increase with detailed and specific feedback. This WOULD be true, if we had a solid working definition of the qualities we are after. Unfortunately, we are working with a circular definition of teacher quality, that equates quality with the ability to raise student performance on tests, and then seeks to reinforce teacher behaviors associated with this ability.

What we need to build strong teachers are more diverse indicators of student learning. As Rog Lucido explained here a few days ago, student learning cannot be adequately reflected by a score, or even a set of scores using multiple measures. Student learning can be described, and it can be exemplified, through the use of authentic evidence - student writing, projects, presentations, research and other products. We need to work with a much richer set of student outcomes than we get by simply focusing on student achievement as it is currently defined. And we will not get there by the circular methods being promoted by the Gates Foundation and the Department of Education.

Is there an appropriate use for test score data in teacher evaluations? Absolutely! In the report, A Quality Teacher in Every Classroom, issued back in 2010 by Accomplished California Teachers, we took a close look at all the possible sources of information that might be brought to bear in a high quality teacher evaluation process. We wrote:

They should be evaluated with tools that assess professional standards of practice in the classroom, augmented with evidence of student outcomes. Beyond standardized test scores, those outcomes should include performance on authentic tasks that demonstrate learning of content; presentation of evidence from formative classroom assessments that show patterns of student improvement; the development of habits that lead to improved academic success (personal responsibility, homework completion, willingness and ability to revise work to meet standards), along with contributing indicators like attendance, enrollment and success in advanced courses, graduation rates, pursuit of higher education, and work place success.

In practice, that means we should oppose the formulaic use of Value Added Models, which research have shown to be highly unstable at the level of individual teachers. This method should not be used for any significant part of an evaluation, even if other measures are included. It is simply not ready for prime time. Of course we must also oppose the publication of teacher ratings based on these models. If you are reading this and thinking "How much harm could it do to use these ratings as one of several indicators of teacher quality?" PLEASE take a look at Gary Rubenstein's just published analysis of the New York City VAM data.

This data is garbage, and it has no business being any part of a professional teacher's evaluation.

The Initial Findings of the MET Project exploring teacher evaluation brings us the good cop/bad cop dichotomy quite clearly:

The public discussion usually portrays only two options: the status quo (where there is no meaningful feedback for teachers) and a seemingly extreme world in which tests scores alone determine a teacher's fate. Our results suggest that's a false choice. It is possible to combine measures from different sources to get a more complete picture of teaching practice. The measures should allow a school leader to both discern a teacher's ability to produce results and offer specific diagnostic feedback. Value-added scores alone, while important, do not recommend specific ways for teachers to improve.

So here we have it, teachers. You can be pilloried in public based on test scores alone, or you can have the magic of multiple measures to soften the blows. We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. How do you want it?

What do you think? Are you ready to accept the wonder that is multiple measures evaluation now?

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

Guest post by Arthur Camins.

Slip slidin' away
Slip slidin' away
You know the nearer your destination
The more you're slip slidin' away
Paul Simon

The current narrative for improving education in the United States is based on two undeniable charges and several simple and compelling solutions.

The current charges: Despite decades of effort we have failed to substantially mediate the effects of race and class on educational outcomes. Compared to product innovations in the private sector, innovations in the education sector are infrequently dispersed or institutionalized... they don't stick. We've all been there. Just when we think we nearing our destination.... real sustainable learning gains for students... the innovation just seems to slip away.

The current solutions: Fire the worst teachers and hire the best, financially reward teachers who are most successful at improving student test scores, spur innovation and improvement through competition led by charter schools, and enact strict controls over schools that fail to demonstrate progress.

This solution narrative is powerful and has gained political momentum because it has resonance with many intuitive beliefs. Unfortunately, none of these market-driven strategies are supported by substantial evidence. In fact, many are contraindicated by research on motivation as summarized in Daniel Pinks' book Drive, the research on performance pay such as the Center for Performance Incentives' recent study on reward-for-results experiment in the Nashville public schools, by the variable performance of charter schools, by the inability to replicate even the most successful charter schools at scale, and by reports on the difficulty of replacing principals removed in response to federal "turn-around" models.

But if market-force strategies won't work, what will? How can we generate innovations that successfully address persistent achievement gaps? How do we get to depth, dispersal and institutionalization.... innovations that stick? I would like to propose a different, if a bit more complex, solutions narrative, but one that also springs from several concepts that most people intuitively accept. Some of these ideas are grounded in state and federal education policy, while others fall within the purview of local school districts. The latter are not just hypothetical brainstorms. Rather, they are widely accepted practices in many high- performing countries. None of these, done in isolation will make a significant difference. Rather, they represent what done in concert could must occur in order for our nation's schools to be on the smart side of the innovations that will lead to systemic and sustainable improvement.

1) Preparation: Teachers need to be better prepared before they assume full responsibility for classroom instruction. The only institutions capable of meeting demand at scale are universities. Such pre-service development must begin with a broad understanding of the role of education in preparing students for life, work and citizenship in the 21st century. It must lead to strong disciplinary content knowledge, but also a deep understanding of how students learn and develop and the pedagogies that effectively support diverse students through learning struggles. Most important, as in other professions, we need a significant thoughtfully developed apprenticeship bridge between initial preparation and full practice under the tutelage of master teachers who are also talented mentors. This will require a massive rethinking and investment.

2) Respect and Job Satisfaction: We need to attract and retain the best possible teacher candidates and provide a means for teachers to continuously enhance their effectiveness. To do so we need to elevate the level of respect and esteem in which the general public holds the teaching profession. This cultural sea change would include ensuring that teachers, like other professionals, have opportunities to engage in continuous, on-the-job learning in collaboration with colleagues and experts in their particular field. As is already common in many high-performing countries, time for such learning should be incorporated into the normal workday, thereby increasing teachers' sense of control over their work and maximizing their creativity and investment in their own growth and development. Also essential are competitive salaries and opportunities for teachers to grow professionally by expanding their sphere of influence beyond their own students.

3) Comprehensive Student Support: For students to benefit from common high expectations and effective teaching, they need to be ready to learn. We all concur that poverty is not a valid reason for lowering expectations with regard to student achievement. However, in and of themselves, high expectations and effective teaching are only a partial solution. Substantial support systems must be in place and readily accessible to offset the limitations imposed on children by their family's poverty and unemployment. These support systems include prenatal and family health care, adequate infant care, and pre-school and after-school programs. The Harlem Children's Zone is an example of this approach, but its replicability is limited since it depends on private sector donations. We need deep and reliable public investment for a support net through which there is no escape. There is no excuse for doing less.

4) 21st Century Goals: For students to be successful in life, career and citizenship, we need to prepare them for a world they--and we--cannot totally visualize. To point them in the right direction, we must first insist upon curriculum and instruction that emphasize creative, divergent and critical thinking; problem solving; flexibility; communication; collaboration; and a strong work ethic. Therefore, we need to expand the learning environment through technology and through engagement in the world beyond the classroom. Second, we need to move away from the current obsession with academic improvement as reflected in low-level summative tests and instead focus on the two types of assessments that have the greatest potential for improving student learning: a) On-the-spot assessment and targeted feedback to students during daily instruction, and b) "short-cycle" assessment of daily written work that is used either for feedback to students on what they can do to improve and/or for making adjustments in instruction to address gaps in student learning. Everyone seems to agree that teachers and school leaders need accurate and timely information upon which to base instructional decision-making and improvement strategies. However, that information will be applied most productively when students and teachers believe that they are empowered to use it to their mutual benefit, rather than perceiving it as a judgment or threat from external forces.

5) Learning Environment: We may have forgotten Avogadro's number or the novels we read in senior English, but we recall with utmost clarity the teacher who gave us a special bit of attention or the classmate who humiliated us. Long after facts and figures fade, we retain how we were treated. We remember whether we felt confident or incapable. Common sense and research strongly support the inseparable connections among social-emotional wellbeing, cognitive development and academic learning. Therefore, attention to conditions that enable learning is as essential as excellent teaching and challenging curriculum. Time must be allocated to intentionally develop the self- and social-awareness and management skills and dispositions needed to negotiate interactions with people of different backgrounds and philosophies, to collaborate, and to cope with set-backs and challenges.

Students need to be explicitly taught that "smartness" is not a quality tethered to the accident of biology or life circumstances, but is achieved through hard work, persistence, and critical thinking. We need to design learning experiences through which students develop a strong sense of control over their own learning and lives. This requires anticipating the needs of diverse learners on the front end of instructional planning so that all students have equal accesses to high-level curricula. Active, inquiry-based curriculum in which students are the prime movers in making conjectures, gathering evidence, developing explanations and revising their ideas, is another step in that direction. Equally important, however, is providing opportunities for students to have a voice in solving social problems in their own classrooms and schools and to begin to learn that they can have an impact in the world beyond the school. Our goal is to engender that inner sense of empowerment that erases students' feelings of vulnerability and convinces them they are capable of taking the steps necessary to achieve their dreams.

6) Organization, Leadership and Coherence: Our memories and educational research are strewn with stories of promising innovative ideas that were either implemented incompletely or failed to take root. The reasons for this phenomenon are complex, but three stand out: impatience, conflicting demands and bureaucracy. If innovation is a prerequisite for progress, we need to develop leaders who create organizational structures that don't just reward success, but rather prioritize learning from failure. Then, we need to give teachers and leaders time to try out and then refine innovations in practice. Bureaucracies that are typically characterized by narrow role-definition, top-down management and reward structures promote the self-protection and promotion behaviors that thwart innovation. Instead, we need learning organizations in which distributed leadership, collaboration and honest dialogue create the time and space for a cycle of innovation so that the most effective ideas gain traction and eventually stick.

Gaps in achievement related to race and class are persistent and unresponsive to simple solutions precisely because the causes are so complex. Because the solutions are not obvious or easily achieved, the facets of an effective strategy, as well as how best to structure their interaction, are ripe for innovation. To do so, we need to create a tolerance for failure and the patience to give innovations time and support stick. Therefore, we need to steer clear of prescriptive solutions imposed by external entities. We need to give up the "magic bullet" idea and recognize that only the synergy of multiple strategies enacted thoroughly over time will produce systemic and sustainable outcomes. We need to avoid measures and consequences that make people risk-averse, squelching the very creativity that is essential to make progress.

We need to pursue this comprehensive approach with all due urgency. Most important, we need to involve the folks doing the work ... administrators, teachers, students and researchers ... in the design, field-testing, revision, and refinement of their own teaching-learning-leading processes. It is the insights gleaned from these practitioners' everyday efforts and activities that we will lead to effective innovations that stick, rather than always seem to be "slip slidin' away."

What do you think of the innovations proposed here? Might they take hold?

Arthur Camins is the director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education (CIESE) at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, N.J. and the former executive director of the Gheens Institute for Innovation in the Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, KY.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Rog Lucido.

Year after year, Mario takes district, state and national tests. Each year Mario's individual scores are combined with others in his class, school, district, and state. The scores are sent home to parents, analyzed by teachers, districts and departments of education. Decisions are made about Mario, his teachers and his school. Belief in the validity of the scores is so strong that most people uncritically accept their truth.

All high-stakes testing is based on the paradigm that learning can be 'measured' by using a device that produces a number. Tests play the role of this measuring device and the resulting numbers are translated into scores. These scores are then compared and contrasted and by selecting arbitrary criteria are used to categorize students, teachers, schools, districts and states. But what if the paradigm is wrong. What if learning cannot be 'measured'?

Under the current line of thinking we have had tests for a long time in our classrooms and schools. Every such test has supported the idea that once Mario's test is scored it can be used as the basis for judgments about his progress and comprehension of the taught concepts. The idea appears to be very simple: ask Mario a set of questions, arrive at a number for each correct answer, add up these numbers and there is his score.

There is a fatal flaw in this line of thought. The process of adding scores must be based on a simple scientific principle: Items can only be added if they have the same units. One apple plus one apple is two apples. We can add one plus one and arrive at two because of the same units: apple.

One apple plus one orange has no sum because they are different items. Attempting to collect them into a new entity is contradictory to their essence. The combination of one apple plus one orange does not produce an 'apple-orange'. In reality this mathematical computation does not produce one or two of anything. In fact this process cannot be done.

In current high stakes test construction each test question is based on a singular standard. For example, let's say that the standard is: "Students will understand the slope of a line." There are an infinite set of questions that can address this standard, but each question will be different from the others or otherwise they would be identical questions. If the test asks five diverse questions on the slope of a line and Mario gets three of them correct we cannot say that his score on slope of a line is three. These are five different questions like adding 1 apple to 1 orange to 1 banana. Three correct answers cannot produce a score of 3. Each question is really a test unto itself and cannot be combined with others. Each question is unique; it stands alone and cannot be added to another unique question.

Imagine a singular test that has questions from mathematics, English, science, and social studies. It is quite obvious that combining the number correct from these different disciplines provides no clarity as to what this score would mean. What is not so obvious is when the exam is a 'math' test with questions on slope added to those on geometry to those on equations etc.. This same concept holds true for tests in any subject with differing standards and an infinite set of questions for each.

The very act of counting the number of Mario's correct responses in the category 'questions' can only specify that the number of questions correct is 'such and such' and not that this number defines any type of conceptual understanding.

We delude ourselves into thinking we have measured learning because we uncritically accept the premise that 'learning is measurable'. Adding the number of correct responses along with some mathematical formulation cannot produce a score. We have been duped!

Therefore, if it is impossible to arrive at a score for Mario and any compilation of questions we call a 'test' then what can be done to find out what he really knows? Answering a question with a correct choice does not mean he has correct understanding. Not only can Mario guess, but also he can have wrong reasons for the correct answer. Surely, if Mario's score is without merit, combining it with other invalid scores in the classroom, in the school, in the state tells us nothing. Can there be evidence of Mario's learning there? Yes.

The evaluator of the test-usually the teacher- can describe the student's level of understanding by using words to articulate their comprehension of each question.

Well, can't numerical scores also describe? No. A score is a number... is a number... is a number. It is not a description. It is the interpretation of the scored number that forms a description in words. I am suggesting that we significantly reduce the number of questions on a test to provide the time for a knowledgeable evaluator or teacher to discuss with each student the justification for their answers.

To do this they need to be in dialogue with each student about their answers and record the justification for their commentary. Describing learning uses words just like an artist uses media of varying colors and type as the means to paint the picture of the learning. "Helen you have great skills in calculating the slope of a line but you are not yet able to explain its meaning." See the Learning Record for one example of such a process.

This is where the Learning Record shines. Because of its structure, information about student learning, no matter how diverse, is organized in consistent, meaningful sections that can be quickly accessed and understood by readers across all disciplines.

'Forgiving Learning' as explained in the last chapter of my book is another:

If not high-stakes testing, then how else are students, parents and to determine what students know and are able to do? What system can be placed within the structure of a classroom, school and district to provide authentic information about what students have learned? This assessment can take place in a mastery conference with the teacher in which the student must demonstrate their understanding in any form of presentation, demonstration, portfolio defense, etc. The key to any assessment is the requirement that the student is to justify their understanding.

What should be the upshot of all of this? Our confidence in high-stakes testing scores should take a significant plunge. We should no longer believe that state and national test scores could measure learning. We may have thought we were measuring learning, but now we know that no measurement had ever taken place. We were performing mathematical manipulations that had no meaning in the real world. We thought we could extend these scores to teacher effectiveness, school and district rankings and comparisons across the US and the world. With invalid scores, all of this is nullified. Some schools had created 'data' walls but now we know they are bogus: there was really no valid data to display.

And so, it is finally over. The tyranny of high stakes test scores are laid to rest. We cannot accept purported test scores and the impact they have on individual students, teachers and schools without being grounded in a sound understanding of what they are and what they are not. All are now released from the paradigm that student learning can be measured. We are now free to describe student learning as we have done throughout history, "Mario, your paragraph is clear, concise and shows your mastery of English form and content. A terrific job."

What do you think? Have we been duped into thinking learning can be measured? Should we reexamine this assumption?

Horace (Rog) Lucido, now retired, taught high school physics and mathematics for over thirty-eight years as well as being both a university mentor and master teacher. He is the California Central Valley coordinator for the Assessment Reform Network and cofounder of Educators and Parents Against Testing Abuse (EPATA). He is the author of two books: Test, Grade and Score: Never More, 1993, and Educational Genocide: A Plague on our Children, 2010. He has written numerous articles on the impact of high-stakes testing as well as presenting workshops on Forgiving Learning.

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

Last Friday, I posted this essay by Teach For America corps member Jameson Brewer: Hyperaccountablity, Burnout and Blame. One of the comments came from another TFA corps member, duke solaris. This comment and Jameson's response ran yesterday, Teach For America Corps Members in Dialogue: Can this Model Work?

Today, in the third installment of this dialogue, I share the latest exchange between these Teach For America corps members.

To begin, duke solaris writes:
Thank you for the reply, and for being willing to engage in conversation!

I completely agree that the achievement gap is reflective of deeper issues in society and that the term "achievement gap" is an oversimplification of a much more complicated issue. I tend to agree with the McKinsey insight (1) that there are actually 4 kinds of achievement gaps: a gap between the US and other nations, a gap between low-performing states and high-performing states, a gap between minority students and white students, and a gap between low-income and non-low-income students. Issues such as rampant incarceration, homeowner, healthcare, earnings and poverty are at the root of some of these gaps, but not all, and each of them have terrible consequences.

What does this mean? That the status quo, the way we have been thinking about education and educating our teachers and principals, has not been working. It doesn't mean TFA is the answer, but it does mean that we as a society shouldn't be satisfied with what we have now, and should be searching for new answers because the current system is failing us. It's also worth noting that, while the achievement gap between ethnicities has indeed been growing on a macro level(2), on a micro level, there is actually evidence of reversal in the gap.

So let's start with the macro level. Why is it that, after 20 years of Teach for America, the achievement gap hasn't been getting better? Well, with only about 9000 Corps Members between the two years, Teach for America teachers make up less than 0.3% of the over 3 million teachers in the United States. That's 3 in every 1000 teachers. Similarly, why haven't charter schools closed the achievement gap? Well, let's look at the biggest CMO, KIPP, which has 109 schools. KIPP alone makes up only 0.1% of the over 100,000 public schools in the US. Even if there were 10 charter organizations as big as KIPP, all those schools together would only make up 1% of all public schools. It's incredibly easy to point a finger at these programs and label them failures because the gap isn't closing, but these programs are nowhere near the scale that would be required to make a dent in the gap, and they aren't supposed to be.

