A Place at the Table

I’m thinking about getting out of the classroom. There is a job that sounds really interesting. According to USAJOBS

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) is looking for the best and brightest to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation. If you are a highly motivated, creative individual who would like to work for an agency that establishes policies on federal financial aid for education; distributes as well as monitors those funds; collects data on America’s schools and disseminates research; focuses national attention on key educational issues; and prohibits discrimination and ensures equal access to education; ED is the place for you! The U.S. Department of Education is recruiting to fill up to 5 temporary (not-to-exceed one year) positions under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA). The positions are located in Washington, DC. We anticipate that the positions will be filled in June/July 2008 and that the work will extend through July 2009.

It seems that, with less than a year to go, Secretary Spellings has decided to bring some teachers on board as Teacher Ambassadors. There will be twenty Ambassador Fellows and five resident Washington Ambassadors.

Teachers with successful strategies for increasing student achievement are encouraged to obtain principal support to apply for Teaching Ambassador Fellowship positions with the U.S. Department of Education through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) for the 2008-2009 school year. Teachers will be chosen based upon their record of leadership, impact on student achievement, and potential for contribution to the field. All Fellows will complete a collaborative project to contribute to the field of education at the national level, and will be encouraged to work with their principals and with government liaisons throughout the year. The program offers two tracks: Classroom and Washington Fellows.

Bess Keller and David Hoff of Education Week wrote that Secretary Spellings offered this rationale of the program.

“It’ll be very useful in both directions for teachers to understand what the issues are at the macro level,” she said in a recent interview. “But it’s also hugely beneficial for us to make sure we know: Is this policy implementable, doable, realistic, and righteous by the classroom teacher?”

I spoke with Bess on the phone, and she asked me what was driving me to consider the job and what might make me hesitate. Why is easy. I’m within commuting distance and in a place in my life where I could do this. I named this blog “A Place at the Table” and I’ve been advocating for teacher perspective in education policy. Part of me argues that not applying is sort of the same as not voting—I lose the right to complain about who is appointed and what they say and do.

So why am I hesitating? I have some unresolved concerns:

Why did it take the current administration seven years to decide that teachers should be part of the process?

What are the job expectations?

Here are the criteria and the job expectations the application overview offers:

Teachers with successful strategies for increasing student achievement are encouraged to obtain principal support to apply for Teaching Ambassador Fellowship positions with the U.S. Department of Education through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) for the 2008-2009 school year. Teachers will be chosen based upon their record of leadership, impact on student achievement, and potential for contribution to the field. All Fellows will complete a collaborative project to contribute to the field of education at the national level, and will be encouraged to work with their principals and with government liaisons throughout the year. The program offers two tracks: Classroom and Washington Fellows.

But there will be a new administration in January and regardless of who wins, there is likely to be a new Secretary of Education and some major adjustments in the DOE. Realistically, how much real impact will these Ambassadors have with their time on the job split right down the middle of two administrations? Will this matter more than time spent with students? And finally, if this is about teacher leadership, doesn’t it seem a little paternalistic to require that I get my principal’s permission to apply?

I was in a movie theater watching Elizabeth: The Golden Age when I finally figured out what was gnawing on me from the beginning about this job prospect. Up on the big screen, I was witnessing betrayal, intrigue, and dead bodies at every turn. And right smack in the center of this political chicanery was... the Spanish ambassador. That was it! The job title!

Ambassador: a diplomatic agent of the highest rank accredited to a foreign government or sovereign as the resident representative of his or her own government or sovereign or appointed for a special and often temporary diplomatic assignment.

An ambassador is a liaison of sorts, but he is not a disinterested one. Who does a Teacher Ambassador represent? Teachers -- or the Department of Education? If teachers, then it would be teachers doing the choosing. But USDOE is doing the picking, and it's logical (and not unfair) to assume that the ambassador will represent the interests of DOE. Does DOE want to know what teachers really think or do they want teachers to validate and promote DOE’s positions?

I have 20 days to left to apply. Is this the opportunity for which I've been waiting? Or a sell out? Or something in between? What do you think?

Posted by Susan Graham at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

So the sun stood still in the middle of heaven, and hurried not to go down.... Joshua 10:13 (KJV)

Friday afternoon, as the last kids left the building, the intercom spoke unto me:

Please note that the clocks have been reset. Although the clocks read 4:57 it is now really 3:57. Our clocks have been reset for Monday morning when Daylight Saving Time is in effect.