A lot of the criticism of TFA comes from the fact that TFA does a terrible job of telling people what it is. TFA is not a career-teacher pipeline - it's goal isn't to get CMs to become career teachers, that's just a side effect. Generally speaking, the purpose of TFA is to work as a leadership pipeline to get more people involved in education so that one day the gap can be closed. TFA is not designed to close the achievement gap all on its own, it's a tiny program. Has TFA been successful in its goal? Well, for such a tiny organization, it sure does cause a lot of conversation about education. And for such a tiny organization, its alumni sure have brought about about a lot of change in the education field. We wouldn't be talking about KIPP, Michelle Rhee, or The Equity Project, for example, because without TFA, none of those things would exist. The ultimate goal is to ensure that one day, all kids get an excellent education - NOT one day all kids will have a TFA teacher - and TFA has been doing a pretty good job of helping move the needle towards that goal.

Now, lets look at the micro level. Perhaps the best example of a turn-around on a micro level has been student achievement in New Orleans and the RSD.(3) In 2005 (after Katrina), the percent of students who were basic or above in math and english was 30% in New Orleans vs 52% in Louisiana. A 22 point gap. Those numbers in 2011 were 59% in New Orleans and 67% in Louisiana. An 8 point gap. Unfortunately, NOLA is by far the clearest example of a reversal, but there is also evidence in New York City:

In 2011, black students averaged 26 points lower than white students on reading tests in fourth-grade, compared with 29 points lower in 2002. In math, they averaged 22 points lower in fourth-grade and 30 points lower in eighth grade, compared with 25 points and 36 points lower in 2003.(4)

I don't feel comfortable extrapolating too far from this data, but it does go to say that it is indeed possible to close the achievement gap if there is enough scale and energy behind it - that issues of poverty etc can be overcome over time. IE: Now is not the time to throw in the towel or throw our hands in the air and absolve ourselves of all responsibility.

With respect to "locus of control," I have to concede this point because I didn't go to your institute and you didn't go to mine. I can tell you how I was taught about LoC, but it looks like it was very different from how you were taught. TFA's model does teach CMs that Teacher Mindsets drive Teacher Actions drive Student Actions drive Student Results, and to focus on what they can be doing to improve student achievement - but the way this was taught at my Institute was clearly not the way it was taught at yours. If I were a CMA, I wouldn't yell at a CM or tell them it was their fault their students didn't have pencils. Blaming a teacher is NEVER the answer. Giving up isn't the answer either. As a CMA, I would want my CM to expect students to want to learn and want to have pencils (Teacher Mindset) and brainstorm with that CM to figure out a way to make sure that students had pencils in the future. At the end of the day, students need pencils to learn, and the teacher should take on some of the burden for figuring out how to get those students to have pencils (whether it be a pencil renting system or calling parents), even if it is outside the teacher's immediate locus of control. Once again, the point isn't that socioeconomic factors are irrelevant, but that they shouldn't be used as excuses and that they can be overcome. The model isn't supposed to be used to blame teachers, it's supposed to be used to help them help their students.

With respect to summer institute, you're right - team-teaching a small group of summer school students is not the same as being a full time teacher. At the same time, the student teaching that students who major in education go through is ALSO not the same as being a full time teacher. Both of these models are apprenticeship and mentoring models - you start learning with a lot of support, and then the support gets taken away. It's a great way to teach a profession like teaching. TFA's Institutes are certainly not perfect, but if TFA's model for preparing CMs was truly inferior, then TFA teachers would drastically underperform first-year teachers in the classroom. Yet they don't - the data is mixed at worst, and trends towards TFA teachers slightly outperforming peers in math. Could it be better? Of course it could, but that means we should be improving it and doesn't mean we should be shutting it down.

Finally, you're right, Erin Gruwell of Freedom Writers did choose to make huge personal sacrifices for her students. It doesn't have to be this way, and one day it won't be. TFA's model is not perfect, but as you very well know, the organization is VERY receptive to criticism and feedback and is constantly changing. Once again, TFA is not THE solution, but it sees itself as being part of the process to move to a better place. TFA's very existence sparks conversations that have never been had before. Some conversations are about things like questioning tenure and considering value-added testing, and these may make some teachers uncomfortable. Other conversations, like being able to drive student achievement without draconian disciplinary policies and respecting teacher work-life balance, make education reformers uncomfortable. But all of these are conversations that need to happen to move the needle forward for our nation.

To answer the opening question: Can this model work? Well, it depends on what you mean. Can TFA by itself close the achievement gap? Of course not. Can TFA improve in a hundred different ways? Yes, and it's working on it! Will 1st year TFA teachers in the inner city outperform veteran teachers in the suburbs? Nope, they never will. Will 1st-year TFA teachers perform at least as well as 1st year non-TFA teachers in the same communities? Data seems to suggest yes. Is TFA a great model for creating an army of superstar career teachers? Nope, and that's not its purpose, but many TFA alumni do become awesome career teachers. Does the TFA model work at creating a leadership pipeline into the education field? I think the evidence points to yes here as well - the model is indeed working.

(1) McKinsey Report on the Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap:

(2) Evidence of growing achievement gap via SAT scores:

(3) Data on New Orleans/RSD LEAP test performance:

(4) Data on NYC NAEP test performance:

Oh, one last thing. You noted that only 88% of CMs stayed from Year 1 to Year 2. That means that 12% didn't finish their second year. I'm having a hard time finding solid research on this, but according to research by Richard Ingersoll, teacher turnover in the first year on a national level is 16% a year. Not just the schools TFA teachers in, but ALL schools. If you focus in on just schools with high concentrations of poor kids like the ones TFA places in, the turnover is 20% a year. Both of these figures are higher than TFA's turnover rate.

Additional data is even more depressing. According to a 2005 study in Chicago, "an analysis of the teacher turnover rates at 64 neighborhood schools over three years revealed that 39 percent of first-year teachers never came back for a second year. " That number is brutal.

duke solaris

Response from Jameson Brewer:
While we agree to the existence of underlying socioeconomic gaps that contribute to the social, economic, and academic stratification of our society, I think we differ on our understanding of the root issues that cause them and certainly plans for alleviating them. You mention the "status quo" as being the way we approach educating our teachers as if this is at the bedrock of what causes these social gaps (of course that sounds like a TFA talking point). While I am a staunch advocate for having good teachers, I am not naive enough to believe that this will magically solve issues of inequality as it does in the feel-good movies you cite.

I think you underestimate the impact that TFA has had on education policy and individual classrooms. TFA touts to its recruits, corps members, and donors statistics showing the tens and hundreds of thousands of students that are "impacted" by TFA teachers every year. Certainly this number is lower than the total sum of national students; however, we aren't talking about TFA going into prosperous school districts; but rather, those districts that are struggling with de jure/de facto segregation, funding inequalities, etc. Additionally, I would hardly call TFA a "tiny" program given the tens upon tens of millions of dollars it receives and operates with (both from private donations - Gates Foundation, and federal funds - AmeriCorps).

In reference to KIPP schools (started by two TFA alumni and currently run by Wendy Kopp's husband) you mention, "It's incredibly easy to point a finger at these programs and label them failures because the gap isn't closing, but these programs are nowhere near the scale that would be required to make a dent in the gap, and they aren't supposed to be." I agree that these schools are small in ratio to the national public school districts. However, when we look at KIPP schools by themselves on the micro level, the gap is not closing (Books, 2011; Horn, 2011).

You mention, "it's goal [TFA] isn't to get CMs to become career teachers, that's just a side effect. Generally speaking, the purpose of TFA is to work as a leadership pipeline to get more people involved in education so that one day the gap can be closed." I would argue that having a revolving door of teachers who swoop in to do two years of community service that somehow gives them the credentials to then go out and start schools (KIPP and other charters), run districts (Michelle Rhee - whose gains have now been challenged as yet another potential cheating scandal), and serve on school boards (Courtney English, Atlanta Public Schools) is more detrimental to students than it is help (Darling-Hammond, 2005; Cline, R., & Small, R. C., 1994). I agree that TFA speaks a message to its corps members that "the most important work" comes working as an alumni. You use the word "pipeline." TFA unveiled a new "principal pipeline" this past year with the goal of taking corps members out of the classroom, partnering with Columbia University and producing principals. I'm told that the Atlanta Corps intends on being 100% of the new hire principals within 5 years. I was offered this "pipeline" in addition to being asked to consider running for school board as I would have full backing of TFA. By the way, TFA hopes to have 20 board members across the Metro-Atlanta districts within a few years. In my opinion, TFA is the quintessential example of the neoliberal corporate takeover of public schools. The goal is to privatize teacher training, privatize schools and privatize school boards who operate at the behest of TFA.

I think there will be decades of research to be done in New Orleans following Katrina. You mention the incredible gains since the devastating hurricane. However, you fail to recognize that thousands left the city and did not return, so you are comparing apples to oranges. Further, standardized test scores are certainly not an indication of growth (Baker, 2011; Bausel, 2011) and is not a reliable indicator of teacher effectiveness (Papay, 2011). I'm sure you will agree that the "growth" you refer to has done little to close the income gap of the different quarters/wards in New Orleans.

With that said, I agree that we should not throw our hands up and quit the fight for social equality. However, I'm not convinced that recruiting top performing students from Ivy League schools, who do not share the same backgrounds as the students they teach, to teach in poor schools for two years is the method of ending educational or social injustice. It is convenient to ignore the real issues causing these gaps by allowing people to overlook them while they focus on a glamorously marketed program sending "the best and brightest" in to "those" schools (Ahlquist, 2011). Many corps members come from prestigious backgrounds when compared to those of their students. Dilworth and Brown argue that this type of dichotomy impedes student learning. They argue, "a need exists for teachers who are consciously responsive to their students cultural backgrounds and learning styles; it is considered crucial by many scholars in their efforts to improve academic achievement" (Dilworth & Brown 2001, p. 659).

I completely disagree with your characterization of traditional student teaching. As someone who went through a traditional education program (including student teaching) and TFA's Institute I feel quite capable of evaluating both. We agree that Institute is not an authentic experience. However, my student teaching was. True, my mentor teacher taught for the first two weeks. Then, I took on a class per week until I had control of all of them. Per the guidelines set forth from my university, my mentor teacher remained in the room for about a month without intervening. Following that, he was not to be in the room. When corps members finish Institute, they have amassed 18 hours of lead teaching time with an average of 10 students (Brewer, 2011). In all, corps members spend 125 hours in "sessions" in addition to the 18 hours of teaching before they are sent into the nation's worst schools. As a student teacher, I amassed approximately 640 hours of lead teaching before I was cleared to graduate. I think that if I found myself on an operating table, I would prefer the surgeon with more prep time. Also, what does this say about the impact that TFA is having on teacher professionalism? I argue that Teach For America has been successful at further deprofessionalizing the teaching profession by insisting that anyone can "learn" how to become a teacher and it can be done in 5 weeks (Veltri, 2010). Veltri (2010) notes, "did TFA corps members consider that in other professions, such as cosmetology, licensure requires a 9-month program of study to be operating legally?" (Veltri, 2010, p. 34).

Wendy Kopp's thesis provides great insight into the organization she founded. She notes that she was at a conference for future business leaders and the participants in her "action plan group" were charged with "improving America's public education system." I'm not quite sure how or why these group of college business students were asked to do this, nor where they received the authority on such issues. However, Kopp notes that they "identified the lack of qualified teachers" as a major issue (Kopp, 1989, p. i). As I stated above, TFA has at its foundation, and core, a neoliberal goal of the full business privatization of teacher training and the educative process within schools. Why? Well, that is the easy one to answer...money and social reproduction by way of infusing business/industrial revolution techniques into the classroom preparing students to work on factory lines (standardized tests, etc.). Here is a good video featuring Sir Ken Robinson to watch on the issue.

Lastly, you mention, "Will 1st-year TFA teachers perform at least as well as 1st year non-TFA teachers in the same communities? Data seems to suggest yes." The data you refer to is the Mathematica Policy Research (2004) article that showed TFA teachers performing on par with, and even outpacing non-TFA teachers in math. What you fail to recognize is that this research compared TFA teachers to "other emergency certified teachers." That is, people with ZERO preparation (e.g., student teaching or Institute for that matter). So, I argue that the data does not indicate that TFA does as well as non-TFA-traditionally-trained educators. What is interesting then about the Mathematica paper is that it undermines the importance of the TFA Institute for "preparing" corps members. Flip your analysis around. If individuals can get hired with no certification, no experience, etc. and do as well as TFA corps members, then the TFA Institute provides no unique benefit. Further, research that compares TFA to traditionally trained educators show that TFA lags behind (Labaree, 2010; Laczko-Kerr, & Berliner, 2002)

I'll close with a quote from Jim Horn (2011) that I think summarizes this dialogue very well.

As long as the focus remains on fixing the insides of children's heads while ignoring the conditions these kids must return to after their ten-hour days [referring to KIPP schedules] of working hard and being nice in their apartheid schools, all manner of indoctrination and extraordinary educational renditions may be deemed necessary and appropriate to achieve KIPP goals. At its unacknowledged core, KIPP remains an intervention aimed at cognitive and behavior control that occurs when we use the happy-talk manipulations of corporate psychology as a means to turn poor minority children into the White Ivy League teacher's version [KIPP or TFA's] of the middle-class children.

What do you think? Is Teach For America delivering strong leaders for our schools? Or is their methodology doing students a disservice?

References:
Ahlquist, R. (2011). The 'empire' strikes back via a neoliberal agenda: Confronting the legacies of colonialism. In R. Ahlquist, P. C. Gorski & T. Montano (Eds.), Assault on kids: How hyper-accountability, corporatization, deficit ideologies, and Ruby Payne are destroying our schools (pp. 9-32). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Baker, K. (2011, Spring). High test scores: The wrong road to national economic success. Kappa Delti Pi Record, 47, 116-120.

Bausell, B. (2011). A new measure for classroom quality, New York Times. New York.

Books, S. (2011). What we don't talk about when we talk about the "achievement gap". In R. Ahlquist, P. C. Gorski & T. Montano (Eds.), Assault on kids: How hyper-accountability, corporatization, deficit ideologies, and Ruby Payne are destroying our schools (pp. 35-50). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Cline, R., & Small, R. C. (1994). The problem with U.S. education: Too much criticism, too little commitment. The English Journal, 83(7), 21-24.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2005). New standards and old inequalities: School reform and the education of African American students. In J. E. King (Ed.), Black education: A transformative research and action agenda for the new century (pp. 197-223). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Decker, P. T., Mayer, D. P., & Glazerman, S. (2004). The effects of Teach For America on students: Findings from a national evaluation. Princeton, NJ: Mathematica Policy Research.

Dilworth, M.E., & Brown, C. (2001). Consider the difference: Teaching and learning in culturally rich schools. In V. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (p. 643-667). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

Horn, J. (2011). Corporatism, KIPP, and cultural eugenics. In P. E. Kovacs (Ed.), The gates foundation and the future of U.S. "public" schools (pp. 80-103). New York, NY: Routledge.

Labaree, D. (2010). Teach For America and teacher ed: Heads they win, tails we lose. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(1-2), 48-55.

Laczko-Kerr, I., & Berliner, D. C. (2002). The Effectiveness of "Teach for America" and Other Under-certified Teachers on Student Academic Achievement: A Case of Harmful Public Policy. Education Policy Analysis, 10(37).

Papay, J. P. (2011). Different tests, different answers: The stability of teacher value-added estimates across outcome measures. American Educational Research Journal, 48(1), 163-193.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Yesterday this blog featured a guest post from a current Teach For America corps member, Jameson Brewer. The following comment was posted by another TFA teacher. A response from Jameson Brewer follows.

As can be expected from a Corps Member, this is a reasonably accurate depiction of TFA's Institute and AIM, with one caveat. In my experience as a CM, TFA pushed CMs to focus within their "locus of control" and work relentlessly to pursue academic achievement for our students. The way I saw it, TFA didn't tell us to ignore socioeconomic challenges (to do so would be terrible) or to call call these challenges "irrelevant." Rather, TFA doesn't believe that socioeconomic challenges are an excuse to justify the achievement gap, and believes that good teachers and good schools together can close the gap in spite of socioeconomic challenges.

Is it more difficult to teach in a school where students are plagued by socioeconomic challenges? Of course! It's much easier to teach middle-class (mostly white) students in the suburbs who are already at/above grade level than struggling (mostly minority) students in the inner city. But socioeconomic challenges aren't insurmountable, and the students in these communities can and do outperform their more affluent peers when placed in good schools with good teachers.

Countless TFA and non-TFA teachers prove this to be true in their classrooms every day. You can read Rafe Esquith's "Teach like your Hair's on Fire", or watch Stand and Deliver or Freedom Writers for evidence of excellent teachers closing the achievement gap that have nothing to do with TFA. Do some TFA CMs burn out? Once again, of course! TFA or no, inner-city or no, MANY first-year and second-year teachers burn out.

duke solaris

Response from Jameson Brewer:

I agree with Kovacs and Christie (2011) that The term "achievement gap...is an oversimplification of a [more] complex issue" (p. 152). In fact, their work argues that the achievement gap has nothing but widened over the last decades (including those that TFA has been involved) due to the growth in societal "gaps" that are the underlying issue of the so called "achievement" gap. Further, Darling-Hammond (2010) and Ladson-Billings (2006) point out, a more proper term for "achievement" gap is "opportunity" gap. Kovacs and Christie (2011) point out that the rampant incarceration, homeowner, healthcare, earnings and poverty gap are the real causes of the "achievement" gap (p. 159). Peter Sacks (2007) argues that,

The unavoidable policy implications are that good schools can go only so far in raising the achievement levels of disadvantaged children and that attacking the problem with policies that improve the social and economic conditions of individuals and families will be more effective than creating policies aimed just at schools. (Sacks, 2007, p. 14)

As for TFA's "locus of control," it is always used in conjunction with "Diversity" sessions, which are designed to aid CMs as they grapple with being more affluent and typically more "white" than the students and parents they serve. The other use of the term comes from the old "corps values" of respect/humility whereby a CM shouldn't argue with an administrator about issues and school-wide decisions "outside of their control." Without being able to quote directly from the materials (internal use only), CMs are to acknowledge that there are things "outside of their classroom" that they cannot control; however, they are to try and expand their locus of control. But, CMs are told that what happens inside of their classroom is within their control and therefore they should take ownership of that. TFA needs to do a better job of articulating how issues outside of CM control impact student achievement. As of now, the opposite is true. It is my belief that many CMs develop, from TFA that is, a belief that socioeconomic factors are irrelevant if there is a good teacher in the classroom. Steven Farr (2010) who writes for TFA argues that,

Highly effective teachers first seek root causes [for student failures] in their own actions. Because they see themselves as ultimately responsible for what happens in their classroom, they begin with the assumption that their actions and inactions are the source of student learning and lack of learning. (Farr, 2010, p. 185)

As you mention, the teacher in Freedom Writers did this very thing, that is, attempt to expand her control. She took on 2 or 3 additional jobs to have extra money to act as a surrogate parent for her students. And what happened? She sacrificed her family (her husband divorced her) and her balanced life. How could this be good for her, her family, or even her students? Certainly the film is moving as it is based on a true story; but, where are the other classes she teaches? Like CM's introduction to teaching, that is in a small classroom, the film is not an accurate depiction of what goes on in a school.

I saw a Corps Member Advisor (CMA) yelling at a CM to the point of tears blaming the corps member for her students not brining pencils to class. The CMA told the CM that she (the CM) clearly had not "invested" her students into learning, otherwise they would have brought a pencil. This is a good example of TFA teaching CMs to "expand" their locus of control while shouldering blame for failure.

The issue of burnout is dramatic within the corps. Not only are CMs quitting (only 88% of 2010 corps members started their second year) but so many that do not quit hate their lives. I think when corps members go weeks without communicating with their family members (Veltri, 2010), days without bathing or eating (Brewer, 2011), that is a serious issue. I think it is obvious that TFA's framework can be very dangerous as CMs work "relentlessly," as you and TFA call it, to the point of jeopardizing their health. This cannot be good for them or their students. Even Wendy Kopp has expressed concern over this issue. Kopp (2011) states that, "it is impossible to imagine hundreds of thousands of them [teachers] sustaining the requisite level of energy and devoting the requisite amount of time not just for two years but for many years, and on a teacher's salary to boot" (Kopp, 2011, p. 34).

What do you think? Does the TFA approach increase burnout by asking Corps Members to shoulder too much blame for issues in their classrooms that are beyond their control? Or is this an appropriate part of becoming an effective, responsible teacher?

References:
Brewer, T. J. (Unpublished master's thesis 2011). Accelerated burnout: How Teach For America's academic impact model and theoretical culture of accountability can foster disillusionment among its corps members: Georgia State University.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2010). The flat world and education: How America's commitment to equity will determine our future. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Farr, S. (2010). Teaching as leadership: The highly effective teacher's guilde to closing the achievement gap. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Kovacs, P. E., & Christie, H. K. (2011). The Gates' foundation and the future of U.S. public education: A call for scholars to counter misinformation campaigns. In P. E. Kovacs (Ed.), The Gates Foundation and the Future of U.S. "Public" Schools (pp. 145-167). New York: Routledge.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3-12.

Veltri, B. T. (2010). Learning on other people's kids: Becoming a Teach For America teacher. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Kopp, W., & Farr, S. (2011). A chance to make history: What works and what doesn't in providing an excellent education for all. New York, NY: Public Affairs, Perseus Books Group.

Sacks, P. (2007). Tearing down the gates: Confronting the class divide in American education. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Jameson Brewer.

The rhetoric of educational policy is an ever swaying pendulum from the conservative right to the progressive left. However, in reality, in the decades leading up to and the ten years following the passing of No Child Left Behind, it has been neoliberal policies and practices that have dramatically shaped the American education landscape. Perhaps this claim is best characterized by the onslaught of hyper accountability that traces its most recent roots to NCLB. The neoliberal practice of hyper accountability, specifically that of teacher accountability, has led to an increase of labeling (e.g., failing schools), cheating (Atlanta Public Schools), and burnout.

As a traditionally trained educator who graduated from college at the beginning of what is now being called the "Great Recession," I, like many other graduates, found landing a teaching job very difficult. In fact, over the course of two years, I was only afforded two interviews; both of which denied me jobs because the only teaching experience I had was my student teaching. So, in an effort to satiate my desire to teach I decided that I would apply to the alternative certification program known as Teach For America (or TFA).

I entered the program with an open mind, but grew concerned as I learned TFA's framework. At TFA's summer Institute, corps members are told that TFA has studied the characteristics and practices of good teachers for the last twenty years and that they now have the recipe for reproducing quality teachers. However, TFA is unknowingly working within a false sense of reality and thereby creates a recipe that fosters disillusionment and burnout. Corps members come to TFA with no pedagogical or methods training, no specific content training and are told that if they simply follow the TFA system and work really hard that success will be had. The naivety of believing that standardized formulaic teaching will always result in success in every classroom across the country is indicative of individuals who have no experience with pedagogy and it sets the stage for disillusionment.

What struck me as worrisome was TFA's Academic Impact Model (AIM). All incoming corps members are indoctrinated into this neoliberal and hyper accountability model for gauging student and teacher outcomes. The Academic Impact Model holds that at the root of every student's success or failure is solely a teacher. TFA's Academic Impact Model (described in this document) teaches its corps members that the foundational building block of student outcomes are a teacher's skills, mindsets and beliefs. Those skills, mindsets and beliefs are then manifested as "teacher actions." TFA then argues that all student actions in and outside of the classroom are informed by their teacher's actions. It is then student actions that cause academic success or failure. It is by the AIM that corps members are told to evaluate their worth.

During the summer Institute, every aspect of the corps member's classroom and what took place there is scrutinized. When students show progress it is celebrated only to the point of acknowledging that even more could and should have been done. When students misbehave or fail on an assessment, corps members are told to look to themselves as the culprit. Now, this summer "training" does not mirror the classrooms that await corps members in August. TFA cooperates with district summer schools at the various regions where Institutes are held. Corps members work in cohorts of two or four to team-teach an average class of ten students for less than an hour each. Anyone who has a child in public schools or those who have braved teaching in them know that this snapshot of teaching is nowhere close to the realities of our nation's most challenging public schools, with class sizes of thirty or more.

In general, TFA's practices and theoretical framework like the AIM would appear to be in violation with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, in claiming that teachers can cause effective learning despite the physiological, safety, belonging, and self esteem issues students face.

TFA posits that the external realities faced by students living in low socioeconomic households are irrelevant and play no significant factor in student achievement. TFA teaches its corps members that a good teacher can overcome the ailments of poverty within the classroom if only they follow the prescribed methods for teaching. This line of thinking is in direct opposition to the 1966 Coleman Report that held socioeconomic realities of students as the largest predictor of academic success. The TFA uses Steven Farr's book, Teaching as Leadership (2010), as an introduction to teaching. The book states:

this [Coleman] report fostered a perspective absolving teachers and schools from responsibility for students' success or failure, encouraging a disempowering tendency to look 'outside their own sphere of influence for reasons why students are not succeeding.

(Farr, 2010, p. 5)

To what extent can an educator eradicate socioeconomic challenges through a well written lesson plan? And further, to what extent should teachers be held or hold themselves accountable for the correlation between poverty and lower academic achievement? Even good attempts by good teachers fail at times. But that is not the message TFA speaks during fundraising events or the message it teaches to novice teachers with no background in pedagogy or methods. The organization sets its corps members up for failure and demands that corps members take full blame for failing schools. Perhaps the old cliche is true. Those who can...do. And those who can't...well, they believe they can and join TFA.

Update: Please see a response to the comment below from duke_solaris here.

What do you think? Is Teach For America holding its corps members accountable for results? Or are they setting them up for burnout?

Jameson Brewer is a traditionally trained educator (B.S.Ed. from Valdosta State University) who struggled to find a job teaching due to the recession. He is now a 2010 Metro-Atlanta corps member teaching high school social studies in the Atlanta Public Schools.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody

As the Simpson family prepared to travel south of the equator to Brazil, Homer revealed some misconceptions. In opposite land, according to Bart's father, "warm snow falls up." Reading the latest press releases and speeches from the Department of Education, sometimes I feel as if this is where we have arrived.

For the past two years, the Department of Education policies have been roundly criticized by teachers. The latest response from Arne Duncan is a big public relations push bearing the title RESPECT -- Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching.

However, as in Homer's opposite-land, everything seems to be upside down.

In his speech launching the project last week, Secretary Duncan laid out what he feels are the problems afflicting the teaching profession.

The Department has solutions to each of these problems - but they often have pursued policies that actually make things worse. Here are the problems, and the solutions the Department of Ed has offered -- many of which are mandatory if states wish to qualify for Race to the Top or escape the ravages of NCLB:

Problem #1: "Many of our schools of education are mediocre at best. A staggering 62 percent of young teachers say they felt unprepared to enter the classroom."

Solution: Evaluate schools of education based on the test scores of the teachers they graduate. Use VAM scores to rate schools of education, and remove funding from those that do not produce teachers with sufficiently high VAM ratings. Since VAM ratings have been shown to be lower among teachers of English Language learners and special education students, programs that place teachers in these classrooms are likely to do poorly. All schools of education will feel significant pressure to prepare their teachers to focus on test scores.

Problem #2: "Many teachers are poorly trained and isolated in their classrooms."

Solution: Continue to support programs such as Teach For America, which places novice teachers in the most challenging classrooms with only five weeks of training.

Problem #3: "Teachers are given little time to succeed--and they are under increasing pressure to get results to meet accountability targets."

Bizarre. What agency of the federal government made competitive grants and the continuation of federal funding contingent on whether states created evaluation programs like the one released last week in New York, that will result in teachers being fired after two years of poor VAM ratings?

Problem #4: "Not enough principals know how to attract, nurture, and let blossom the great teachers that they have in their buildings."

Solution: Pressure states to dictate to principals exactly how they must evaluate their teachers, resulting in highly specific and onerous systems, generating piles of paperwork and little real support for teachers. The New York Times reported last fall on Tennessee's system, praised by Secretary Duncan for leading the way.

"In the five years I've been principal here, I've never known so little about what's going on in my own building." Mr. Shelton has to spend so much time filling out paperwork that he's stuck in his office for long stretches.

Problem #5: "While high-performing nations almost universally have a high bar to entry--rejecting as many as nine in ten applicants who want to teach in their countries--here in the U.S. we basically allow anyone to teach, and often train and support them poorly."

Solution: Provide a grant in the amount of $50 million to the already well-funded Teach For America program, encouraging them to expand into areas that have no shortage of qualified teachers.

Problem #6: "Here in the U.S., evaluation is too often tied only to test scores, which makes no sense whatsoever."

This is actually a clever feint. In fact, here in the US, teacher evaluation has NOT been tied to test scores, even in part. But the Department of Education PR experts want to pretend that they advocate some sort of middle course. They OPPOSE evaluating teachers ONLY on test scores, and merely want scores used as one of the "multiple measures" of teacher quality. But this is a straw man. Show me a school or a state where evaluations have been based "only on test scores." Opposite land. No such place exists. It is the Department of Education that has required that states mandate the use of test scores in teacher evaluations as a condition of NCLB waivers.

Problem #7: "Instead of a safety net beneath our children and teachers, test-based accountability has become a sword hanging overhead."

Indeed! And who sharpened the sword and demanded it be hung on the slender thread of VAM ratings? The Department of Education, through Race to the Top and now the NCLB waiver process.

Problem #8: "Too many schools resemble 19th century factories that treat all teachers and students alike, rather than establishing creative learning environments designed to address the individual needs of students and the personalized developmental needs of teachers."

The Department of Education continues to require states to use test scores to identify the bottom 5% to 15% of schools, and subject those schools to the "turnaround" trauma we have seen fail in Chicago and elsewhere. Schools with large numbers of students in poverty will continue to feel intense pressure to raise test scores, until we stop measuring success this way, and stop believing the way to motivate and support people is by threatening to fire them.

Problem #9: "Both the teacher work day and work year are too short to get the job done and allow for the kind of professional collaboration teachers want and the learning time that students, particularly disadvantaged students, desperately need."

Solution: Require teachers to work longer hours, extending the school day, as has been done in Chicago, though there is little research showing this will work. And though the Department of Education speaks of increased compensation for this work, how many states are allocating additional funds to increase teacher pay these days? And how many are looking to cut costs, while increasing our work loads?

Problem #10: "Teacher tenure and compensation is largely unrelated to job performance, skills, and demonstrated leadership ability."

Solution: Eliminate the use of seniority as a means of determining layoffs. Instead use "job performance," a significant part of which will now be based on test scores. When protected by seniority, a teacher knows that she cannot be dismissed unless there is clear evidence she is not doing the job. Under the new evaluation systems, as in New York, two years of bad VAM scores in a row and you are out the door.

Problem #11: "Compared to other important professions, teacher salaries are far too low to attract and retain top college students into the field and barely sufficient for existing teachers to raise a family, buy a home, and maintain a middle class lifestyle. Many teachers must work side jobs or rely on their spouses to make ends meet. Something is radically wrong with that picture."

Solution: The Department actually has no solution to this at all. They have nothing to do with the funding that is used for teacher salaries, and have done nothing at all to address inequities in funding between wealthy and poor districts, even as the gaps there have widened. But doesn't it make you feel great when Secretary Duncan tells us some of us ought to be earning $150,000 a year?

Problem #12: "Finally, good teachers often must leave the classroom--leave what they love most and what they do best--to acquire more responsibility, advance professionally, and increase earnings. Many simply leave the field."

Solution: Pay people more if they raise test scores or take on more leadership. I support the leadership aspect of this. If teachers take on additional responsibilities, they should be paid accordingly. Unfortunately the lion's share of this sort of funding has gone into pay-for-test score schemes, while the Department of Education has cut funding for real leadership programs like the National Writing Project and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. And all the test-centered policies described above will drive teachers from the profession, in spite of all the rhetoric.

Another interesting element of the RESPECT program is this. We teachers have long been clamoring for a seat at the table where decisions are made about schools. The Department has a cadre of Teacher Ambassador Fellows who work under the Office of Communications and Outreach, who are currently holding round table discussions with teachers around the country. But Secretary Duncan gave us a clue about the voices who will be heard the best:

The conversation will be on blogs, in the media, and in town halls like this one. We will engage our union partners at every level--national, state and local--as well as teacher reform groups, like Teach Plus, Educators for Excellence, and the New Teacher Project.

Interesting. Our unions have been a real mixed bag when it comes to these deals. But the three teacher "reform" groups mentioned are another story. All three are heavily funded by the Gates Foundation, and all three have played significant roles in pushing for the increased use of test scores in teacher evaluations.

Teach Plus played a key role in bringing teachers to testify in favor of Senate Bill 1, which passed last year in Indiana. Their goal there was to protect "promising young teachers" from layoffs, by supporting a system that would base layoffs instead on evaluations that are tied to test scores.

Educators 4 Excellence recently took credit for the new evaluation plan in New York. Their leader, Evan Stone, said the following last week:

For the last two years we have been waiting for an evaluation system that gives us meaningful feedback, and now we might have one...This is a huge step forward for teachers and students in New York, and its because of your voices that it happened. This entire policy proposal is based on the ideas of last year's E3 policy team, and it's your effort that got it included in the budget amendment today. But we're not done yet. We need to keep pushing and make sure our voice is heard.

Please take a look at the potential problems raised by New York principal Carol Burris here.

And Diane Ravitch explained:

...one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: "Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall." What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

The last group mentioned by Secretary Duncan, The New Teacher Project, is yet another Gates-funded group. TNTP was founded back in 1997 by Michelle Rhee, and got this whole teacher evaluation mania rolling with their 2009 report, The Widget Effect.

So it is very telling that these are the three organizations given special mention by Secretary Duncan.

The crazy-making thing about all this is that teachers are not stupid. We know when we are being systematically disrespected. We know that in order to have a career in teaching, we need some degree of security. We cannot survive if our jobs depend on constantly rising test scores. The supposed "bargain" we have been given is one that makes our work, especially those of us in high poverty schools, all about test scores. The Department of Education is attempting to create a reality distortion field, where we will somehow believe the spin, mistake all these new mandates for "flexibility," and miss the fact that all these terrible test-scored-driven policies being introduced across the nation are driven by their policies.

Bad news, Homer. We are not in opposite land. Here in the USA, cold snow falls down, and test scores are indeed a sword hanging over our heads. And the agency most responsible for this is the US Department of Education. Real respect is all about being forthright and truthful. We will know it when we hear it.

Note: Lest I be accused of lacking solutions, allow me to once again refer readers to the report I helped write a couple of years ago, A Quality Teacher in Every Classroom, which offers detailed proposals regarding teacher evaluation.

What do you think of Secretary Duncan's RESPECT campaign?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Steven Sellers Lapham.

Note: Steven Sellers Lapham and Jack Hassard worked together on this post.

Public schools in America are under attack from many directions, and the U.S. Department of Education (ED) seems bent on delivering a lethal one-two-three punch. This decade will likely witness more neighborhood schools shutting down, crowded classrooms, excellent teachers fired, and children fobbed off to "online learning programs." Let's recall that Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed its schools 1959-64, creating a "lost generation" of children who were hobbled, as adults, by years of missed education. Today, a school district in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, cash strapped and unable to pay its teachers, is being kept open only by a federal court order.

We now face the prospect of a school closing because the local tax base has withered, the state government is under water, and the federal government has deemed the school to be unworthy of aid due to lackluster scores on high-stakes student tests. The federal Department of Education, which should be the strongest defender of public schools, is making the problem worse.

Punch #1: Punish the Poor.
The slogan "Race to the Top" is social Darwinism at its most ugly: Reward those who are doing well (inevitably, schools in wealthier neighborhoods) and punish those who are struggling (predictably, schools in America's poorer neighborhoods). A child in Oklahoma, Mississippi, or North Dakota should not have to rely on a state administrator's clever grant-writing skills in order to receive a good education. Certainly, some grant monies should be available for innovation and experimentation in schools. But to make "success" the guiding star of educational policy is wrong.

Punch #2: Death by Paperwork.
States might avoid the draconian punishments of the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) by applying to ED for a "waiver." The mad rush is on. To date, eleven states have submitted a "flexibility report." Georgia's is 249 pages long. California estimates that enacting all of the waiver requirements (unfunded mandates) would cost at least $2 billion and has declined to apply. ED could make the waiver process useful by placing a 1,000-word limit on applications (a bit longer than this essay) and asking only for a brief description of a state's educational goals. This would free up teachers and administrators to do real work.

Punch #3: Absurd Metrics.
Teacher evaluations will be based on "student growth." There is, however, no scientific basis for doing this. The practice contradicts a 2011 National Academy of Science report, "Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education."