I detest Daylight Saving Time. Just when we get to that point in the year when I can wake to sunlight and the busy birds, and then sing “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” as I drive to school, I am forced once again to rise in darkness and arrive at school just as dawn is fading into daylight. Every year I rage against it, demanding to know “WHY???” So, for all who share my frustration, I did my homework this time around.

Benjamin Franklin came up with the idea of Daylight Saving Time while serving as Ambassador to France. It was a logical idea in a world lit with candlelight. It seems that one of the first efforts to actually implement Franklin's idea came in 1907. An Englishman, William Willett, wrote a pamphlet titled “The Waste of Daylight.” Defending his proposal to put all of England on a schedule of moving up their clocks 20 minutes on four consecutive Sundays in March, Willett argued:

Everyone appreciates the long, light evenings. Everyone laments their shortage as Autumn approaches, and everyone has given utterance to regret that the clear, bright light of an early morning during Spring and Summer months is so seldom seen or used. Nevertheless, standard time remains so fixed, that for nearly half the year the sun shines upon the land for several hours each day while we are asleep, and is rapidly nearing the horizon, having already passed its western limit, when we reach home after the work of the day is over.

But Michael Terman, a clinical psychologist and head of the Center for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, notes that light-sensitive individuals who suffer from winter depression are just beginning to get over their symptoms when along comes Daylight Savings Time. Quoted in a recent article published in Live Science, "Time Change: Springing Forward Could be Bad For You," Terman says:

We are placing these people back into February. We are dealing with a public health issue and the extension of Daylight Saving Time at both ends is extending the period of year in which people are most vulnerable to depression.

William Willett died in 1915 with time as yet unaltered (maybe his failure had to do with the unlikely prospect that folks would remember to change their clocks FOUR weekends in a row?). But the energy demands of World War I soon pushed much of Europe to implement DST. For a year, in 1918-19, the United States followed suit, but most states dropped the practice quickly after the war. Farmers preferred their sunlight on the front-end of the day. Also, in those days natural daylight was the primary source of light in public and private buildings. Incandescent light was supplemental for dark days and late hours. Factories featured the distinctive saw-toothed clerestory windows, and public buildings such as schools were characterized by their big windows admitting light and air.

The need for energy conservation revived DST in the U.S. during World War II. After the war, DST became optional again -- much to the growing dismay of railways, bus and air lines and the broadcasting industry, where commerce depended on timetables. The debate continued every spring and fall for the next 20 years. Then Lyndon Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act into law, which created the familiar April to October system. Just last year, Congress extended DST by another four weeks, ostensibly in response (once again) to the energy conservation arguments.

But the research justifying DST as an energy-saver is more than 20 years old. Some current research indicates that while there is minimal electrical power conserved through DST, it results in increased use of gasoline, greater emissions, and pedestrian deaths. It seems that we are spending those extra daylight hours driving around in our cars, burning gas, and running over (sleepy?) people on our way to convenience stores and the golf course. Hum.

So what does all this mean to me as a teacher? (My editors sigh in relief)

Science has proven what every teacher knows about teenagers: Their circadian clock tells them not to sleep in. And since many of my students are responsible for getting themselves up in the morning, they often listen to what that clock tells them. They need eight to ten hours of sleep and they are not getting it. And while, in theory, DST gives them more time outside, the lack of sleep will not be offset by an increase in healthy outdoor activity for many children. Their working parents want them to stay in where they are safe after school, which is reasonable since juvenile crime peaks at three in the afternoon.

And, you may ask, do adolescents learn more early in the day? As my friend Nancy likes to say, not so much. It’s interesting to me that (at least where I live) we do high stakes testing during the first couple of hours of the school day -- especially in light of what this research summary, "What is the Best Time of Day for Student Learning?," tells us. A couple of quotes:

According to Carskadon, the students' brains--at 8:30 in the morning, during second or third period--were essentially still asleep.

(W)hen given the opportunity as part of the experiment to try to fall asleep in the morning upon arrival at school, almost half of the 10th-graders went into deep REM sleep (sleep that usually only occurs in the middle of the night), and they fell asleep on average within 5 minutes.

They might all be Highly Proficient if we tested them at 3 p.m.. But by then the Hidden Gifted have left the building.

Oh well. I'm writing this ahead of my posting date, so let me say back here in Real Time that I’m going to bed early Sunday night so I can be ready for Monday, because there will be lots of tardies and grumpy people at my school. Unfortunately, I’ll probably be one of them.

I guess I’m just young at heart!