Using test scores to measure the efforts of teachers is a pseudoscience akin to phrenology of the 1800s, which purported to measure one's intelligence according to the shape of one's skull. It also brings to mind journalists and social scientists of the 1920-60s who misued prison statistics to "prove" that black people are genetically inclined toward criminal behavior. In his Harvard University Press book, Khalil Gibran Muhammad established how a racial and racist, 'scientific' discourse promoted this idea. Today, we use high-stakes test scores to "prove" that embattled schools are "failures," and that hard-working professionals aren't working hard enough.

There are many reasons why student test scores might not mount endlessly upward, such as an influx of non-English speaking immigrants; a rise in divorces; the town's factory closes; family transience; a rise in home foreclosures; a sad absence of parents, who are serving in Afghanistan; etc. Or maybe the for-profit company that created the test got a little sloppy when it wrote the test questions, skewing the results. These powerful influences cannot be adequately controlled in a statistical analysis on the small scale of a single school district, a single school, and least of all, a single teacher.

Pushing Back
We must ban the use of standardized tests to make high-stakes decisions of any kind. Standardized test scores might be used ethically as a diagnostic tool ("Apply first aid here!"), but never as an excuse for punishment ("Bleed the patient dry!"). As a study by Fairtest has revealed, the system has placed an inhumane burden on teachers and administrators on the ground, resulting in cheating scandals in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Valerie Strauss reports that the "misuse of standardized tests mandated by public officials has created a climate in which increasing numbers of educators feel they have no choice but to cross ethical lines."

Of course, teachers, like any professional group, should be evaluated and held to high standards. Experienced teachers and administrators in the school itself have personal knowledge of the teacher, students, local community and curriculum. Peer observation and evaluation have been a part of healthy educational settings for centuries. There are rigorous protocols for teacher evaluation provided by professional and subject-discipline associations. Let's use those.

In New York State, 1,359 principals (and even more teachers) have signed a letter protesting the use of students' test scores to evaluate their job performance. California, with more public school students than any other state, has jumped ship. So has Pennsylvania, apparently. "The emphasis on testing under the waiver plan is as heavy-handed as it has been under NCLB," said educational historian Diane Ravitch, who served as assistant secretary of education.

Replacing NCLB with a new law could propel our nation's educational standing. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's most cherished goal is to return the United States to first place in the percentage of the population who graduate from college. To do that, let's provide every child who could benefit from daycare with free admission to Head Start, which is the most powerful predictor of success for children born into poverty. Then we can strive to make every school in every neighborhood in America a center of excitement and excellence, not just the chosen few.

Until Congress passes a new federal education law, ED can write its rules and marshal its resources to assist students, teachers, and schools - and stop punishing them. And it can adopt a new slogan to match this new ethic. How about "Raise All Boats!"

Have the Federal Government's education acts (No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top) created conditions that have led to the "perfect storm" hitting American education? What do you think?

- Steven Sellers Lapham is an editor at a nonprofit educational association. The opinions expressed are his own.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Jack Hassard. You can read Part One here.

Practicing teachers, clinical professors, and researchers who work in the field know that assessing teachers or students requires much more than simply looking at test scores. And indeed, researchers who have examined the value-added assessment system which purports to measure the "teacher effect" on student achievement test scores, question it's validity and more important reliability.

The Data Used to Make High-Stakes Decisions on Teachers and Students
Value Added Effect
For example, Terry Hibpshman, of the Kentucky Education Professional Standards Board, did an in-depth review of value-added models and concludes that even though VAM has been implemented in some locations (Tennessee, and Dallas), the methodologies "should not be considered mature or well-formed at this point in its history." Dr. Hibpshman goes on to explain that VAM models, by their very nature, are extremely complex, and unless one understands the statistical nature of these models, people are quick to make policy decisions without understanding the limitations of these models.

That said, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) has figured out a way to mandate linking student achievement test scores to teacher assessment using VAM. If one reads the details of the NCLB Waivers, states must implement teacher and administrator evaluation that is tied in some way to student progress on high-stakes achievement tests. This was initially a requirement for states receiving Race to the Top funds. The Secretary of Education figured out a way to hold all states accountable to using VAM, because since he knew most states were chomping at the bit to reduce the hold the U.S. Department of Education because of the nutty No Child Left Behind act. Now, any state getting a NCLB Waiver will have to use VAM as part of their assessment of teachers and administrators.

Now we have created a situation where states will use a system that has not been shown to be scientifically valid or reliable (VAM) by using high-stakes test scores which assume that the results on these tests tell us what students have learned in the course being tested, but also how much the teacher contributed (value added) to student progress.

Willis D. Hawley and Jacqueline Jordan Irvine explain why students' cultural identities are integral to "measuring" teacher effectiveness.

Drs. Hawley and Irvine believe that the practices that teachers use should be part of any teacher assessment system. Teaching practices, to be used in teacher assessment, need to be observed, or need to be described by teachers themselves. In particular, the authors suggest that there are teaching practices that are called "culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), and that these need to be included in any "high-stakes teaching evaluation."

As Hawley and Irvine point out, culturally responsive teachers,

• understand that all students, regardless of race or ethnicity, bring their culturally influenced cognition, behavior, and dispositions to school.


• understand how semantics, accents, dialect, and discussion modes affect face-to-face interactions.


• know how to adapt and employ multiple representations of subject-matter knowledge using students' everyday lived experiences.

• Learning from family and community engagement


• Developing caring relationships with students


• Engaging and motivating students


• Assessing student performance


• Grouping students for instruction


• Selecting and effectively using learning resources

Finally, we should add that the Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA) of The National Academies issued a letter to the Department of Education on the Race to the Top Fund (RTTT). The essence of the letter was a critique of the RTTT Fund's insistence on linking student test scores to teacher effectiveness. In the letter, the BOTA had this to say:

The initiative should support research based on data that links student test scores with their teachers, but should not prematurely promote the use of value-added approaches, which evaluate teachers based on gains in their students' performance, to reward or punish teachers.

High-stakes test scores that are reported for students, schools, and districts are far from the reality of what students do and should learn. We've been fooled into believing that test scores are valid measures of student performance. Let's look into this claim.

Let's say we want to design a high-stakes test for mathematics for 8th graders in the state of Georgia. The first item of business is to check the Georgia mathematics standards for grade 8. According to the Georgia Department of Education , 8th graders:

will understand various numerical representations, including square roots, exponents and scientific notation; use and apply geometric properties of plane figures, including congruence and the Pythagorean theorem; use symbolic algebra to represent situations and solve problems, especially those that involve linear relationships; solve linear equations, systems of linear equations and inequalities; use equations, tables and graphs to analyze and interpret linear functions; use and understand set theory and simple counting techniques; determine the theoretical probability of simple events; and make inferences from statistical data, particularly data that can be modeled by linear functions.

Please note this is only a summary of the 8th grade math standards!

There are 98 standards for 8th grade. You can only create a test that a student can take in 1.5 - 3 hours. We have to worry about student test stamina. How long can an 8th grader sit for goodness sake. Let's say that we design a test with 75 items for the 98 standards. First we note that not all of the curriculum can be "covered" in a single test, so the test makers must make a decision about which standards not to test. We then realize if we are going to "test' all of the standards, we only allocate one test item per standard, and then use the results on the test to claim that we have measured what a student has learned in 8th grade mathematics. All done in one day, when in fact the student was enrolled in course that was at least 170 days of instruction.

The Long and Short of It All
We've created a standards-based testing system that is remarkably short on telling us what students have learned. We have also learned that the statistical model (Value Added Model) that has been shown to be inconsistent, and of questionable reliability.

How can we possibly use data from a complex system, the education of American students, to determine what the contribution of a teacher has on student learning?

What is the "tell" that creates this information on a teacher? None.

There is more to teaching than simply preparing students for the test. There is attitude and effort, collaboration and teamwork, and the development of character. There is inquiry, problem solving, creativity and innovation.

There is also more to preparing people to become teachers than dropping them into classroom with little or no preparation.

What do you think? Why do we have it in our head that teaching requires little to no preparation. Why do we entrust children with teachers who not licensed, when in the state of Georgia, a manicurist must take 9 months of intense training and pass two tests?

Jack Hassard is Professor Emeritus of Science Education, Georgia State University. He is author of The Whole Cosmos Catalog of Science, Science Experiences, Adventures in Geology, The Art of Teaching Science (2009), Second Edition, Routledge, and most recently, Science As Inquiry (2011), 2nd Edition, Good Year Books. Specialities include science teaching & learning, global thinking & education, geology, web publishing, blogging, writing, and antiquing. His blog is The Art of Teaching Science.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Jack Hassard.

Part 1 of 2.

In my post of a week ago, I reported that Georgia's Cobb County School System rejected the superintendent's proposal to hire 50 Teacher for America teachers for schools located in South Cobb. Many of the South Cobb schools are underperforming schools. I suggested that this was a good decision, but also indicated that it was done by default. The default is, that the proposal never made it to agenda of the board and thus was withdrawn for the time being. Is this another avoidance tactic?

Today, we expand our thinking to explore the nature of the achievement data that is used to make decisions about student progress and teacher effectiveness. Our over-obsession with test data has led to the narrowing of curriculum, and led to the goal of education to single a outcome--the improvement of test scores. Period.

In the next post the challenge of teacher education is investigated, and the data is to show that high quality teaching results from teacher preparation programs that are clinically and experientially based. Recommendations are then made for how alternative teacher education programs (including Teach for America) can be improved.

The Simple Mindedness of Test-Based Reform
One of the serious issues plaguing education is that so many of us want a simplistic solutions to such a complex and diverse system. We've been convinced that test score is a valid measure of student achievement, so much so that we willing to use the test scores to reward or punish students, teachers and schools.

Does One Size Fits All?
Have we made producing workers as the purpose of schooling? Is schools performance the basic tasks of creating enough workers with "adequate" abilities and the right attitude to become an employee? (M. Peterson, 2009, extracted February 15, 2012).

Test and standards-based reform seems to mean that school improvement is only based on a minimum set of core standards.

Achieve, Inc., has already developed the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics and Reading/Language Arts, and now in the writing phase of creating the Next Generation of Science Standards. And right behind the common standards are the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), a state consortium led again by Achieve, Inc. to develop the next generation K-12 assessments in English and math. Does this work? Does one size fit all?

This model is rooted in the myth that the United States is not competitive in the global market place because our students don't perform at high enough levels on guess what: achievement tests. The truth is that the U.S. is very competitive, and has been for decades. With basing their thinking on test scores, politicians and think tank types have convinced the public that American schools are a failure, and the one kind of reform that will help us "race to the top" is driven by just one fact: we must raise test scores, and they must be raised every year. Get a grip.

Competitiveness of U.S. Citizens. The United States is economically competitive as reported in the World Economic Forum's 2010-2011 Global-Competitiveness report, and as reported by Iris Rotberg in her book Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform. According to the World Economic Forum report, the U.S. is one of only 35 countries in the world that are at the highest stage of development--the innovation-driven economy.

The United States now ranks fifth in the world in global competitiveness. This ranking has fallen one position, from a higher 4th to a lower 5th in the last year. At this time, the U.S. economy is the largest in the world. However, the World Economic Forum researchers have concluded that the U.S. economic competitiveness has weaknesses. The report reads that the weaknesses include the business communities' criticism of the public and private institutions, that there is a great lack of trust in politicians, and a lack of a strong relationships between government and business. And the U.S. debt continues to grow. (World Economic Forum Report, 2011 - 2012.

According to the World Economic Forum, student test scores on international tests in reading, mathematics and science were not related to the weakening of the U.S.'s ability to compete. Period.

In Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform, Iris C. Rotberg, Research Professor of Education Policy at The George Washington University, concluded that continuing to use student test scores is not a valid argument to understand a nation's competitiveness. According to Rotberg, a nation's competitiveness is too complicated, and is impacted by other variables as identified in the World Economic Report. She puts it this way:

Other variables, such as outsourcing to gain access to lower-wage employees, the climate and incentives for innovation, tax rates, health-care and retirement costs, the extent of government subsidies or partnerships, protectionism, intellectual-property enforcement, natural resources, and exchange rates overwhelm mathematics and science scores in predicting economic competitiveness.

There is ample evidence that student test scores are not a barometer of U.S. economic growth, or depression. U.S. test scores did not cause or contribute to the Great Recession, any more than they caused the Economic Boom of the 1990s.

For example, I have included a graph below which shows the United States GDP growth rate from 1957 (the year of Sputnik) to 2012. If you scroll down to Table 2, which shows the NAEP trends in 13 year old math scores, you'll note that student math scores rose during the last 39 years, while the GDP rose and fell during the same period of time. What caused the GDP fluctuations? Student test scores? I don't think so.

Table 1. U.S. GDP 1957 - 2012.

Rising Test Scores. We've been raising test scores ever since the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) began administering low-stakes tests in 1969 to a nationally representative sample of American students at grades 4, 8, and 12 for main assessments, and ages 9, 13, and 17 for long term assessments. For example, the trend in mathematics scores for 13-year old students has shown an overall increase in scores since 1973, when testing began by NAEP. The data for 9 year-olds follows the same trend, while the for 17 year olds there is not a significant difference from 1973 - 2008, although it is higher now. Long term trends in reading slowly rose from 1971 - 2008, in the same manner as mathematics scores. The same can be said about science scores.

Table 2. Trend in 13 year old math scores 1973 - 20008. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, 1973-2008 Long-Term Trend Mathematics Assessments.

Achievement Gaps. The achievement gap that exists between students by race/ethnicity is shown in Table 3 and by family income as shown in Table 4. The NAEP data shows that compared to 2004, there was no significant change in the average scores of White, Black, or Hispanic students at age 17. This is significant because this was the period during which the No Child Left Behind Act was implemented. One of the underlying premises of the act was to decrease the gap among white, Black and Hispanic students. The data shows that this did not happen.

Family income also has a powerful impact on achievement scores. As shown in Table 4, there are significant differences the achievement scores on NAEP tests from 203 - 2011 based on family income. Family income is determined by eligibility for free or reduced lunches. As shown in the graph, the differences are quite apparent. Abbott and Joireman have shown that family income level may contribute more to the disparity among students scores than race/ethnicity. Gerald Coles reports on this blog that the achievement gap between the rich and the poor has grown, especially in the last decade.

It isn't enough to simply acknowledge the gap that exists among groups by race/ethnicity or family income. We must go deeper and ask why and how the present form of educational reform, which purported to help solve the problem, has actually contributed to preventing any progress.

Lisa Delpit, Eminent Scholar and Executive Director of the Center for Urban Education and Innovation at Florida International University, and author of Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, and the forthcoming book, Multiplication is for White People: Raising Expectations for Other People's Children, suggests that the "programmed, mechanistic strategies designed to achieve the programmed, mechanistic goal of raising test scores" strips away the humanity that should be the basis for education (Delpit, Other People's Children, 2005). The present obsession with standards and test scores has driven us further away from realistic goals that she calls for. She puts it this way:

Nowhere is the result more glaring than in urban classrooms serving low-income children of color, where low test scores meet programmed, scripted teaching. The reductionism spawned has created settings in which teachers and students are treated as nonthinking objects to be manipulated and "managed."

Dr. Delpit explains that she is more concerned now with the development of the character of students than she was years before. The reductionist goals of the present reform movement are not serving most children in American schools. She speaks about Hyde Schools as an exemplar of schools that focus on the character of students, not on their test scores. In her first book, Other People's Children she quotes the founder of the Hyde Schools, Joe Gauld explaining that the message to students is:

• that they have an important purpose on this earth and the unique potential to fulfill it.
• that their true worth is measured not by their social status, intellect, or talents, but by the strength of their character
• that we admire their attitude and effort, and care less about their actual achievements, because these will come with time if they develop character traits like those emblazoned on the Hyde School shield: courage, integrity, concern, curiosity, and leadership.

Schools like the Hyde Schools base their work and curriculum of a set of goals that are very different than the narrow interpretation of our test- and standards-based school culture. As Hyde Schools director and founder Joseph A. Gauld explains:

Over the years, making academic proficiency the purpose of American education has shifted the benefits of learning away from students and families, onto schools, colleges, businesses, and the education industry itself.

In her new book, Dr. Delpit reminds us that there is no achievement gap at birth, and is concerned that the conversation about student's education has become limited and restricted. She asks:

• What happened to the societal desire to instill character?


• To develop creativity?


• To cultivate courage and kindness?


• How can we look at a small bundle of profound potential and see only a number describing inadequacy?

Dr. Delpit believes that classrooms can be created that speak to "children's strengths rather than hammering them with their weakness, and about building connections to cultures and communities." (Delpit, 2012).

Dr. Coles suggests that family income or wealth can make significant differences in ending the achievement gap. Work that provides a family with a decent income, work with reasonable hours, health care for all citizens, housing, and college education--these would help children in ways that Dr. Delpit documents so well in her research.

Table 3. Trend in NAEP Mathematics Average Scores for 17-year-old students, by race/ethnicity. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, 1973-2008 Long-Term Trend Mathematics Assessments.

Table 4. Average 2003 - 2011 Mathematics Scores for 8th Graders by Family Income as Determined by Eligibility for Free or Reduced Lunches.

What do you think about test- and standards-based reform? Should we continue using high-stakes tests?

Jack Hassard is Professor Emeritus of Science Education, Georgia State University. He is author of The Whole Cosmos Catalog of Science, Science Experiences, Adventures in Geology, The Art of Teaching Science (2009), Second Edition, Routledge, and most recently, Science As Inquiry (2011), 2nd Edition, Good Year Books. Specialities include science teaching & learning, global thinking & education, geology, web publishing, blogging, writing, and antiquing. His blog is The Art of Teaching Science.

All graphs used with permission.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 6:34 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody

This week I engaged in another online debate with one of Arne Duncan's press secretaries, Justin Hamilton, who readers may recall asked me to "correct" my commentary a year ago after President Obama inadvertently criticized our over-reliance on standardized tests.

This time Mr. Hamilton took issue with a question I posed in advance of Duncan's latest Twitter Town Hall. I asked, "How can you say that we should not teach to test while NCLB waivers tie teacher & principal evaluations to test scores?"

To this, Hamilton (@EDpressSec) replied: "False. Waiver states using multiple measure not testing only."

Obviously, Mr. Hamilton is engaging in some sophistry here, because I never said that test scores were the ONLY measure being used. In any case, as a result of this pressure from the Department of Education, many states are incorporating the use of test scores into their evaluations, digested and delivered in the form of "Value Added Model" (VAM) ratings. This week New York became the latest state to jump on this bandwagon, requiring that 40% of an evaluation be derived from test scores. Furthermore, a release from the State Education Departments states: "Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall." Thus, as Diane Ravitch tweeted last night: "Teacher in NY agreement rated "ineffective" on 40% (test scores) will be rated ineffective, period. So 40%=100%."

Beyond this, what are the problems with using test scores or VAM ratings as one of a number of indicators of teacher performance?

Value Added Methods are not rendered reliable when they are combined with other measurement methods. We have solid evidence of the problems associated with VAM - which exist with the use of raw scores as well.

A study that looked at teacher ratings in five districts in Florida found that 27% of teachers who received "A" ratings one year got Ds or Fs the next year. 45% of them got C or lower. Furthermore 30% of the teachers who got an "F" in one year got an A or B the next year. 51% of them got a C or better.

Would you want to gamble 40% of your job rating on such a volatile indicator?

Second, VAM ratings are greatly affected by the students who are assigned to your class. Research has shown that English Language Learners and Special Ed students in particular tend to lower the ratings of teachers to whom they are assigned.

Take a look at this example from Houston:

This teacher began teaching in HISD in 2006. Until 2010-11, she was rated as "exceeded expectations" or "proficient" across every domain in terms of her supervisor evaluations. Like most teachers, she had positive (3 out of 6) and negative (3 out of 6) value-added scores across the years.

Can you look at her results and guess what happened in her third year?
 She was assigned to teach a large number of English Language Learners who were transitioned into her classroom, and as you can see, her value-added scores plummeted. This well-regarded teacher left the Houston school district, while those who have stayed are increasingly confused and demoralized by this system. For more on this, and the previous study referenced above, please see the report of a policy briefing sponsored by the American Educational Research Association and National Academy of Education, Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Brief for Policymakers, by Linda Darling-Hammond, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, Edward Haertel, and Jesse Rothstein.

In the Oakland schools, where I worked for 24 years, many special ed students are mixed into the general population, and many that probably should be special ed are not even designated as such, because their parents do not wish them to be stigmatized. What is likely to be the unintended consequence here? Who will want to run the risk of teaching these students, when they could cost you your job or reputation?

Some suggested that other indicators that are among the "multiple measures" also yield good test scores. Thus teachers might attend to THOSE instead of teaching to the test. I am highly skeptical about this for several reasons. First of all, thanks to the NCLB waivers, administrators who will be doing the evaluating are under the same intense pressure to produce high test scores. Thus they are likely to be looking for secondary indicators that teachers are, in fact, preparing their students for tests. This idea was borne out by Melinda Gates' discussion of multiple measures last fall at Education Nation, when she made it clear that the way that Gates Foundation researchers checked the validity of student surveys was by choosing questions that correlated with higher test scores. (See a more thorough discussion of this circular definition of good teaching here.)

If we have decided that all that matters are student test scores, the fact that we have multiple ways of measuring teacher behaviors that result in good test scores only enhances the degree to which we have made test results central to our definition of good teaching. This focus has permeated the environment so thoroughly, we find it difficult to escape. The phrase "student outcomes," which sounds as if it might actually be a robust description of learning, is almost always boiled down to test scores of one sort or another.

Mr. Hamilton, and many lawmakers, seem to be under the impression that these various multiple measures are like fairy dust. When you sprinkle them on the test scores, they magically reverse all the bad effects we have witnessed from the past decade of NCLB-driven test score obsession.

Let's end by taking a look at the raw logic at work here. The argument seems to be that since we are only using test scores for PART of a teacher's evaluation, teachers will not feel much pressure to teach to the tests. If you think about it, this seems rather silly. If you have ever watched the Miss America competition, you know that there are a number of ways contestants earn points to advance. The criteria are actually as follows:
Lifestyle and Fitness in Swimsuit - 15%
Evening Wear - 20%
Talent - 35%
Private Interview - 25%
On-Stage Question - 5%

You can see from this list that the Miss America contest also uses "multiple measures." Fully 65% of a contestant's score is derived from talent and interviews, and only 35% depends on appearance! Does this mean looks don't matter? Hardly! Just as a certain sort of physical beauty permeates this contest, test scores permeate the measures that are now being used for teacher evaluations.

The teachers of the United States have been entered in a very ugly sort of contest, where there will be few winners and many losers. The biggest losers will be our students, who will find that contrary to the bland reassurances of our highest officials, basing 40% of a teacher's evaluation on test scores will indeed promote teaching to the test. It will indeed make teachers reluctant to work with English language learners and Special Ed students. And it will drive good teachers out of the profession, exacerbating the already high turnover rate in the schools that are in the greatest need of stability.

Einstein once observed, "The significant problems we face can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." It is apparent that the same sort of mechanistic thinking that doomed our students to a decade of test-driven reform under NCLB is still at work here. And not even press secretary Justin Hamilton's fairy dusting of magical multiple measures can make this ugly reality disappear.

Update: Someone tweeted that "an article this critical of multiple measures should offer a solution." And Justin Hamilton responded to me "if you're against multiple measures, does that mean your for only using 1 measure? #NCLB tried that and failed." So to clarify, "multiple measures" is a mushy term that sounds inherently good, but is being used to mask the fact that the federal government is mandating the introduction of test scores into teacher evaluations. I am, of course, in favor of looking at multiple indicators as a part of a robust and holistic approach to teacher evaluation. Here is a post, with a link to a full report I helped write a couple of years ago: A Quality Teacher in Every Classroom. The key recommendations are:
1. Teacher evaluation should be based on professional standards.
2. Teacher evaluation should include performance assessments to guide a path of professional learning throughout a teacher's career.
3. The design of a new evaluation system should build on successful, innovative practices in current use.
4. Evaluations should consider teacher practice and performance, as well as an array of student outcomes for teams of teachers as well as individual teachers.
5. Evaluation should be frequent and conducted by expert evaluators, including teachers who have demonstrated expertise in working with their peers.
6. Evaluation leading to permanent status ("tenure") must be more intensive and must include more extensive evidence of quality teaching.
7. Evaluation should be accompanied by useful feedback, connected to professional development opportunities, and reviewed by evaluation teams or an oversight body to ensure fairness, consistency, and reliability.

And to be clear, I am against the use of unreliable and volatile VAM ratings, or the use of raw test score data, as these attach very high stakes to test scores, and inevitably will drive teachers to teach to the test, in spite of Secretary Duncan's rhetoric against this practice.

Update 2: If you still think the use of test scores on evaluations is a good idea, take a look at principal Carol Burris' description of how teachers will find themselves evaluated in New York..

Update 3: Since he accused me of a falsehood last week, I have been attempting to get Justin Hamilton to answer a simple question: "T or F: NCLB waivers require inclusion of test scores in teacher/principal evaluations." Thus far, no answer. Please tweet this to @EDpressSec if you think it deserves an answer.

What do you think? Are teachers likely to feel increased pressure to teach to the test when student scores are included as one of the means by which they are evaluated? Or will the use of multiple measures take care of the problem?

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

A few days ago, I ran a guest post authored by science educator Jack Hassard; Cobb County, Georgia, Rejects Teach For America. One cogent comment came from Stuart (EdOutsider), who wrote the following:

Listen, all this slapping our own backs might be fun and good, but of all the states where TFA places its teachers, three (Tennessee, North Carolina, and Louisiana) conducted a study to determine which certification path produced the greatest collective student gains.

What did it find? TFA teachers (teaching in the poorest 20% of schools) outperformed all other certification routes, including residency master's programs.

Yes, on 5 weeks of training. So, on the whole, would you say we are recruiting the right applicants to the profession?



Here are the studies:



http://www.nctq.org/docs/TFA_Louisiana_study.PDF


http://www.tn.gov/thec/Divisions/fttt/report_card_teacher_train/report_card.html


http://publicpolicy.unc.edu/research/PortalImpactBriefing_RevisedandUpdated.6.9.10.ppt/view



The fact that the most recent evidence was not included in this discussion, I am sure, has nothing to do with the author coming from a school of education.

I asked my prior guest, Phil Kovacs, to respond, since he had posted the reviews of research cited by Jack Hassard. Here is his response:

From Phil Kovacs:

Stuart (EdOutsider) argues that the three studies show some sort of clear evidence that TFA is solving problems that traditional programs can't. Let's take a look...

Teach For America Teachers' Contribution to Student Achievement in Louisiana in Grades 4-9, 2004-2005 to 2006-2007
This study was published by an organization (the National Council on Teacher Quality) funded by neoliberal reform organizations out to replace colleges of education. This organization is so bad that when they offered to evaluate colleges in our state, for free, ALABAMA turned them down. You can read more about issues with their work here, and here.

[Note: See a response from a representative of NCTQ below.]

This study is not peer-reviewed, and given that it is now three years old, it should have been. So it has not been scrutinized, but the abstract tells us what we already knew, that TFA recruits are better than new teachers on these particular indicators. They are not statistically significantly better than veteran teachers mind you, and this is important when we look at the next study.

The Impact of Teacher Preparation on Student Test Scores in North Carolina: Teacher Portals

I critiqued this on one of my earlier posts for Mr. Cody. The authors note that the rate of TFA turnover ultimately has a NEGATIVE impact on student performance because of how much better teachers with more than 4 years of experience do than new teachers of any certification. Perhaps that is true on both the Louisiana and Tennessee study, but we can't know because no one looked.

2010 Report Card on the Effectiveness of Teacher Training Programs (Tennessee)

Finally, the Tennessee report card might be worth something, but it is based on a value added assessment that has been questioned by the scientific community, as I pointed out in an earlier post for Mr. Cody. It is also important to note that the Tennessee data linked to on that "research" page shows that only 8% of TFA recruits are still teaching after 4 years (compare that to UT Knoxville's 50%.) Just to remind the reader, this is taken from the report's summary: "The analysis contained within this report is not based on a comprehensive set of measures upon which the quality of teacher training programs should be ranked."

That statement is insightful is it not?

Just for the sake of argument, let's pretend that the findings on all three reports are valid and significantly so. I would still be hesitant to accept them as the "be-all-end-all" of teacher evaluation because they rely on a very limited definition, using Stuart's words here, of "student gains."

Anyone who has taught children of any age also know students make gains in areas outside of the subjects being tested. Social, personal, familial gains are just as important, if not more important, than academic gains when discussing the growth and development of human beings. They are not important, ostensibly, when discussing the proficiency of future workers. How fast can a child churn out math problems has become primary to how well she wrestles with the human condition. In the TFA summer camp, the second question is ignored because it can't be measured, and, the logical positivists supporting TFA and the education revolution we're currently enduring don't care about what can't be measured. Because TFA members are trained to have a myopic focus on standardized testing, they may in fact produce small gains on standardized tests, but those gains are, at present, the only possible positive from the program. For example, are their students ending the school year more interested in science? More resilient? More likely to graduate? We can't know. All we can know is that a) TFA members have been taught to worship data and b) that data worship may be producing some small gains in some subjects in some cities but we can't know for sure because of the admitted noise in the instruments being used to measure what they are doing.

Maybe, in the English classroom, the TFAers are not teaching writing because it is not on the test, as has been reported in a number of classrooms. Maybe they are simply working from the state provided workbook to raise scores and ignoring everything else that might be worth teaching...i.e. inquiry based science (not testable) or autobiographical history, which is not immediately testable, but has been suggested by scholars such as Nieto and Bode to improve student development and growth robustly defined.

Maybe, in these math, science, history, and reading classes, the teachers don't have students who are ELL or SPED, as has been reported across the country. Maybe, as has already been rumored in my city, the students with the worst behavior are being moved out of TFA classrooms because the TFA recruits have no classroom management.

In short, are principals putting the weakest students with their best teachers, which would make a lot of sense? My hunch is yes, though we need a study with principals who aren't afraid of losing their jobs, to determine if that was true. If the answer is yes, gains on short term tests seem logical.

Maybe the reason TFA members burn out so quickly (data showing the retention rate is declining will be forthcoming) is that they put in 16 hour days, work through weekends, skip meals, etc., and can do so because they don't have children of their own. And the burnout is a genuine problem because, as noted by the portal report that Stuart is parading, the children who have teachers with more than four years of experience do better on standardized tests than those who do not. (Again, I hate to use these tests as barometers of human performance...)

We need to be asking a) why the gains are there, b) if they are meaningful, and if so, we should look at c) what is going on. We need a cadre of scholars doing a, b, and c and then we need careful action, rather than uncritical parroting.

Update: Response from NCTQ:

I would like to alert you to a correction needed in your reposting of Phil Kovac's post. Kovac mistakenly cited NCTQ as the publisher of Study #1. We merely reviewed this study in our monthly newsletter last year (and hosted the pdf to ensure reliable access to it). The study's actual authors are listed on the first page of the pdf.

Moreover, Kovac's characterization of NCTQ as 'out to replace colleges of education,' couldn't be further from the truth. Our organization stands strongly in defense of traditional teacher training programs. I invite you to read through our responses to some of the most frequently expressed concerns and questions regarding our upcoming review of teacher preparation programs.

[The dialogue regarding the need for a correction continues in the comments below. I have extended an offer to NCTQ to share more about their work in this blog.]

What do you think of the research shared by Stuart, and the response from Phil Kovacs? Is there important evidence here that should be considered?

Philip Kovacs is an assistant, tenure tracked professor at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 7:09 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Gerald Coles

Last week the New York Times provided valuable, disturbing information by reporting recent research on the growing educational achievement gap between rich and poor students, which has grown substantially over the past few decades, even while the achievement gap between black and white students has narrowed. As the author of one study put it, "family income appears more determinative of educational success than race."

Yet, as is often true of the Times, what it gives with one hand, it takes with the other. For example, as the media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has long documented, while the paper of record frequently provides factual information about events, its interpretation of the facts buttresses against drawing the "wrong" conclusions about political-economic power relationships.

A clue lies in the opening sentence of the article, which offers a summary of a presumed long-held national expectation. "Education," the reader is told , "was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults."

The passive voice in this sentence expeditiously cloaks a contentious history that, if included in the article, would raise critical questions both about the assumption and whether education should be the determining factor for social well-being. With respect to the assumption, as John Marsh documents in his recent book, Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality, during the nineteenth century "public education encountered as much opposition as it did support," with few people believing "that education alone or education at all" would offer the nation's children a path out of poverty and to occupational mobility and economic security. Moreover, although during the 20th century, particularly from the Great Depression onward, many Americans did see education as an economic and social elevator, in practice college was less necessary because high wage jobs were plentiful for many millions without higher education. As these jobs have disappeared in the U.S., Marsh argues, a greater focus on educational attainment has served to displace "the debate about social class and economic power" and "the causes of and the cure for sustained poverty and increasing inequality."

The Times article contributes to this change of focus by reporting on the educational achievement gap but then citing "expert opinion" that discourages readers from thinking that poor children's education would be helped by directly addressing fundamental disparities in class and economic power. The Times' expert opinion removes from the reader's focus any thoughts that a redistribution of wealth, which would include the use of that redistribution to create end-of-poverty legislation, would serve to reduce or eliminate the social class achievement gap. Expert opinion makes clear that while affluent families know how to use their income, time and privilege to nurture their children's minds and abilities, these advantages would be wasted in the hands of poor parents.

One of the experts quoted, John J. Heckman, has built a prominent career trying to improve parenting skills and enrichment educational programs for poor children. Assumed in this effort is the belief that the poverty of the families served can be left untouched, that the children can remain poor and that the overall educational conditions of the children can remain in an abysmal state. He warns us, with regard to poverty, not to go back to the time (whatever time that might have been!) when we thought that "poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that -- if they want to redistribute income -- that would be a mistake" (his heartfelt word in the Times article).

This view is reinforced in the article by another expert, Charles Murray of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Murray (co-author of the racist and classist book, The Bell Curve) has devoted his life to the claim that differences between the rich and poor are largely due to genetics, that is, the unequal inherited intelligence favoring the rich. As Murray concluded in the Times article, income inequality is "more of a symptom than a cause" (that is, were Murray to speak frankly, the poor, in his view, are genetically dumber). A great expert for the Times to quote!

The last expert cited is Douglas J. Besharov, also of the American Enterprise Institute, but listed in the article only as a "fellow of the Atlantic Council" which, the article fails to note, is a think tank servicing global corporations. Besharov's aid to the rich, like that of the other two experts quoted, has included his opposition to government policies to end poverty because, in his informed view, the U.S. has no genuine poverty! "Rhetoric about cutting 'poverty' is misleadingly outmoded," Besharov has intoned, because "almost all Americans already live far above subsistence poverty." (Yes, he really wrote that.)

The Times article leaves Besharov with the last word about the growing education gap between the rich and poor, a takeaway message meant to leave the reader scratching her or his head: "The problem is a puzzle. No one has the slightest idea what will work."

Yes, there's an educational gap between rich and poor, but let no reader of the article think that any of the following, using a redistribution of wealth, would significantly end the achievement gap:

--Work that provides parents with a good income for raising a family. That won't help!

--A workweek with reasonable hours that leave a parent time and energy to parent. Forget that!

--National health insurance for all, good housing for all, good nutrition for all, schools fully funded, free college for all, etc. etc. (you can finish the list that you think would serve to create an equitable society and translate into solid educational achievement for all youngsters). Mistakes, mistakes! The implementation of these ideas would be money down the drain.

At least that's what the 1% and their scholarly troops would like us to believe.

What do you think now?

Gerald Coles is a full-time researcher, writer, and lecturer on the psychology and politics of literacy and education. He is the author of several books, including Reading the Naked Truth: Literacy, Legislation, and Lies, as well as numerous articles in education, psychology and psychiatry journals. Before devoting himself to full-time research and writing, he was on the faculties of the Department of Psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester. His chapter, "Reading Policy: Evidence Vs. Power," will appear in the forthcoming Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy (Sage). He lives in Rochester, NY. He can be reached at geraldcoles@rochester.rr.com

Posted by Anthony Cody at 5:51 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Sarah Puglisi.

Often I ask people what they think or remember of school.

After 30+ years teaching public school in areas of poverty--some of the "worst," apparently, in the nation--it interests me what the answer will be. Most often it has to do with a relationship between a student, a teacher, and the student's feelings of recognition of a gift, talent, ability, possibility. This is how hope operates in a real-world context. The stories usually celebrate what assisted that person to try to "make it in a tough world."

I call these the echoes of my work.