Posted by Susan Graham at 6:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Education Week, sister publication of Teacher Magazine, featured Chester Finn 's "Lessons Learned" on the Commentary page last week. Mr. Finn, known to his fellow alums of Phillips Exeter Academy (and most of the world) as "Checker," is usually styled as an “education guru” because he is a Hoover Institute Fellow and President of The Fordham Foundation where he contributes regularly to The Education Gadfly. For something like three decades, he has been more than willing to explain to people in positions of power exactly what is wrong with public education. It’s nice to know that he has learned some lessons along the way. Here are some examples:

Lesson 2. People are good at different things--and plenty of human traits matter besides academics.

Lesson 11. Don't read too much into test scores.

According to David Hoff’s blog, in his new book Troublemaker Finn offers, as examples, his own children, who drank powdered milk to help with the financial strain of private schools, where their educational future didn’t balance on a single test -- a test that might include a question like this:

The Finns want to pay for their two children to attend a private high school in suburban Maryland. Tuition at the median private high school for day students is $10,000. The Finn family recoups the cost of private school over public school by drinking powdered skim milk rather than fresh skim milk. If the cost differential between powdered and fresh skim milk is $2 per gallon, how much milk does the Finn family drink per school year to save enough to pay for tuition? (You may use scratch paper to determine your answer.)

Anyway, while I would agree with Lessons 2 and 11, I wonder why Finn still promotes the National Assessment of Educational Progress (he served as first chair of NAEP's governing board), which is at best a very limited, and at worst, a deeply flawed method of determining the abilities of America’s young people.

Lesson 3. Even the biggest-name schools have kids "left behind," victimized by an inferior education.

Lesson 10. Hard as it is to make government reforms succeed, private ventures also face trouble sustaining their edge and not slipping into wary, bureaucratized, status-quo-ism.

I guess these really were lessons learned the hard way. NCLB doesn't seem to be fixing things. The Edison Project Schools (where Finn was a "co-visioner" at the start-up) proved to be a disaster of private enterprise in public education. It is a lot easier to write a business plan for effective schooling than it is to actually make it work. Since Finn has learned these lessons, I wonder why he and his colleagues at the Fordham Foundation continue to support school privatization schemes?

Lesson 4. Teaching is truly hard, and being smart and well educated doesn't make one good at it.

From the sound of it, Checker really did learn this lesson most painfully. After attending Phillips Exeter Academy ( pricey now, pricey then) and earning bachelor and master degrees from Harvard (ditto), it must have been pretty traumatic to discover he couldn’t cut it in a public high school classroom. I give him credit for publicly confessing that he showed poor judgment when he brought to class a pig's head obtained from the local butcher and used it as a visual aid for Lord of the Flies. Perhaps he should have thought about running that idea by someone with a little more experience teaching teenagers, even if they didn’t have quite as fine an educational pedigree. In any event, Finn says he "came to realize that, if I were going to make a difference in American education, it wouldn’t be at the retail level."

Lesson 6. Persistence counts, even in the nation’s capital.

Lesson 7. Character counts, too, along with leadership and courage.

Yes, these things do count. And I wonder, if Finn has learned these lessons, why he derives such pleasure in styling himself as a gadfly (meddler, busybody, pest, nuisance) and a troublemaker. I spend my day with people of persistence, character, leadership and courage. (Many, Finn might be surprised to learn, are also smart and well-educated.) They are classroom teachers. They didn’t give up after a year. They come back to the classroom every day to try to improve the lives of their students. Some of them are amazing. Some of them struggle. But they are sticking around and putting in the time it takes to become accomplished teachers. Finn went back to Harvard and got a doctorate in Education Administration and Policy. And while I may not be qualified to question the screening process for the doctoral program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I wonder about it. If a new CPA fails to survive an entry level job at an accounting firm, is the obvious path to skip the “retail” level and go back for a PhD. in Economics? Perhaps so. Perhaps this explains something about the quality and practicality of education policy today.

12. Nothing in education reform is easy.

No, it’s not. And quite frankly, those of us out here on the front lines could do without professional Troublemakers who leverage their privileged backgrounds, elitist education, and the contacts that go with them into careers directing the campaign from the rear. Public education is serious business. The future of our economy, government, and people depend on it. If Finn is serious about determining what works and what doesn’t, perhaps he should spend less time posturing in the plush chairs of non-profit think tanks, or the marble halls of government, and a little more time in quiet contemplation, observing and listening to the teachers, school administrators, and students who spend their days in our public schools. There are lessons yet to be learned there.

Posted by Susan Graham at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)