Sometimes I ask teachers too what they remember about their work teaching. These stories highlight relationships--serious stories, ones that are hard to look at in the present 'accept no excuses' culture. It's hard to look openly at what teachers know when they are simply labeled "excuse-makers". We cannot look into the eyes of the children, these traces of our nation's public work, people alive within their teacher hearts, from a position of shame.

Especially held within the teacher in schools in poverty.

Of all the folks that have been forced into silence, these teachers remain the most demonstrably eliminated from the dialog about teaching work. They are now called the dealers in failure. It might be because they are blamed, called "bad" or failing the children. It might be because under the covers of the policies and political spin we haven't wanted to hear them. In any case, their voices are not the ones I hear on education policy now so front and center.
Yet these are the people that best know the children left "behind."

After all, who really writes? What voices frame our understanding, especially in a world more decidedly divided by income than ever before?
My voice is concerned with a one percent, but not the one percent that may well be having lobster on wheat toast this morning.

Yesterday, after work, I went rapidly home. This is unusual--like most teachers in neighborhoods like mine, I usually stay, off the clock, for tutoring, prepping, and other responsibilities. But my son had a migraine. Halfway there to his high school, my husband called to say he had found the way to get him first, and somehow this put me at the grocery store getting him milk. I tell this to set the scene--just an ordinary moment in my life.

In the store, I glanced at a product. And I started to cry.

On the shelf this year they've returned those lovely boxes of chocolates in the red velvet boxes. The last few years I didn't see them. I bought one, when I found them last, and I took it to the gravesite of a former student. He was killed the day before Valentine's Day. You might have heard of his story. It's complex. He died because of the fact still today violence is a factor in our neighborhood. In all our lives all the time, violence stands.

My former student died at school in the 8th grade. But when I see the box, I remember him younger--when he was a student in my 1st/2nd grade combination class, and he brought me a beautiful box like this one. His father escorted him in, very upset, asking him to apologize to me. This wonderful child looked up so sheepishly. I see him clearly to this day, looking downward, looking up. Swallowing--swallowing food. On his way over from the gate he'd opened my present and had a chocolate or two. I laughed! And, seeing that, so did his aggravated father. His father wanted me to understand that they sent the box in for me. And like any father might be, he was upset. What teachers do, all the time, is assist the child. And what I did that day was the same. "Oh thank you," I said, "I just cannot eat these all by myself, I'm so plump, let's have another." And so we did. Happily I gave him a hug and I would hope, all was right with the world.

Most of us, teachers in poverty schools, must find hope now in a nearly empty Valentine's Box. Because hope is untestable, ineffable, undefinable, the nation has chosen to ignore it--but it is probably the most precious commodity we pedal. Just the same, I'm aware of the role it plays in the relationships we build in public schools. And how really incredible hope is. Like the force of love, it may embarrass our leadership to speak to such stuff, but if you talk to students who live lives forging possibility--it's everything. That I know.

This school year, several years after the Valentine's where I went to the burial of this child, I am again brought face to face with the issue of violence in our community, in America. I'm dealing now with the consequences of domestic violence for instance; what it does to my students. Limiting their cognitive development, forming their fears. I see children that are not best served in highly competitive, test-based and high-stakes cultures, children who are still trying to do their best for us every day. I sit after school talking to the home-school tutor, or the social service caseworker, or looking over at the apartments wondering just where the stabbing actually took place. I liken this to looking over the wounds to the body of my work, the scars. It doesn't stop me from hauling in my telescope, buying my own iPad to share, buying books, prepping lessons; it doesn't keep me from making a book a week for the children with them to fuel our enthusiasm for reading. It just sits with me sometimes as I reflect.
A silent fact of the lives of my children.

I often am praised for my use of the arts with the children. Luckily, I had a high degree of training in the arts. That the arts improve the experience for my elementary students goes without saying. Sometimes though the feedback stops me. As we make The Garden of Abdul Gasazi in play dough from our reader, it strikes me when children are so effusive, so thankful, creative, what fuels such intense feeling?
"You are the best teacher ever in the world," they say elevating me off the floor in their hearts. I think to myself, well, hum. Perhaps so, but when I was cooking that dough I felt a bit grumpy, muttering to myself something along the lines of "what was I thinking." But we press on, drawing, designing and photographing these imaginary best playgrounds ever. I recall one child a few years ago, who returned later to say to me: "These things you did, this changed me, it's why I went into architecture then engineering. All the designing, I had to keep doing that." I sat dumbfounded.
Back then, her math wasn't even that great. Now it is essentially her everyday.
Hum. I started to say to her, well I can't do all I once did with you, not now under the control, structure and mandates NCLB wrought, but I hesitated.
We were in her dreams, and now my hope come to life.
Why alter that with my present cloudy feelings.

Why rain?

I think the most amazing thing about working with children in the arts is supplying the children with firsts.

Poverty often makes getting the supplies, the food dyes, the play dough, the crayolas, the access to the technology harder, if not impossible. So my glitter, my cloth, my puppets, these things that have taken a backseat to workbooks and test prep and classroom uniformity, are first experiences for many children. This is why I walk a bit on a cloud within the children. Because they do know that their learning will be embedded in an experience, activity, project, model. It is a foundational right. And now, in these times, as has been true for years, I'll reach in pocket and pay for it.

Still for the wandering here, I'm experiencing a year where violence and helplessness as I said, might be the lessons that are really shouting at the children. Taught within their lives and community. The other day, due to a tragedy within one family, a brutal violent one, my class came in with plenty of weekend "news" and, worse, the association of this to their life, their fears, their experiences.What they see and know.

How can a teacher talk to you about that?

Especially in a world deeply embedded in denial? A world that thinks when I talk about poverty and violence in communities I might be looking to make an excuse? Or that no matter about that, my standards need to be set higher and the pressure always on. A Tiger Teacher. If one is reading what mandates required me to read, how do I address a Ruby Payne who sees the poor pathologically and needing to "Step up to Middle Class Values" the way we now "Step Up to Writing" with the aim of perfect paragraphs? Perfect people, perfectly living perfect lives. Except we see and know the truth.

One of our best writers, say a Steinbeck, would never write to talk to the pain, struggle and impact of living in poverty to mark the people in the life as "our problem" or "bad', would they? Truthfully it's tricky.
Because in the end I look at the gratitude in those students I teach in poverty, and at the creativity first. I see them as using the relationships we build for personal growth and motivation, and needing the school they go to, to fire imaginations, to gain hope and skills as well as bring to us their awareness. I see them as our answers. They grow up to assist us in focus upon what we value, what and how to change-their backgrounds are essential to what they offer, understandings of resilience and real success spring from them.
To become filled with a desire to care for another, to hear one another, this they offer you. This they gave me.

I see my work as a place where we build the leaders, address the human values; the complex understandings to actually improve the world, and know what that might actually mean--firsthand. Essentially I don't necessarily implant middle class values into children, I try to work on students wanting a life of value. One that sees them as an asset to us all first and foremost.

I'm not sure where we got off track in our dialogs in the last few years on schools. I saw we were off track when I dragged myself through the previews of the movie about Superman and teaching, and listened to Michelle Rhee happily denounce the losers she was firing to the three of us in that theater waiting another show. Not so much because of her effort to take out irresponsible adults in teaching, but more for what wasn't being said. No talk of the people, giants among us, that have taught and assisted children in public institutions, learning their story, opening their heart, building teaching relationships, giving their care tending the communities. To not see that- I saw the train headed for the derailing.

Today it will be Valentine's. Day. Yes, my kids will exchange cards, ones they'll write. I'll engage in having some math activities, secret code heart writing and walk down the halls seeing my peer's children so happy too. The rooms will be excited, the memories will last. My own children certainly remember the 100 dot Love Bugs I make with students, recall special lollipops, lessons they assisted, or, mostly, the warm sentiments. Memories are made. And I'll cry a bit and place a box over at a gravesite for a child that didn't grow up with us, RIP.

But in my mind will be the importance fundamentally of the relationships that are formed and forged within our schools, that are essential to our children, how the children transformed me by challenging me to improve as an instructor- so that I might better prepare them for our world. And how, at the end of the day I take this everywhere, even to the grocery store, as I look upon the hope that springs from a heart shaped box of chocolates.

As I see our nation's hope in them.

Sarah Puglisi is a public school teacher in California. You can read her blog, A Day in the Life, here.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 6:23 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Jack Hassard.

Cobb County, Georgia's second largest school district, decided not to consider the superintendent's request to hire 50 Teach for America (TFA) uncertified college graduates to work in under-performing schools in South Cobb. According to an editorial in the Marietta Daily Journal, Dr. Michael Hinojosa, the county's new superintendent (formerly superintendent of the Dallas ISD) had worked with the Atlanta office of the Teach for America program behind the scenes to bring the new teachers to the school district.
Teach for America recruits and then trains the teachers in 5 week summer sessions before they assume their teaching responsibilities, which are usually in low-income neighborhoods, initially in urban schools, but now in school districts that will agree to sign contracts to pay for the TFA training.

The Deal
According to an Open Records Request, Dr. Hinojosa and Shyam Kumar, executive director of Teach for America Metro Atlanta, had worked together to bring 50 TFA teachers to South Cobb, and discussed ways of raising the $8,000 per TFA for summer training. It was revealed that Kumar met with three influential Cobb citizens, including Shan Cooper (general manager of Lockheed Martin Marietta), Barry Teague (executive developer Walton Communities), and Sam Olens (Georgia's State Attorney General), all of whom agreed to find ways of funding the effort.

It was assumed by TFA and the superintendent that the deal would be approved by the school board, but the board was unaware of any of the negotiations, or how the contract would be funded. Before a recent board meeting, the chairman of the school committee removed the item from the agenda. It was also revealed that the three women school board members were against the idea, while four male members of the board were in favor of it. One school board member changed his mind, and as result the chairman pulled the item.

The School District
Cobb County is located west and north west of Atlanta and includes cities and towns including Marietta, Powder Springs, Acworth, Smyrna, Kennesaw, Austell, and Mableton. The county serves 106,000 students in 114 schools. The ethnic breakdown of students in Cobb is as follows: White (44.5%), Black (31.2%) Hispanic (16.5%), Asian (4.8%) Native American (<0.1%) The county employs 5,894 classroom teachers.

The 50 TFA teachers would have been placed in the Pebblebrook and South High School feeder patterns, located in South Cobb. According to system and state records, schools in South Cobb have been "under performers" based on state achievement test scores (Criterion Referenced Competency Tests-CRCT). But many of these schools are also located in the poorest neighborhoods in Cobb County.

State testing results for 8th grade science were compared between 6 middle schools in South Cobb and 6 schools in North Cobb. I also looked at the data available at the state DOE website to determine the percentage of students receiving free and/or reduced lunches. In Cobb County, 43 percent (46,192) of the students are eligible for free or reduced lunches in 2011.

As seen in Table 1 below, there is a great disparity between North Cobb and South Cobb Schools. CRCT scores are higher in schools with low free or reduced lunches than schools with very high percentages of free or reduced lunches.

This pattern of low performing schools in poor neighborhoods is one that TFA uses to place non-certified teachers into schools in which students have significant learning and social problems. Research, which is discussed below, indicates that students in low performing schools perform better when placed with more experienced teachers, or beginning teachers who have gone through a teacher education program.

Table 1. Comparison of North Cobb and South Schools on the 8th Grade science CRCT and % of free and reduced lunches.

TFA Rejected: Is this a good decision?
There are many reasons to support the decision that the school board made. However, I am not sure that TFA was rejected for reasons that help us understand the real problems that should be explored and discussed by the school board about teaching and learning in low performing schools.

That said, the fact that Cobb will not be hiring 50 un-certified teachers is a good thing. The research on exploring the effectiveness of TFA and other non-certified teachers generally shows shows that TFA teachers' students do not out-perform other students of teachers' that were non-certified in mathematics, reading and language arts (Laczko-Kerr & Berliner, 2002). Laczko-Kerr and Berliner also found students of certified teachers out-performed students of teachers who were under-certified. In fact, they found that students of under-certified teachers make about 20% less academic growth per year than do students of teachers with regular certification.

This is an important finding. What it is saying is that "traditional" teacher education programs are much more effective than "alternative" programs, especially TFA. And for Cobb County, there is really no need to recruit TFA teachers when in the metro-Atlanta area there are at least 10 universities and colleges that have vibrant teacher education programs, and provide a source of certified teachers who have gone through experienced- and field-based teacher education programs. Indeed, many of these graduates would have completed internships in South Cobb Schools.

The decision not to hire TFA teachers is common sense.
Why would Cobb County board members think that placing inexperienced and non-certified teachers in its most difficult schools is good idea? As one teacher said, because of budget shortfalls, the county is going to lay-off personnel. If there are 50 teaching positions available in South Cobb, why not staff these positions with teachers who have served Cobb County for years, are experienced and certified, rather than with college graduates who have no teaching experience, and are not certified in the State of Georgia?

The research on the effectiveness of TFA teachers does not support the claims that TFA makes on its website, nor does it make any sense to educators and parents that teachers in schools with students who have not done well should be staffed with inexperienced and rookie teachers. Would we do this in any other profession?

Teacher Education Counts
In a recent research paper entitled Teacher Education and the American Future, noted education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond wrote that:

For teacher education, this is perhaps the best of times and the worst of times. It may be the best of times because so much hard work has been done by many teacher educators over the past two decades to develop more successful program models and because voters have just elected a president of the United States who has a strong commitment to the improvement of teaching. It may be the worst of times because there are so many forces in the environment that conspire to undermine these efforts.

As Darling-Hammond points out, many schools of education have made significant progress and changes in the way teachers are prepared. She identifies schools of education in Boston, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Charlottesville, Portland, Maine, and San Antonio. In the cases that she examined, effective teacher education programs all had a clinical curriculum which was focused on working in local schools to help candidates not only learn about the local school district curriculum, but to become immersed in diverse cultural settings. These programs struck a balance between the practical and theoretical, and prepared teachers who were skilled professionals who knew how to make decisions about pedagogy and child development, and were prepared to assume the responsibilities of a professional teacher.

As reported in this study, "it is possible to prepare teachers effectively, even for teaching in high-need communities." Teacher education programs not only provide the tools for success, but as one first year teacher said about her first year of teaching: "I'm miles ahead of the other first year teachers. There are five other first year teachers here this year. I am more confident. I had a plan for where I was try to go. The others spent more time filling days...I knew what I was doing and why -- from the beginning." (teacher who graduated from Mills College, CA, quote from Darling-Hammond, p. 41).

To hire uncertified teachers in high needs communities simply contributes to a national problem in which poorer communities have unequal access to quality education. And according to today's politicians, the most important factor in influencing student learning is the quality of the teacher. So why does a district like Cobb county want to hire uncertified teachers and place them in the poorest schools in the county?

In the U.S., the evidence is that there is unequal access to qualified teachers, and the Cobb decision not to hire TFA non-certified teachers is not only good for experienced teachers looking for a teaching position, but good for parents and students who live in South Cobb. For example, the graph below should the distribution of uncertified teachers by poverty (determined by free or reduced lunches), race and achievement results. Data shows that more uncertified teachers are placed in schools which are poorer, include high percentages of minority students, and in schools in which the students perform in the lowest achievement quartile.

Source: http://www.cgsnet.org/portals/0/pdf/am09_Darling-Hammond.pdf, Accessed February 12, 2012

TFA--Be Wary of their Slogans
One of the slogans on the TFA website is: "We can turn things around. We can put our country back on track. Let's start today."
It appears from the graph above that TFA is contributing to the problem of America's poorest communities being staffed by uncertified teachers. Yet TFA claims that its uncertified teachers actually have as much an impact on student performance as veteran teachers do.

Over the past few months on Living in Dialogue, you will find discussion that shows just the opposite of TFA claims. Professor Philip Kovacs wrote several posts exploring the research on the Teach for America program. Dr. Kovacs is a professor of education at the University of Alabama, Huntsville who not only reviewed the research on TFA, but vocally opposed Huntsville School District's hiring of TFA teachers and signing a $1.6 million contract with TFA which will provide 170 un-certified teachers over the next four years.

Dr. Kovacs wrote three articles for Living in Dialogue.
Philip Kovacs: Research Suggests Teach for America Does Not Belong in Huntville: 1/9/12
Huntsville Takes a Closer Look at Teach for America 12/11/11
Philip Kovacs Takes on TFA in Huntsville 11/19/11

Phil Kovacs was also recently interviewed by local Huntsville TV station WAFF, as can be seen here.

Dr. Kovacs cites some of the research as referenced earlier (Laczko-Kerr and Berliner and Darling-Hammond) in this post but delves deeper into research, especially in the legal domain. Here is what he said about a recent study which looked at the placement of teachers in Title I schools:

The most recent peer-reviewed study is Vasquez Heilig, J., Cole, H. & Springel, M. (2011). Alternative certification and Teach For America: The search for high quality teachers. Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy, in press. I requested and received the page proofs as part of my research into Teach for America.

This study focuses more on the legal ramifications of changing the definition of "highly qualified" teachers so that programs such as TFA can operate under No Child Left Behind, which was supposed to make sure poor, minority students received the same high quality education by middle and upper class students.

This peer-reviewed piece appeals to me and to my city in particular because Huntsville, Alabama, is under a federal desegregation order and one of the Department of Justice's specific complaints is inequitable distribution of teachers. Given that TFA members are only going to Title I schools, it seems to me that this particular inequity is going to increase, especially in light of the peer-reviewed pieces cited above

This inequitable distribution of effective teachers further compounds the disadvantage that high-poverty and high-minority students are faced with in school. Children most in need of strong teachers are being denied what arguably might be their most invaluable resource-teachers, which is reinforcing the inequalities.

My view is that Cobb County inadvertently made the right decision not to approve the superintendent's desire to hire 50 TFA teachers. TFA has a regional office in Atlanta, and although the superintendent said the issue will not come up again this year, he wants to improve communication with the board, and concluded that he would try again. As superintendent of the Dallas ISD, Dr. Hinojasa was an advocate for TFA, and indeed, TFA has a big presence in Dallas.

So, if the research reported here has any bearing on future decision making on the part of the Cobb County School District board of education, then they need to educate themselves on the research not only related to TFA, but on the value of hiring teacher education graduates with full certification.

Update: In response to one of the comments below, Phil Kovacs offers a review of the three most recent studies that claim to show a positive impact by Teach For America core members.

What do you think? Was the right decision made in Cobb County?

Jack Hassard is Professor Emeritus of Science Education, Georgia State University. He is author of The Whole Cosmos Catalog of Science, Science Experiences, Adventures in Geology, The Art of Teaching Science (2009), Second Edition, Routledge, and most recently, Science As Inquiry (2011), 2nd Edition, Good Year Books. Specialities include science teaching & learning, global thinking & education, geology, web publishing, blogging, writing, and antiquing. His blog is The Art of Teaching Science.

All graphs are used with permission.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 7:23 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Kelly Flynn.

It's an unspoken pact: teachers will not talk about the biggest roadblock to teaching and learning. They'll talk about all sorts of other things, things you've heard a million times before: that it's hard to teach a hungry child, a frightened child, or a sick child.

They'll also talk about the students they love, kids who have succeeded in spite of deplorable home lives and serious learning disabilities, kids who are kind, empathetic, funny, and wise.

But they refuse to talk about the elephant in the room because it has become politically incorrect to do so.

And that elephant is this: bad behavior, student apathy, and absenteeism are the real reasons schools "fail."

If every child listened in class and did their schoolwork, most would be successful learners.

Really.

But they don't, and there are hundreds of reasons why. In media reports, those reasons hide behind the more general term of "poverty." And yes, sometimes a child who grows up in poverty has never been taught how to behave. And sometimes students are apathetic because they are hungry, or frightened, or sick. Poverty manifests itself in schools in hundreds of devastating ways. But "poverty" has become a catchall term, so overused in reference to education that it's lost its power.

For readers the word "poverty" has different connotations, depending on their worldview. Some equate poverty with laziness. Some think poverty is a choice. And still others think no further than "there but for the grace of God go I."

So it's important that we take bad behavior and apathy out from behind the label of poverty and address it for what it is: the direct result of parental choices and societal influence.

Because there's an entire stratum of students who are not poor, yet don't behave because they've never been expected to. Thousands of students, and sometimes their parents, are at war with their teachers and their schools every day.

At parent/teacher conferences, when faced with an indisputable transgression on the part of their child, I heard dozens of parents say, "I know, I can't do anything with him either." But just as many parents adamantly stuck up for their children with the claim, "It's not my kid's fault."

When teachers attempt to discuss disruptive, violent, mean kids, they walk a razor-sharp line between professional discourse and whining. One wrong step and their careers are in shreds. They know this.

So they don't talk about it. And thus no one acknowledges -- least of all the corporate reformers who create education policy in this country -- that Johnny is hyped on caffeine, strung out on drugs, glassy-eyed from video-gaming, has no self-control, talks back, uses foul language, neglects to bring materials to class, refuses to do schoolwork, or is rude beyond belief. No one acknowledges that as a society we are not only at a loss as to how to discipline kids, we often enable their bad behavior.

The idea that more testing is going to solve anything is ludicrous.

A quick scan of the education blogosphere on any given day turns up dozens of articles about education reform: teacher quality, merit pay, tenure, professional development, Common Core Standards, Gates-funded teacher evaluations, charter schools, vouchers, scripted lessons, differentiated instruction, and most strenuously, standardized testing. The list is endless.

A quick scan of "Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2010" at the National Center for Education Statistics website turns up student issues that school personnel spend an inordinate amount of time struggling with every single day: insubordination, student and teacher victimization, fighting, weapons, theft, verbal abuse, sexual harassment, gang activity, drugs, alcohol, tardiness, and an astonishing rate of absenteeism.

So why don't schools just make kids behave?

They try. Every school has a student code of conduct that clearly outlines discipline procedures. But there are few effective discipline options available to school personnel and some days the sheer volume of infractions threatens to overwhelm understaffed schools. When I first started my teaching career, kids trembled at the thought of a call to their parents. Fifteen years later, a kid in trouble was more likely to demand, "Get my mom on the phone. She'll take care of you."

It would be unprofessional and inappropriate to discuss particular students' behavior problems with anyone. We know that. But at some point this national education conversation has to acknowledge the growing number of students who don't learn because they don't want to. The ones who choose, every minute of every day, to be non-learners, the ones who have checked out mentally, and often physically, of the entire learning process.

You can't force someone to learn something. You can't force someone to try to learn something, either.

If disruptive behavior, student apathy, and absenteeism were taken out of the equation, if students came to school healthy and well fed, rested and eager to learn, and simply tried their best, then we would see a true education miracle.

Instead of attempting to improve student learning by asking how we can make better teachers, maybe the question we should be asking is, how can we make better students? What do you think?

Kelly Flynn is the author of Kids, Classrooms, and Capitol Hill: A Peek Inside the Walls of America's Public Schools (second edition to be released later this year with a foreword by Nancy Carlsson-Paige). Connect with Kelly at her website, on Facebook, and Twitter. And for a giggle, check out the Flanigan O'Malley book trailers!

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody

In 1961, a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, closed his term with a speech that carried a prophetic warning. He said:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

This year, we will spend an amount that would be equivalent to $20 billion for each of the 50 states on the military. Can you imagine the schools we might have if we spent half that amount on education? There is little doubt that, with our current state of apparently endless wars, we have entered the realm Eisenhower warned us of.

This week another Republican used the phrase "military-industrial complex." Only he was not talking about the arms industry. He was talking about the diverse alignment of vested interests now driving our schools towards a common goal. The speaker was Robert Scott, Education Commissioner of the state of Texas.

Here is what he said:

The assessment and accountability regime has become not only a cottage industry but a military-industrial complex. And the reason that you're seeing this move toward the "common core" is there's a big business sentiment out there that if you're going to spend $600-$700 billion a year in public education, why shouldn't be one big Boeing, or Lockheed-Grumman contract where one company can get it all and provide all these services to schools across the country.

Mr. Scott said a great deal more about the over-use of standardized tests, a critique readers of this blog are well- acquainted with. Valerie Strauss at the Answer Sheet has the key comments he made.

But I want to dwell on the language he used, and suggest that what we are up against in education is indeed comparable to the military-industrial complex which drives the lion's share of federal spending. But perhaps a better term might be the techno-scholastic complex.

If you think Mr. Scott was being some kind of conspiracy theorist, here is what Joanne Weiss, Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and former leader of the Race to the Top program, had to say last spring:

The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.

What are arms of this techno-scholastic complex?

1. Vendors of computers, and computer-based learning systems, who stand to gain billions as funds are shifted from paying teachers into the purchase of soon-to-be obsolete hardware and software, in constant need of updating.

2. Publishers of tests, and curricula aligned with the tests, such as Pearson. To see this in action, witness the announcement last spring of a partnership between the Gates and Pearson Foundations for the creation of online curriculum in math and reading.

3. Prominent non-profits, often funded by anti-union billionaires such as the Walton and Broad Foundations, which make their mark by claiming the "system is broken," which they bolster by reliance on test score data, and offer solutions such as poorly trained novice teachers, elimination of seniority, or charter schools.

4. Hedge fund managers, who have emerged as unlikely "reformers," especially enthusiastic about charter schools. It turns out there may be some money to be made here as well.

5. Media outlets, many of which provide a platform for propaganda such as Waiting for Superman, or rely on the Gates Foundation to provide them with the "facts" to guide their discussions of the issues.

6. The US Department of Education, which, much like the cozy relationships defense contractors have had with the military, has a very close bond with "reform" proponents like the Gates Foundation.

6. The Obama administration, which apparently values the enthusiastic assistance and support of these various parties more than it does that of teachers, parents and students affected by these transformations.

Just as the military/defense industry alliance created a new self-sustaining dynamic in the 1960s, the techno-scholastic complex has, through the use of standardized tests and federal policies, permeated -- and to use Robert Scott's term -- perverted our educational system. These various entities have somewhat distinct ambitions, but they coalesce around similar policies.

Teachers' unions are by far the most powerful potential obstacle to this, and thus are the most frequent target of "reforms." Whether it is the ever-expanding use of Teach For America novices, removal of collective bargaining rights, elimination of seniority, or expansion of charter schools, unions are always in the crosshairs. Although our unions have been valiant in some places, in other ways their leadership has been lacking.

Robert Scott was no doubt correct in his warning, as was Dwight Eisenhower. The forces allied in promoting the techno-scholastic complex are strong, but there are more than four million teachers, and millions of parents, students and citizens who understand the importance of our public education system. Our work is clear. We need to help the public understand what is under way. This is not a partisan issue. In this election year, we need to let every candidate in the land know we do not want our school buildings sold off to charter operators and hedge fund managers. We do not want our teachers replaced with iPads or smartboards. We do not want our schools staffed by revolving cadres of poorly trained novices. We want our union leaders to take clear stands against the selling off of our schools and our profession. And we DO want real reforms that respond to the very real needs of our students, as described very clearly just last week by Chicago teacher Katie Osgood.

There was a whole generation that responded in the 1960s to the war that emanated from the military industrial complex. That movement helped to end the Vietnam War at long last in 1974. We need several generations to march together once again, against the military-industrial complex that still consumes our treasure and yields destruction, and the newer techno-scholastic complex we now face in education.

What do you think? Is there a techno-scholastic complex at work? How can it be confronted?

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

Guest post by Jack Hassard

Who the #@!% would make such a statement? Why would such a statement be made about America's youth?

If you go the Broad Foundation Education page you will find the answer to the first question. This is the first of four statements about American youth, followed by "stark" statistics. The Broad Foundation says:

"We have low expectations for American students."

Shame on them!

This is the foundation that has channeled over $400 million into education, primarily in charter schools, training of administrators, and online education. It's a very good time to be in the business of influencing and undermining public education these days, especially if you run a very well-endowed foundation or corporation.

For years now, these same foundations and corporations are using statistics that misrepresent and pervert what is actually the case. Data from tests, especially international test results, are used by politicians, foundation heads, the media, and even the U.S. Department of Education to make proclamations about the status the country's educational system. Needless to say, American youth are beat over the head for not meeting someone else's expectations.

TIMSS and PISA: The Super Bowls of Education

Two international assessments are: Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Program for International Assessment (PISA). Each of these international organizations test students in mathematics, reading and science. PISA studies 15 year-olds, while TIMSS assesses students in grades 4 and 8. TIMSS claims to assess students' performance on the curriculum, whereas PISA claims to test student's abilities to apply what they have learned to real-world problems. But please keep in mind, these are low stakes bubble tests comprised of a pool of questions that in general are without a context.

Since about 65 countries participate in these assessments, there is the general feeling that the results are important, and provide us with a glimmer of the nature of science education in these various nations. Some would agree, others would argue that the real issues facing any nation's educational system are masked by looking at average scores, and simple rankings. Still others report that the findings are inconsistent. For example, a country might score low on TIMSS, yet higher on PISA. Most researchers urge that we use caution when interpreting the results, and not rely of simple averages (now someone's thinking) to make judgements about student performance.

That said, Dr. Svein Sjoberg, Professor of Science Education, University of Oslo, and Director of the ROSE project (The Relevance of Science Education), an international comparative research project that gathers information about attitudes of students toward science & technology, makes this point regarding PISA:

the main focus in the public reporting is in the form of simple ranking, often in the form of league tables for the participating countries. Here, the mean scores of the national samples in different countries are published. These league tables are nearly the only results that appear in the mass media. Although the PISA researchers take care to explain that many differences (say, between a mean national score of 567 and 572) are not statistically significant, the placement on the list gets most of the public attention. It is somewhat similar to sporting events: The winner takes it all. If you become no 8, no one asks how far you are from the winner, or how far you are from no 24 at any event. Moving up or down some places in this league table from PISA2000 to PISA2003 is awarded great importance in the public debate, although the differences may be non-significant statistically as well as educationally.

If a team doesn't win the Super Bowl, is that team a failure? What do you think? What does the public think?

Are our schools failing? Is is a fair claim to say we have low expectations for American students? The answer is no!

Let's take a look.

The Math and Science Conundrum

It is easy to make a quick decision about what you think about math and science education when you read headlines in the newspaper that report that the sky is falling on our educational system, or that we are experiencing another Sputnik moment. But the teaching and learning of mathematics or science, as seen by practicing teachers and collaborating researchers is much more complex (and interesting) than the questions that make up the tests that PISA or TIMSS uses to assess mathematics and science in more than 60 nations.

The conundrum is this. The vision of science that each of these tests measures gives meaning to scientific literacy that looks inward at the canon of orthodox science--the concepts, processes and products of science. Science is seen through the lens of the content of science. But added to this the fact that we have a second vision of science. This vision of science includes public understanding of science and science literacy about science-related situations. In this vision we are more interested in the context of learning, as well as the meaning that students attach to science and mathematics, and how it relates to their world. The lens we use here to view science is within the framework of socioscientific issues (SSI).

TIMSS, because it is tied to the current traditional curriculum, is likely measuring the outcomes of vision I. PISA claims to be measuring students' abilities to apply what they learned to real situations. But science education researchers Troy Sadler and Dana Zeidler disagree with this, and suggest that the test items that have been released publicly seem quite removed from the intent of the SSI movement.

Given this analysis, we are quite safe to claim that these tests are measuring Vision I of science education, and do not provide a full picture of what actually is happening in many classrooms, schools and districts. Science education is more than learning terms, and concepts. It should include problem-solving and inquiry, and investigations into problems that are relevant to students lived experiences.

Standings

Where do we stand?

PISA and TIMSS are favorite sources of data for foundations and corporations, and especially the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to use to show how poorly American students are doing in mathematics and science. The Program for International Student Assessment ( PISA) is a system of international assessments that tests 15-year-olds in reading, math and science in 65 countries every three years. The latest results are available for 2009. The next will be administered in 2012.

Using scores from tests such as PISA or TIMSS to evaluate and assess science education misleads the public into thinking that science learning has been assessed in the first place. For instance, in the United States there are more than 15,000 independent school systems, and to use a mean score on a science test, such as PISA, or TIMSS does not describe the qualities or inequalities inherent in the U.S.A.'s schools. Furthermore, as we showed above, there are at least two visions for teaching science, and these tests seem to assess Vision I, ignoring perhaps more relevant and interesting science learning that is taking place in many science classrooms. That said, let's look at two interpretations of data from these international tests.

Interpretation 1.

For example, take a look at these statistics that you can find here on the Broad Foundation website, most of which were based on PISA results from past years.

American students rank 25th in math and 21st in science compared to students in 30 industrialized countries.

America's top math students rank 25th out of 30 countries when compared with top students elsewhere in the world. [PISA Math Assessment, 2006)]

By the end of 8th grade, U.S. students are two years behind in the math being studied by peers in other countries. [Schmidt, W., 2003 at a presentation]

Sixty eight percent of 8th graders can't read at their grade level, and most will never catch up.

The Broad Foundation paints a picture of American education as a broken system, with little hope for many students, especially those who the Broad Foundation claims cannot read at their grade level.

Interpretation 2.

Let's take a look at another way to examine these data. I have gone to the ED site that presents PISA data, and downloaded Highlights from PISA 2009 in reading, math and science to provide another view of the results. Here is another interpretation, point by point.

1. In mathematics, the only country of similar size and demographics that scored higher than the U.S. was Canada. Most of the other countries that did score significantly higher were small European or Asian (Korea, Japan) countries. The U.S. score was above the average score of OECD countries. Although there were 12 countries that scored significantly higher, there were only three that are similar to the U.S. in size and demographics. We are not ranked 25th in math and 21st in science. (source: PISA Data 2009)

2. America's top students' performance place near the top of all students tested by PISA. For example Dr. Gerold Tirozzi, Executive Director of the National Association of Secondary Schools, analyzed the PISA data from the lens of poverty, as measured by the percentage of students receiving government free or reduced lunches. For example, Tirozzi found that in schools where less than 10% of the students get a free lunch, the reading score would place them number 2 in the ranking of countries. This is very far from being 25th as reported by the Broad Foundation.

3. Are we two years behind in the content of math that is being studied by 8th graders? There is no data that would support such a claim in the form of statistical analysis. Curriculum differences have great variance from one country to another. As in other countries, curriculum is implemented in American schools based now on the Common Core State Standards in mathematics, and the high-stakes tests that are used in each state.

4. It is not true that 68% of 8th graders can't read at their grade level. In the 2009 NAEP reading achievement-level results, 76% of American 8th graders were above the basic level of performance. The graph below shows 8th grade reading results, 1969 - 2011. Yes, we have work to do, but the claim that 68% of 8th graders cannot read is not justified.

NAEP Eighth-Grade Reading Achievement Results 1969 - 2011

Trends in Performance

Here is the truth.

I have provided graphs showing trends in science, mathematics and reading for American students as measured by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). You will find that the trends reported by NAEP do not support the Broad Foundation's opinions of American youth.

Science. U.S. students have significantly improved on the PISA test from 2006 to 2009, as shown in the graph below. This trend is a positive sign, and disputes the claim that expectations for American students is low. One of the ways in which data is perverted is to claim that American education, including science education is broken, and that the cause probably has to do with poor performance of "bad" teachers. It is an unsubstantiated claim.

Average scores of 15-year olds in the U.S. and OECD countries in science

Source: Fleischman, H.L., Hopstock, P.J., Pelczar, M.P., and Shelley, B.E. (2010). Highlights From PISA 2009: Performance of U.S. 15-YearOld Students in Reading, Mathematics, and Science Literacy in an International Context (NCES 2011-004). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Student performance is affected by a number of factors including gender, race/ethnicity, type of school, family income level. The figure below shows Grade 4 results on the 2009 NAEP science assessment. The graph shows relationship between family income (as measured by eligibility for reduced-price or free lunch). Note that students of families with lower incomes perform lower than students from families with higher incomes. This is an important factor when we interpret test scores, as Dr. Gerold Tirozzi found when he analyzed the PISA data from the lens of poverty.

Grade 4 Science Results, NAEP 2009 by Family Income. Click here to explore this data in more detail.

Mathematics. According to NAEP results, mathematics scores for 9- and 13-year olds were higher in 2008 when compared to previous years. There was no significant change in the White - Black or White - Hispanic score gaps compared to 2004. However, since 1973, Black and Hispanic students have made greater gains than White students.

Trend in Mathematics scores for 9- and 13-year olds 1973 - 2008. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, 1973-2008 Long-Term Trend Mathematics Assessments.

Reading. Overall, the national trend in reading showed improvement from 2004 to 2008 for students at three ages (9, 13, and 17). The average reading score for White, Black and Hispanic students was higher than in previous assessments.

Trend in fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP reading scores 1992 - 2011

Have you visited any of the educators in your community that teach science? Have you heard about any of the projects that they doing with their students? What do you think about the Broad Foundation's crummy assessment of American students' performance in math and science and that we should have low expectations.

What are they thinking?

Jack Hassard is Professor Emeritus of Science Education, Georgia State University. He is author of The Whole Cosmos Catalog of Science, Science Experiences, Adventures in Geology, The Art of Teaching Science (2009), Second Edition, Routledge, and most recently, Science As Inquiry (2011), 2nd Edition, Good Year Books. Specialities include science teaching & learning, global thinking & education, geology, web publishing, blogging, writing, and antiquing. His blog is The Art of Teaching Science.

All graphs are used with permission.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Katie Osgood.

I have a pretty unique job. I work as a teacher on a child/adolescent inpatient unit at a psychiatric hospital in Chicago. My students come from all over Chicagoland and attend all types of schools: neighborhood, charter, turnaround, private, suburban, alternative, and sometimes no school at all. The vast majority of my students, however, come from low-income minority neighborhoods. My job allows me a rare birds-eye view of the educational landscape here in Chicago.

And I do not like what I see.

My students are often very sick. The reasons they find themselves hospitalized vary, but usually it involves some type of crisis, either a threat of harm to themselves or others. They are in my classroom, on average, for only about a week or two. Some kids are filled with anger about being bounced around to yet another foster placement. Some are depressed because they don't feel wanted or cared for at home. Some are sad because their lives are a series of upheavals including bouts of homelessness, nights without food, and a new school every year or two. Some kids are involved with gangs, and although they may not want to admit it, they are terrified of the violence. Many have drug and alcohol problems already at their young age. My kids are the kids who tried to take their own lives after being bullied and tormented because of their sexual identity. My kids are the ones who have run away after being abused by a relative. My kids get into fight after fight in school because they feel they have nothing left to lose. All in all, my students tend to be those disruptive, difficult-to-educate kids with behavioral or emotional disorders who frankly no one really knows what to do with. So they end up in a hospital like mine.

As I listen to my students' stories about their experiences in school and then look at the current education reforms sweeping our nation, I am increasingly alarmed at what I see. Every change pushed by the corporate reform movement seems to do a greater disservice to my students than the last.

Charter schools are being hailed as 'the answer' and then they unapologetically push my students out. I have worked with kids who were counseled out of all of the major charter school providers in Chicago, even the highly publicized ones lauded by Arne Duncan, Mayor Emanuel, and President Obama. The charters are not serving my kids. My students are also getting more and more untrained novice teachers, like the corporate reform favorite Teach for America provides, and fewer experienced educators. Many of these young college grads know nothing about these students' cultural backgrounds or extensive social-emotional needs. To add to all of that, my students are being labeled as "failures" by the standardized tests mandated by corporate reform's signature piece of legislation, No Child Left Behind.

All I hear coming from the powers that be is to "fire more teachers," "create more charters schools," or "give more tests." None of the remedies being peddled by the elites help my students AT ALL. They are the kids being left behind.

So what DO my students need?

They need caring, committed, EXPERIENCED teachers. They need people with extensive training and practice teaching students who have intense needs. They need as many seasoned professional teachers as possible who already know techniques and strategies that will help them from day one.

They need stability. Every time some politico decrees from on high that a school is failing and proceeds to fire the staff or close the school, they are disrupting children's lives. They are violently, often without a word of explanation to the child, ripping a trusted adult or mentor away from these kids. My students' lives are already chaotic enough, why add to that?

They need "a village". One of my favorite parts of my job is working with a dedicated TEAM of professionals. I am never alone with the kids. There is always at least one and usually more staff around to help coach kids through conflict or frustration. While I teach, the social workers are working with the patients' families and with the child individually to address those important social-emotional needs and family dynamics. Nurses are soothing their physical ailments. Doctors are helping imbalances in the brain. The activity therapist guides kids through therapeutic play, music, and art. It is a collaborative, holistic, team approach to learning. And the kids respond to it.

They need extra resources. My kids have more needs than students from affluent areas. Their schools need to be flooded with social workers, mental health workers, nurses, teacher aides, special education experts as well as with material items like books, science labs, technology, and art and music classes. Flooded.

They need to have their basic needs met. Another perk of my job is that I know that every child in my class had a good night's sleep in a safe environment, every child has a full belly and knows their belly will be full again soon, and that there will be no violence or trauma inflicted on my kids after they leave my sight today. It is a luxury many inner-city teachers do not get. We need to get serious about combating the realities of poverty.

They need creativity and flexibility. How I would love to see schools which were using the most progressive, exciting, inventive teaching techniques possible--The kind of teaching and learning which seems to only happen in private, elite schools. Instead, teachers' hands are tied to scripted curriculum and standardized outcomes. Charters are no better. In fact, some schools, like the highly-praised KIPP franchise, preach "zero tolerance" and "no excuses" with rigid expectations that are so high, my students have little chance to ever reach them. In this manner, the charters conveniently push low-performing students out. Schools need to bend to meet the needs of students, not expect the kids to know how to change themselves. That's the beauty of public education. All are supposed to be welcomed.

They need strong peer groups. Most schools and teachers can figure out creative ways to work with just a small handful of children with truly significant behavioral and emotional needs. Unfortunately, there is a critical mass that is reached when schools become overwhelmed with difficult-to-teach children. As charter schools and turnaround schools skim off the students who are strongest academically and behaviorally, the peer group in the neighborhood schools suffers. And of course, the great paradox in American education is that the schools with the greatest numbers of these challenging students are given the fewest resources to help them.

They need personal attention. Class size matters. When I ask my students what they need from the adults in their lives, the answer is almost always, "someone to listen to us." My students require positive adult attention as often as possible. And so, teachers need small enough classes to reach every child.

They need high-interest curricula developed specifically for them. Thanks to the enormous autonomy my job affords, I get to tailor my lessons to the specific kids in my classroom. This past week, for example, the kids in my elementary class got extra excited about the children's book, The Teacher From the Black Lagoon by Mike Thaler. This pure, accidental interest in the book sparked a whole week's worth of literature lessons where we read all the series, acted it out, and wrote stories of our own. This independence is an extravagance many public school teachers today can only dream about. Instead, they are forced to teach boring, skill-acquisition, test-prep curricula--the kind of terrible lessons which often create more negative behaviors. The only real exciting learning occurs "between the cracks" in those spaces just after the testing week or at the very end of the year after the last grade has been turned in. Those are some of the few moments when students' faces really light up in the process of learning and teachers are reminded why they chose this noble profession.

They need their mental health issues addressed and not punished. These children are sick. We let kids grow up in environments where they are exposed daily to violence, trauma, racism, substance abuse, and neglect. And then we blame them for acting out in rage. They are subsequently funneled into a for-profit prison system instead of supported in their grossly underfunded and overwhelmed schools. It's sick and wrong. These kids can still be helped.

I am tired of hearing that poverty doesn't matter. While mental illness can strike anyone regardless of socio-economic status, living in poverty exacerbates and sometimes creates many of the illnesses that bring my students to the hospital. Teachers are some of the few people out there who work directly with these kids. And as wonderful as they are, teachers alone are not enough. Society at large needs to step up, stop blaming the teachers, and start focusing on the real barriers to achievement.

I am in awe of my kids every day. They are such dynamic, vivacious, intelligent, curious, sweet, funny, young people. I love talking to them, hearing their stories. They have so much to say. But I feel like society has written them off, thrown them away, resigned itself that some people are just not worth saving. A two-tiered education system in being created where the kids who can meet expectations behaviorally get one type of school and everyone else is forgotten in the purposefully starved neighborhood school.

And it makes me so very sad.

When will the conversation shift away from non-issues like choice, competition, bad teachers, and test scores, to finally focus on the kinds of reform that would actually make a difference in these kids' lives?

Katie Osgood is a special education teacher in Chicago currently working at a psychiatric hospital. She also taught special education in the Chicago Public Schools. She holds a Masters in Elementary and Special Education from DePaul University. Before teaching in America, she taught ESL/EFL for six years in Japan.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by John Kuhn.

Part Two of two.

I ended the last posting with a list of possible causes of the superior academic results seen in Highland Park ISD as compared to Everman ISD. In this posting, I want to talk at length about causality, because it is at the core.

The battle line over causality, like all battle lines, is defined by two sides. One side shouts, "It's poverty, stupid," and the other shouts, "Quit making excuses and get results." Who to side with?

There are two main reasons I side with the poverty faction (not including the fact that I am a teacher and tend to hate it on principle when non-teachers tell me I am terrible at what I do.)

The first reason is simple. To use a baseball analogy, rich and middle-class kids from stable families are fastballs over the plate. We tend to hit them out of the park with regularity. Poor kids, on the other hand, are knuckleballs and rising curveballs. The poorer they are, the nastier the junk. Poverty, in my first-hand experience, makes a HUGE difference in the classroom. In general, homework gets done more consistently if you aren't poor; notes get taken; tests get studied for; parent phone calls get answered; parent conferences are actually attended; commitments are made by parents and followed-through-on; online grades are checked; parent-initiated phone calls are received; questions about grades get asked; supplies are provided from home and not from the teacher's mug of cruddy free pencils.

If you are a reformer, you are likely tempted to say, "So what? Baseball players don't make excuses. They either hit the ball or they get sent down to the minors." But here's my philosophical rub: baseball players face an opponent. There is another team trying to strike them out. I'm left with a fundamental question: in the field of American education, who is trying to make teachers strike out? Who is the opponent throwing this junk? And why don't they just stop?

Everyone you talk to says they want us to hit homeruns. No one self-identifies as the opponent. As far as I can tell, an opponent of education doesn't exist. But these factors that challenge the education of our children keep arising nonetheless. School reformers seem to believe that these pitches are magical and immutable. God is the one throwing the heat, and who are we to tell Him to stop? Poverty has no origin. It has no cure. It cannot be ameliorated or minimized. And any teacher who breathes the p-word, "that which must not be named," is just making excuses.

I say baloney. Poverty can be contained; it's just that no one wants to do it. "Inequality is inevitable" would make a really pathetic national motto, wouldn't it? So quit screaming at me to put out these fires faster and admit just once that there's an arsonist on the loose.
The only problem many are willing to acknowledge is bad batting. They wear jerseys with our logo on them, jerseys that say "Students First" and have pictures of apples and the whole bit. Everyone--everyone--says positive outcomes for children are "the most important thing in the world." But none of this changes the fact that someone is still out there throwing junk over the plate, still trying to make teachers fail in accomplishing "the most important thing in the world," and no one is lifting a finger to stop him. I'm left with the disheartening belief that the reformers' commitment to success for all students crumbles when they are asked to do anything more strenuous than condemn others. Ask them to work for some meaningful improvement in the life conditions of students and they, ahem, balk.

Accountability is only for the teachers in our modern republic. There is no visible or sustained pressure to address school funding, no pressure to address the inequity of resources or the unequal opportunity to learn that, while many are content to pretend it doesn't exist, nonetheless devastates kids in Everman far more than it devastates kids in Highland Park. We batters are supposed to live with these nasty pitches; we are supposed to accept poverty as "part of the deal." There will be no hue and cry in opposition to inequality. And to that I can only say, "Why?"

When Dr. Steve Perry titles a book No One is Coming to Save Us, I can only ask myself why he has given up so easily on equality and the moral imperative of social justice. In surrendering equality and embracing the inevitability of poverty, so many who think they are serving the interests of poor children have traded their birthrights for a bowl of soup (or a stack of standardized tests).

The myth of the Bee-eater is that the outcome of kids is so important that any and all obstacles to their success should be confronted. But that doesn't appear to be the case when it comes to obstacles that aren't teachers.

If you contend that poverty and inequity are "part of the deal," to be lived with and accepted, then I think you are either cruel or you possess a deficiency of moral courage. If you say--as an acquaintance on Twitter recently argued--that inequity is inevitable, then I think you're an enabler for the 1%. If you stand in the public square and say schools must change but society must not, you are a fraud and you aren't fixing anything. After all, there are many places on this green Earth (brace for Finland reference) where inequity is much less pronounced than in the USA. Apparently inequity isn't inevitable everywhere. And before you jerk that knee and say, "But Finland is homogeneous," let me just telegraph to you that my reply will be: "So you're saying America would be more equitable if it weren't for all the black people?" (I like to say that we are just as homogeneous as Finland because we are all people here. I don't subscribe to the prominent philosophy that accepts different treatment of other races as the norm.)

The "quit making excuses" refrain rubs me the wrong way because my "excuse" is the straightforward statement that kids run more slowly in flip-flops than they do in Nikes, no matter how hard I coach them, and that it's pure, cowardly nonsense to say this nation can't give every kid in flip flops a better pair of shoes. When did it become fashionable to throw in the towel on equality in the USA? When did we all agree that Thomas Jefferson missed the mark when he said "All men are created equal"? When did we decide that egalitarianism was no longer a worthy aim for our democracy?

The quick dismissiveness of so many regarding the "excuses" of soul-searing inequality and bone-grinding poverty leads me to believe that they aren't really interested in finding solutions for our children unless the solutions are as convenient as firing 5% of our public school teachers or maybe opening some lucrative charter chains.

I'll ask a question I've asked before: if accountability is good for our schools, then isn't it also good for our society? If bad teachers can be identified and fired, then surely bad policy can be identified and repealed. Benchmarks for statistical progress can survive outside the confines of our public schools, can they not? Or is school the only place in all of America where we are willing to demand improvement and levy stiff consequences for its failure to materialize?

Under NCLB, teachers and schools have been on trial continuously for 10 years. But poverty and inequity haven't had a single day in court. Reams of data have been collected and then paraded before teachers with the question, "What are you going to do about this?" But who of the prominent school reformers has taken the time to parade the readily available data pertaining to school funding inequities and say, "You know, it isn't enough to hold teachers accountable. Our public policy needs a close look too. Policymakers should be held to account"?

If you're in a rowboat that's sinking, it seems to me that you wouldn't waste time arguing about whether you should bail water or plug the leak. It doesn't have to be either-or. Seems that you would let those who think plugging the leak is vital to get about that and those who think bailing water is vital to be about that. In the words of John Thompson in comments here, folks should "play their own position." Listening to policy wonks talk about what teachers should be doing is a lot like listening to white people expound on problems in the African-American community. It is perhaps the least productive and most offensive way of trying to fix something. Yet teachers have acceded (because they had no choice) to the machinations of the policy wonks. But policy has yet to accede to the demands of teachers for accountability on the other end.

I sum up the prevailing narrative in American education policy this way: "Teachers, you must be accountable; policy-makers, eh, do the best you can."

Every time Diane Ravitch or a teacher brings up poverty, you can count on some wag to say something like the declaration in the comments section after one article that "we should not wait until all our nation's social differences are erased to take more steps to improve schools," as if Diane Ravitch or any teacher has ever actually argued for that. What teachers say is, "Please, tend to poverty. We're dying here." And the reform movement's callous reply is "Shut up and teach harder." If we say, "Hey, while you're holding us accountable, could you also demand action on the poverty/inequity issue?" we can expect to be summarily ignored. Poverty will not be addressed, thank you very much. The curveballs will not cease. Learn to hit them or go home.

But you and I well know that teachers will never hit the curveballs like we hit good pitches. And each one of those kids who isn't a home run is a real person, with a real future, good or bad. And we don't get those pitches back. So you can pile the guilt on me and my colleagues if you want. And you can wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first. You can puff yourself up and assure Oprah Winfrey and all your snooty friends that you are better and more pure than the sorry teachers like me and every last member of my blood family, regular middle-class people who pollute every town in America with our mediocrity. But I see through you. We are your scapegoat; we make you feel better about being privileged in a nation where many are not. "If it weren't for bad teachers," you say, so that you may avoid saying, "If it weren't for people like me."

This all comes to me in the context of a Texas funding system that funnels more money to a child's school if it's in a wealthier community, and less if not. Contrary to popular straw men, no one is saying, "Fix poverty and only then hold me accountable." We have said (or tried to say), "Hey, while you're beating the tar out of me with all this accountability, would you mind terribly slapping society on the wrist for the outside factors that simultaneously influence these test scores (which, incidentally, you'll be using to fire me someday)?" And as long as enough education wonks dismiss truly diabolical schemes like Texas's Target Revenue funding system as nothing more than a lazy teacher's excuse, such poxes won't get cured. The curveballs will be incoming. And my friends and I will keep swinging (and all too often missing).

Why is there not a parallel system of accountability for public policy that affects learning? After all, no one honestly believes that test scores are solely affected by teaching; yet no one proposes that we use these same test scores to identify other weaknesses in our democracy. Why aren't we bailing water AND plugging the leak? In the strange reality of these education debates, any proposed effort to ameliorate poverty is seemingly rejected out-of-hand, on the off chance that helping poor kids might accidentally bless teachers with a kind of collateral beneficence.

So what I argue for is the fairly obvious concept of shared causality. The poor scores of poor children are not caused merely by bad teachers, but by a variety of factors, all of which can be remedied (but not all of which can be remedied by teachers).

Surely the day will come when it is considered simplistic and unproductive to insist that bad teaching is the sole or even greatest source of our educational woes. Surely some of the attention will one day get fixed in the direction of that other giant causal agent, inequality.

And if shared causality is acknowledged to be real, then it follows that there must be shared accountability for the outcomes of our children. Every actor whose fingerprints are on these children should be held equally responsible for the results of his or her actions. The fact that Texas lawmakers can routinely invest $7 million dollars more educating 6,000 kids in a rich neighborhood that they spend educating 6,000 kids in a poor neighborhood and NOT be faced with relentless cries of "Inadequate Progress" or "Unacceptable" speaks volumes to me. The fact that school reformers can't find the time or energy to speak out against systematic fiscal child abuse--yet also can't stop rooting out a tiny proportion of bad teachers in a select subgroup of our schools--leaves me little choice but to ascribe to dark conspiracy theories about the deliberate undermining of the American public school system.

The children's song "There's a Hole in the Bucket" never ends. After starting by singing "There's a hole in the bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza," Henry and his wife go through a list of steps needed to fix the hole, the last of which is fetching a bucket of water. That, of course, takes them back to the beginning.

The education reform debate is like that. But it's even worse because we disagree over which lyric truly begins the sad tune: "There's poverty, Dear Arne" or "There's bad teaching, Dear Diane." The chicken-and-egg nature of the debate may never end, but sensible folks should hedge their bets and insist that one not be addressed without also addressing the other, and with equal attentiveness and urgency.

John Kuhn is Superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt Independent School District in Texas. Last year he spoke out on the steps of the Capitol in Austin, and was featured in this interview here.

What do you think? Are teachers being used as scapegoats by a society unwilling to address systemic inequality? How can we change this song?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend