Guest post by Rachel Levy:

Andrew Rotherham recently wrote a column in Time advocating for parents' choosing their children's teachers. Some of the commenters at Joanne Jacobs' blog have some valid criticisms. Jacobs' summarizes in saying:

Of course, if all parents investigate teachers' reputations and request whoever's considered best, this doesn't work.

While I could make the same case against it, I want to take this criticism a step further. First of all, parents may not make the best choices for their children. Not every parent is an education expert, and they may choose based on irrelevant criteria. They might choose a teacher based on the color of his skin or based on her having an accent. Or they might choose based on the simplest and most convenient index available: test scores.

That being said, it would be disingenuous of me if I didn't acknowledge, as Jacobs does, that savvy parents already use their influence to steer their children towards certain teachers and to avoid others. My parents did this for my sister and me; I, no doubt, would do this for my own children.

I also think it's important that parents have a say in where and with whom their child is placed. I appreciate the caveats Rotherham offers about publishing teachers' VAM scores and his sound advice regarding how to find out more about the culture and style of teaching in particular schools.

However, I don't like the idea of modeling teacher or school choice after the process used to choose a car to purchase as Rotherham seems to (Who, exactly, is the car supposed to be here? Speaking of treating teachers like widgets. . .), but I think there's something to be said for making sure that your child is properly matched. I also don't deny that in some cases, the problem isn't one of matching, but one of someone who shouldn't be in the classroom. Even under the best possible working conditions, I've seen this be the case.

What then should be done? My kids' school does something that's in between. Towards the end of each school year, the school sends parents a form with about four questions on it which ask parents and guardians to describe their child's strengths, weaknesses, personality, etc. The staff and faculty then work as a team using what they already know about your child (especially if the child is already a student at the school), the dynamics with their peers, the information the parent provides, what they know about the style, strengths and weaknesses of each teacher to form each class and to place each student.

Honestly, and this could be a lucky coincidence, my kids have yet to be mismatched. Ultimately, this process allows for professional judgment and parental judgment. It means the school is not only hearing the parent voice but that they're taking it into consideration, using it to inform the decisions they make. I have seen parents request class changes during the year and those are usually honored. I have heard of parents' requesting teachers their previous children have had before and I think that's usually honored, too. This may even be encouraged as it means the teacher already knows a family.

The placement process is emblematic of all of our other experiences at this school. As parents, my husband and I are always consulted and we always feel that what we say matters. We don't always do what they suggest and sometimes we do what they suggest even though we're reluctant to, but we usually follow their advice and we're almost always glad we did. Either way, we always work together with administrators, staff, and faculty as a team.

The other thing I like about this system is that it doesn't leave behind children whose parents aren't involved in their education. If a parent neglects to complete that form, it's unfortunate and may put their child at a disadvantage, but at least the teachers, principals, counselors, and social workers' judgment is there to fill in the gaps--there is some safety net for children with less involved parents. Unfortunately, children with parents who aren't making good, or any choices, for them are often left to chance in straight-up school choice systems.

Otherwise, what bothers me most about education, schools, and teachers as cars to be chosen via Consumer Reports'-style ratings (as much as I value using Consumer Reports for making purchase decisions) is that it reduces every place not just to a marketplace, but to a zero-sum, competitive line of rankings from best to worst. This isn't even how people choose cars. Furthermore, my kids' school isn't a car dealership and I don't want it to be run like one--what an utterly uninspiring, bleak, and crude vision of the teaching and learning process.

During his opening of school remarks, a principal I once worked for ( he was young and energetic, mind you) conveyed to the faculty the magnitude of the compact between parents and educators. Every day, he told us, parents entrust us educators with the people they care about most in the world, to undertake one of the most important processes of their young lives: their education. This is a grave and awesome responsibility that educators to need to own and fulfill.

Now, that's inspiring. Above all, the educators who get that are the ones I want teaching my children.

Rachel Levy is a writer, teacher, and parent who lives in Ashland, Virginia. She has taught middle school, high school, as well as elementary school-aged children, preschoolers, and adults. Her education writing has appeared at TeachHub.com, The Washington Post's "The Answer Sheet," and Truthout. She normally blogs about education at All Things Education and is a contributor to The Core Knowledge Blog, Blue Virginia, and So Educated.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Teacher evaluation--with all its multiple facets, blind alleys, disputed data models, technocratic hype and roll-out problems-- is on every principal's mind these days. It would be great to think that principals in states with new evaluation plans are eager to begin this work, now having permission to sink more deeply into their roles as instructional guides, to have productive two-way professional conversations with their teachers, thinking together about improving instruction to reach specific goals.

But no. They're worried about another time suck and avalanche of paperwork on top of an already-ridiculous workload. And--you can't blame them. Being a good principal, like being a good teacher, is impossible. There is no way one single human being can cover all the bases, from keeping the buses running on time to staying abreast of the new math curriculum in grades K through 6. Besides, the new evaluation plans have huge problems embedded, beyond the make-work element.

Hint: this is how pointless and ineffectual evaluation-checklists came into being. For many years, the first item on my school's teacher evaluation checklist was "Teacher's appearance is neat and well-groomed." Worthless. But certainly easy to evaluate in a matter of seconds.

I'm happy to see the Checklist Era end, too. But--however inadequate the evaluation tools, sharp principals have been pretty good at identifying, and sometimes picking off, the lemons. There's considerable evidence that even before they see "data," principals reliably know who their superstar teachers and ineffective teachers are--even if they're unclear about that large middle segment. From a 2005 study by Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren:

In particular, principals appear quite good at identifying those teachers who produce the largest and smallest standardized achievement gains in their schools, but have far less ability to distinguish between teachers in the middle of this distribution and systematically discriminate against male and untenured faculty. Moreover, we find that a principal's overall rating of a teacher is a substantially better predictor of future parent requests for that teacher than either the teacher's experience, education and current compensation or the teacher's value-added achievement measure.

Presumably, weaving a constantly shifting percentage of test data and "multiple measures" (whatever that means) into complex evaluation procedures will help principals keep closer tabs on the instructional efficacy of all staff members. Unspoken: and generate a paper trail that will make it easier to fire them, too.

Is it more important for principals to spend time doing complex teacher evaluations than walking the halls, talking to parents and students--or mundane tasks like bus duty? Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project and a person who has obviously not spent much time in middle school cafeterias, suggests that schools ensure principals act first as instructional leaders, transferring non-academic tasks to "other staff members."

"This is what they're supposed to be doing. Do we really think that lunch-room duty or monitoring the school buses is so important?"

Actually, yes. An effective principal will have his/her finger on the pulse of school climate, sharing daily responsibility for a building that is safe and orderly, where good teaching and learning flourish, where there is mutual respect. Anybody who thinks that job can be permanently outsourced to unnamed "staff members" is mistaken. Good school leaders don't shut themselves up in their offices to do paperwork. Not if they want the support and cooperation of their teachers and students.

So--who will do this complex, data-based evaluating if principals don't have enough time? There's talk of peer review, bringing accomplished teachers into the evaluation process. For every teacher who's ever worried about their principal having zero expertise in their subject discipline, this could be good news. But I'm guessing use of teacher evaluators would start a firestorm among the biggest promoters of using test data to evaluate teacher performance.

My prediction: In the end, this will be another issue where outcomes are determined by cost-effectiveness. If it's too expensive for principals to fairly evaluate teachers' instructional efficacy, a cheaper strategy--relying more heavily on test data and technology--will be found. In fact, I'm guessing that any number of education publishers and non-profits are working on it right now.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Why don't schools routinely tap their best teachers to organize and deliver custom-tailored professional development to their peers?

Interesting question.

It seems like a no-brainer, actually. It's standard operating procedure for most professions--the master litigator advising and modeling for researchers just out of law school, the CPA counseling junior partners about weathering tax season--or bright newbies offering training on technology tools veterans haven't yet utilized.

There was a mini-conversation at Twitter over this question:

@BreaktheCurve (Craig Jerald): Never been able to figure out why teachers don't revolt & protest against time-wasting PD.

@TeacherBeat (Stephen Sawchuk, of Education Week): I wrote a whole series on this last year. PD terrible, districts don't even know what they spend on it

@Csousanh: (Chris Sousa) Cycle school's expert teachers as this, 1/2 teach load keeps them fresh. It's cheaper, can build trust and confidence too.

@nancyflanagan: Nearly 100,000 NB Certified teachers are anxious (and vetted) to serve as coaches. Just for starters.

@TeacherBeat: So why aren't districts using them?

Well....lots of reasons. And the question applies to all those with recognized signals of teacher proficiency, not just National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs).

First--it must be said that some progressive school leaders do regularly seek out teacher expertise and leadership in building a community of highly skilled educators. It's not unknown. But it's not part of the traditional school culture; the idea represents a sea change in ordinary practice and thinking.

Teachers typically don't determine and access their own professional learning needs. They're learning and growing all the time, of course--but their formal development is marked by credits, units and workshops: seat time.

There is a dominant mindset that Professional Development (caps intentional) is something delivered to teachers, rather than cultivated by them, as practitioners striving to improve their practice. Professional Development assumes that someone knows better than a teacher.

Who is that someone? Often, it's an administrator, a curriculum or human resources director. I'd be the first to say that these are necessary jobs--curriculum and instruction are the core purpose of schooling, after all--but central office administrators have a tendency to "know best" when it comes to teacher development. Because it's what they were hired to do, and are held accountable for.

This involves a level of suspicion and mistrust-- the administrative monitoring function kicks in. Will teachers really learn something new if it's not fed to them by a talking head in front of a room? Would they waste time, if it wasn't structured for them?

In my district, this boiled down to a fight over whether "working in their rooms" could constitute valid teacher professional development. Would teachers take this time to simply get out from under their accrued paperwork and grading? How would administrators monitor and evaluate teacher behavior? How would they know that teachers had learned?

Actually, uninterrupted time to get organized is an incredibly rare and valuable commodity to American teachers. Especially if it frees a teacher up to read professionally at home, research new ideas on the Web, prepare materials for a demonstration, or meet with other 5th grade teachers after school to talk about good writing prompts.

All of which are also "professional development," BTW.

There can also be a false elitism around teacher-led professional development--the "who does she think she is?" syndrome. While teachers are perfectly willing to swipe good ideas and practices shared by colleagues in the lunchroom, a teacher who's put his reputation on the line for a respected credential standing in front of the room violates some teachers' sense of egalitarianism. Here's another way to think about it: Are NBCTs promoting their own expertise in self-created PD opportunities? If not--why not?

There are really two big factors at play here. Number one, teachers aren't considered true professionals--and policy is leading us further away from a professional work model. We're still talking about "training" teachers, rather than drawing on their wisdom.

Finally--probably the most significant reason--professional development is an education market. What would happen if teacher development happened internally, entirely site-based and tailored to particular schools and populations? It would require demonstrated, deep teacher expertise in instruction and curricular issues. Which could shift the balance of power. And it would cost very little.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Who speaks for public education?

Policy-makers, who set change in motion with mandates and incentives designed to get them re-elected? School leaders, who find themselves administering policy "solutions" that actually get in the way of what leaders believe is best for the school community they're leading?

Teachers, whose autonomy, professional judgment and organizations are denigrated daily? Parents, who are deeply invested in educational outcomes, but seldom asked for their perspectives on core issues of teaching, learning and decision-making?

Or --do we get our impressions about public schools from the media?

Where do we--as a nation-- get our ideas and beliefs about education?

• A friend works in the admissions office of a small, well-regarded liberal arts college striving to build an intellectually strong, diverse pool of students. In office chit-chat, she mentions that she is having trouble connecting to a particular high school's guidance department for a needed piece of information. Oh, says a colleague. Public school, right?

• A fellow organizer at IDEA is invited to a "parent advocacy" meeting, designed to train parents in "grass-roots influence" on education policy in their state. He wonders why parents need a three-day training to express their desires about good schooling for their children. Who's behind this "free" training, which includes "developing a constituency" and "delivering winning messages?"

• A neighbor confides that she thinks the schools in our district are meeting the needs of all three of her children. I know a lot of people in [our small town] think the schools are bad, she says--but I just don't see it. My kids had good, caring teachers, the curriculum seems reasonable, the principals are responsive--what am I missing?

Who speaks for public education?

After a recent blog where I challenged longtime Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews' belief that there exists a "best" lesson plan for each subject, several friends noted that Mathews, for better or worse, was widely seen as a respected authority on education.

Yesterday, Juan Williams posted a blog at The Hill, on the continuing downslide of public education, a fact-free paean to market-based education policy, in honor of "National School Choice Week." (And who instituted School Choice week?) Williams described Race to the Top as offering federal money to "school systems willing to use the latest proven strategies for improving student performance." Ironic, since most school systems are dying to use genuinely proven strategies--plenty of highly skilled instructors and ample new resources, for example-- rather than unproven strategies like test prep and merit pay. Williams:

Better schools will result if parents have more control over how tax dollars are spent on education. That means bipartisan, coast-to-coast support for charter schools, vouchers and anything else that introduces competition and innovation into a stultified, failing education system.

Juan hasn't been reading the research, evidently. Or Finnish Lessons.

But his spiel has the feeling of familiarity, of casually expressed conventional wisdom. It's what a fair segment of the general public is now saying about public education--that it's failed. That the only credible solution is to abandon state and local investment in all that is "school"--buildings, curriculum, programs, human and material capital--and start over with a market-decides focus.

Contrast Williams' lazy, pre-fab appraisal with these words from Richard Rothstein, buttressed by decades of NAEP data:

Assuming systemic failure to justify a frenzy of ill-considered reforms, we've spent almost no time investigating what caused these trends. We can only speculate. Rather than spending such energy imagining how schools have failed, so we can fix them, we might devote attention to investigating what schools have done well, so we can do more of it.

Whose voice is the loudest? The researcher, the politician, the media "authority?" Or the people who are invested, who have first-hand contact with public schools every day?

Who speaks for public education?

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 6:56 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest blogger Corey Gaber is a first-year resident in a new teacher training and certification program called Urban Teacher Center, teaching middle school Humanities at Baltimore Freedom Academy, a social justice-themed Baltimore City Public School. He has an M.Ed in Mind, Brain and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is a Community Organizer for IDEA (Institute for Democratic Education in America).

"What percentage of NFL players are black?" I ask twelve boys in a summer program designed for students in danger of being retained at their recently completed grade level. We estimate about 75%. "OK, and what percentage of NFL owners do you think are black?" No need to guess here, the right answer is zero. The conversation is designed to provide students a content base for writing a Brief Constructed Response (commonly referred to as a "BCR").

Now that the issue of race has been raised the conversation veers away from football. A curious student asks me, "if we walked by each other on the street [he is black and I am white] and you called me a n***** could you go to jail for that? Or if I called you a cracker could I get arrested?"

Other students' heads perk up, waiting for my answer. There is a rich discussion to be had about First Amendment rights and the freedoms and limitations of speech in our society. At this moment the entire class is engaged and excited to learn about civics. But we have strayed too far off topic so the lead teacher tells us, "pull out a piece of paper and begin writing your BCR silently."

Articles are written every year bemoaning the fact that young Americans are woefully ignorant about civics. Here's a radical theory to consider: Young people don't know civics because we don't teach them civics! We made a decision in that moment with those twelve boys that practice with writing a brief constructed response was of higher value than becoming competent, prepared, participatory citizens. Does that decision mesh with your own values?

The instructor was no mindless drill-and-kill caricature. But our class time together was finite and the students had a final test fast approaching with multiple BCRs on it. The program evaluators look at the results of that test to determine whether or not to re-hire teachers from the summer before. Although the instructor would likely say that civics is more important than BCRs, the weight of the final exam (which had no questions about civics on it) was used to gauge his effectiveness as a teacher, and therefore his future employment pushed his actions in another direction.

What we choose to evaluate creates a set of pressures which shape teachers' actions and thus the daily experience of our students in school. This is not necessarily a bad thing, assuming that the evaluation system is aligned with our highest values. I have no problem being held stringently accountable for ensuring that my students understand the laws of our land, our system of government, and their power and responsibilities as citizens. But my job has never been on the line based on my students' abilities to obey the social contract when it is just--and to take non-violent action to alter the contract when it is unjust.

I have never been asked by an administrator how the work in my class will help to create informed and powerful citizens that can boost the health of our democracy. But isn't that the point of public education? If not that, then what? Shouldn't we come to some consensus about the goal before we create the means towards that end?

It's no surprise that evaluate has the word value in it, but it is surprising that there is no conversation in schools about whether the values embedded in our tests actually match the values of our school communities.

As new federal legislation is on the horizon that will replace NCLB, right now would be a wonderful time for students, teachers, administrators, and families to have that conversation and to make their voices heard. Let's teach our children civics by being active citizens ourselves.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

During my thirty-year career in the classroom, I occasionally worked with colleagues who resisted the contractual requirement that they turn in weekly lesson plans. As veteran teachers, they felt that detailed planning on paper was mindless hoop jumping. According to them, good teachers could step into a class, all their knowledge and skills percolating, and proceed to do the right things, without having to rely on notes. Good teaching as natural artistry.

Never worked for me. Early in my career, I developed the habit of planning on Sunday night for the week to come. The planning was nit-picky and thorough in the early years; in the last half of my career, I had a full tool bag to work with, which made thinking ahead and getting organized much easier. But still essential.

Perhaps a dozen times in my 30-year career I went to school on Monday without plans, trusting I could wing it. And every one of those days was painful.

I eventually started using yellow legal pads to plan, because I needed more space than the standard-issue planbook allowed. I still have the planning pads from my last few years of teaching. Although they're full of great ideas for teaching music, they would be useless to anyone else. Not only because I had my own shorthand and didn't have to explicate each lesson--but for the reason that I wrote the plans to address the learning needs of specific children at a particular time.

Lesson plans are not one size fits all.

In December, Jay Mathews wondered why schools don't provide new teachers with "the best lesson plan possible for each subject." He introduces readers to promising Teach for America corps members, who were "told where to find good material," and (no surprise) provided with sample items from the statewide assessments. But-- "beginning teachers still had to construct their lessons from scratch, as teachers have done for centuries."

Jeff Wetzler, Teach for America's executive vice president of teacher preparation, support and development, showed me a 2010 survey of the organization's beginning teachers in 31 states and the District. Forty-one percent said their districts provided them with low-quality instructional tools like lesson plans, or none at all. Twenty-seven percent were provided with tools they were required to use, and 7 percent got tools that they used because their colleagues used them. Only 15 percent said they were provided tools that they used freely because they were of such high quality.

At this point, I see veteran teachers around the country shaking their heads. (Hello? You didn't realize that constructing lesson plans for your students is part of the job of being a professional teacher? Too bad.) But the issue is much larger.

First, what Jay is talking about here is not a lesson plan--it's a learning activity. Planning lessons involves selecting and sequencing content, choosing activities appropriate for your students, sampling their learning through on-the-spot assessment. There are single-day lessons and arcs of lesson planning involving exposition, exploration, extension and review of a particular concept or skill. Good lesson planning is a blend of deeply understanding a curricular discipline, choosing effective activities--from lectures to demonstrations to rough drafts-- then checking for understanding, perhaps re-doing certain bits. And always keeping the particular students you're teaching in mind, using what happened in class today to make tomorrow's lesson more effective.

Best case scenario, this work is done in collaboration with skilled colleagues who serve the same kids, who share what's worked for them. Over time, a teacher might expect to develop their own tool bag full of high-quality activities and strategies. This never-ending tinkering with instruction and curriculum is called building an effective practice. It's challenging intellectual work, entirely dependent on teachers' commitment to experimenting, then paying attention to their results.

There is no such thing as the optimum, all-purpose lesson plan for any particular concept. There are websites and books filled with suggested activities to teach or reinforce a concept, but it's the teacher's job to select promising strategies, based on her knowledge of the students in front of her. "Teacherpreneurs" who sell their lesson plans are simply marketing activities and assessments that worked for them--but those may worthless for different instructors and students.

Mathews persists:

Many teachers, and the organizations that represent them, don't want ready-made lesson plans. They feel it limits their creativity and turns them into robots doing whatever their department head or the district curriculum chief wants.

Wrong. It's not about squelching "creativity." It's about being forced to teach in ways that don't acknowledge students' unique needs. It's about demeaning teachers' judgment, even scripting their speech. Teachers want a steady supply of good ideas for teaching, but they also want the responsibility of choosing the best strategies for their own classrooms.

There's an old joke about the deadwood teacher who taught the same year 30 times. Kind of ironic, now, at a time when we think we can standardize lesson plans and everything else about schooling.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I spent much of the past week in Louisiana, working with the teachers at a turnaround school there. I've written about this school before--their struggle to build genuine trust and teamwork when a brand new staff is constructed of enthusiastic beginners, battle-weary returnees who know the community well and skilled veterans looking for a challenge who volunteered to transfer in. When I was there last summer, the school was uninviting (to say the least) and the staff was sticking a tentative toe into honest collaboration.

What a difference five months makes. The most obvious evidence is shiny floors, new window blinds, student work on the walls, and people who call each other by name. In fact, the teachers use an automatic honorific in addressing each other--Ms. Thompson calls her colleague Ms. Adams, even in a two-day, adults-only professional development workshop where everyone's lounging around in jeans and Who Dat? sweatshirts. This is rigid federal turnaround policy wrapped in King cake and LSU purple and gold.

The thrust of our work was on creating learning experiences that touched every child. How do we build lessons that go deep, into the place where school learning shapes motivation? A special education teacher shared a story about being selected to play the Holy Virgin in her school Christmas play--and how that experience literally changed her life, making her feel exceptional and sending her on a path toward a preferable future.

She described her mother making a costume pattern from paper bags and sewing the blue satin robe with "jewels" at the neckline, the Lower Ninth Ward version of Mary. There was a lot of joking (How can we fail with the Virgin Mary on staff!?)--but it was a powerful story of, well, turnaround and choice. Special is good.

I hope you have pictures of that, people exclaimed. "I did," she said. "I still had the costume, too. But I lost them. In Katrina."

The story was a good framework for discussing ways to enrich the learning and lives of all the children entrusted to these teachers. The school, like all turnarounds, will be repeatedly monitored for three years. The monitors came for the first time in December, and their initial report arrived right before the two-day workshop: a few plaudits (for engaging parents) and a number of frustrating critiques and markdowns (for not putting up mandated writing curriculum posters).

From a cynical conversation with the fourth grade teachers, who spent a half-day generating productive, cool ideas for teaching writing to the kids whose strengths and deficiencies in language arts they now know intimately: Yeah. That poster is really going to fix their writing, all right.

Cynical comment from three different work groups: It's like the monitors are desperately searching for reasons to show how we're failing!

The report chastises school leaders for not putting up the required Data Wall near the entryway to the school. Actually, there is a rather comprehensive Data Wall, in the teachers' lounge, but monitors must elevate precise obedience to regulation over what matters. The principal says clearly: I want the entrance to this school to generate feelings of welcome, pride and progress. The data isn't particularly useful to the parents and grandparents who come to school--but it does have value and meaning to the teachers.

What issues are worth digging in your heels? Are there times when it's OK to concede to "reform" even when you know it's counterproductive? How many times do we tell children they're failures before they agree, and check out of the system entirely?

Conversations--even some gentle arguments--bubble up on the last afternoon. Teachers tip their hands about core beliefs and their aggravations about the year so far-- and they're not always coming from the same perspective. But they do have a common mission, a combination of a big vision for learning and achievement, as well as attending to details of running a good school. Mundane things like bathroom policies and bulletin boards.

In the upper-elementary hallway, there's still a 10-foot long poster where the fourth graders wrote their ideas on what they're thankful for. Even though it's six weeks old and needs replacing, I'm glad it's still up. It tells me that 10-year olds at this school are thankful for Gramma. They're glad they have shoes. And they love coming to school to have breakfast. Tyrone says: I am thankful for learning good.

After the meeting, a fifth grade teacher quietly notes that the school--prior to this year--did not celebrate Black History Month schoolwide, which seems incredible in a building where the population is 100% African-American and many children have never left their neighborhood. What a rich opportunity to share genuine narratives of turnaround and choice, to make children feel exceptional.

Special is good. There's work to do.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I taught in a middle school for almost 30 years. The last year I was there, I ended up teaching a class called Enrichment, which was code for Kids Who Are Falling Behind. The students in my class were compelled to give up one of their elective courses, and were placed in Enrichment in order to "catch up." The theory was that once all the uncompleted assignments were done, the student could return to gym class, happily part of the educational pack once again.

Why I ended up teaching Enrichment is a long story that usually requires an adult beverage--but suffice it to say, what I was doing in Enrichment didn't have much to do with expert instruction. It was about compliance, an adult standing over kids who were chronic homework avoiders, dangling the lackluster carrot of that elective class while breathing severely down their necks. The goal was never about mastering content. It was about filling in empty boxes in the grading program.

There were a handful of kids in the class who were genuinely struggling with the content and assignments. I was actually teaching them--sort of. They'd been avoiding homework because they didn't get it, and sometimes I was able--experimenting with different pathways to learning--to shed some light on required concepts and skills. They never caught up, however. They would go to math class and spend 50 minutes being confused, then come to Enrichment and do leftover homework using skills their classmates had tackled six weeks ago. It was hardly an efficient way to learn.

The majority of kids in the class simply didn't like doing homework. Many of them had been placed in Enrichment by their parents after getting a bad grade (with "bad grade" being a relative notion--for some parents, the first C was evidence that it was time to crack down). Like many schools, we used an online grading program, which allowed parents to track their child's work output and marks on a daily basis. Completing homework and maintaining acceptable grades became a cat and mouse game between anxious mom and manipulative 7th grader.

My Enrichment kids developed considerable expertise at being just far enough "behind" to stay in the class. I eventually began to see how much some of them enjoyed an hour during the day to read (one boy completed the Lord of the Rings series over two semesters), use the computer--or do work they enjoyed, in subjects where they were "caught up." When I tried to send one boy who had no uncompleted assignments back to his elective class, his mother insisted that he stay in Enrichment--to "teach him some responsibility."

What we were doing was exactly the opposite, of course. As Teacher Tom notes, in his wonderful blog about teaching pre-school:

Parents often talk about wanting to teach their kids to be responsible, then go about it by trying to boss them into it, picking for them those things for which we think they ought to feel responsible (e.g., "Clean up your room" "Make your bed."). But this mostly just teaches obedience, which does nothing to further the kind of responsibility we want children to take on. The problem is that it's almost impossible to feel responsible for things that one sees as unimportant. We might clean our room, but if we're taking responsibility for anything it's for keeping mom happy (which is not the same thing), even if we're not just doing it to avoid punishment.

One of the by-products of the accountability movement and high-tech data management tools--like on-line grade-books--is the elevation of filling in boxes over actual learning. The grade, the test score, the completed assignments--all manifestations of obedience--become the target.

And paradoxically, by putting the focus on things we can control, we are subtly demonstrating to our children that they're not really responsible, at all.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The usual end-of-year Janusian posts are springing up everywhere in Ed Blog world this week--the best and worst of 2011, bold predictions for the upcoming year. List-making draws readers. But I don't really have the heart to revisit the terrible and wonderful year just past--nor do I want to be embarrassed by my own starry-eyed prognostications, come December 2012.

I do like the idea of "Ten Things I Know to be True"--ideas that represent genuine reality, in my world, a roundup of verities. Try as I might, I couldn't come up with ten.

#1) Real school reformers do not spend their days perusing blogs, obsessing over their tweet numbers, engaging in online catfights or handicapping states' chances to win your tax dollars by being more compliant than other states. Real school reformers are mediating squabbles on the playground, revising an unsatisfactory lesson plan during their planning period, or meeting with the PTA to figure out how to get new books for the library since the budget was slashed. Again.

#2) Education and schooling are two completely different things. School is where most children spend time during the day with their peers, resulting--one hopes-- in credentials that society deems necessary to the next phase (more schooling, jobs, etc.). Education is something else entirely. It's the sum total of what we've learned, absorbed and can apply to the challenges of living. Best-case scenario, school is a useful piece of the lifelong process of education.

#3) There are good-guy organizations out there, on the education reform front. But it's getting harder to tell who they are, as seductive edu-rhetoric and policy-advocacy advertising obscures truth. One (not infallible) clue: who's funding the organization.

#4) A lot of the rhetoric about education being the civil rights issue of our generation is just that: grandiose but empty talk. The civil rights issue of our generation is that shameful and increasing income gap. It's going to take a lot more than charter schools which teach kids to walk in straight lines to fix that dangerous economic chasm.

#4a) A corollary: We need more minority voices in the ed-reform debate. We also need more female and youth voices. The most dominant voices, right now, are men representing their own perspectives. And the people doing the actual daily work of investing in and improving the education system--by this I mean students, parents and grassroots-level educators--are largely female and minority. Some of my best friends are white male educators with gray hair. Still, the dialogue is very unbalanced right now. Move over, John Merrow.

#5) We aren't going to solve our education problems with technocratic solutions. Not by alternative governance. Not by omnipresent, high-tech data analysis. Not by legislation or competitions. Not by carrots, sticks, levers, advertising or exhortation. Not even by tough mandates. And certainly not in the marketplace. We will solve our education problems via careful investment in people and practice, over time.

#6) Many American teachers feel powerless. They've never had their intelligence, dedication, qualifications or career choice challenged like they have in the past decade. Teaching is a vocation of service; it's not pursued as a way to hit the big-time, in terms of personal profit or fame. So asking teachers to take the risk of getting publicly political makes some of them queasy. Wisconsin in February of 2011 was proof that teachers who are angry enough are a potent force for change.

#7) The movement to reclaim public education will catch fire when school leaders decide they have agency and the moral fortitude to push back against policies they know are harmful to kids. We've seen some of that courage emerge recently in New York State. Patron saint of gutsy administrative bluntness: TX Superintendent John Kuhn. You know that leadership video where one crazy guy starts dancing, and eventually is followed by a whole crowded hillside of dancers? If school leaders would get over their reservations and start dancing--speaking powerfully from their hearts and minds--we might have a chance to turn things around.

#8) We can have both excellence and equity in public education. Equity is not a matter of evenly dividing limited resources--it's about individually crafted opportunity for every child. And excellence has many faces; it's a lot more than upping the percentage of college degrees. Our rich country has the resources to provide a free, high-quality education for every child. The fact that we don't is a matter of political will and preference.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Alexander Russo,

So here I am, with the final hours of bleak December ticking away, casting about for the right hook to write about Education Reform in 2011: The Big Picture.

Go with a top ten list? Ten signs of hope? Pushback against dark corporate forces? Bright and cheery? Down and dreary?

While I pondered, weak and weary, came a Google alert winging (flinging! singing!) to my inbox. Alexander Russo labeled me--and other progressive education thinkers-- Goliaths! Says we're dominating the on-line fight against slingshot-wielding "Davids." Two of these feisty, underfunded David exemplars sprang to mind for Russo: StudentsFirst and Stand for Children.

Right.

There are several ways to understand/respond to your recent post, Mr. Russo. I'm not sure why you're trying, once again, to position school "reformers" as small, scrappy start-ups bravely challenging the mighty, mighty public education monolith. I'm pretty sure you've cast the wrong actors in starring roles in the David vs. Goliath narrative. But--some observations:

First thought: Thanks for acknowledging a handful of the swelling cadre of articulate educators and parents who are mad as hell about what's happening to their public schools and just not going to take it anymore. We like it when our efforts are noticed and shared.

Second, a question: Does Russo seriously misunderstand the distribution patterns and naked influence of cash in education "reform?" Highly doubtful. He's the trained professional education journalist, presumably always alert to tracking the money trails-- I'm just a retired teacher.

I have, however, been paying attention to the increasing list of ed-organizations whose survival depends on going with the (funded) reform flow. And I'm seeing Gates Foundation and a number of others--a lot. One at a time, the big-boy funders are picking off nonprofits (not to mention the federal government) and re-shaping their work toward a reformy mindset. A little anti-LIFO here, a bit of merit pay there, a heavily subsidized "innovation charter," the repeated concept that grant funding and privatization are the only routes to genuinely raising the bar. If you want the pay, you have to play.

They may have even lured the NEA over for a quick drink with their youngest and hottest teacher recruits.

Third theory: Education entrepreneurs know how to talk to young teachers. It's a seductive line: your youth and energy are what we need, your special smarts trump veteran teachers' experience. You're not a "regular" teacher--you're a leader! All of this rhetoric is fine until you find yourself alone in an out-of-control classroom, where some of that honed-by-fiery-trial pedagogical skill and commitment to your students might come in handy. (If you don't plan to remain in teaching, it's not such a big deal.)

Creating magnetic sound bites is now an essential part of what used to be the reform discourse, more important than actual evidence or learning your craft over time. And nobody does that better than an organization with hundreds of millions to spend on branding and message-crafting.

Fourth question: Does Russo really believe that all genuinely progressive educators know each other, and are partnering in a grand strategy to thwart "reform?" I like a good conspiracy theory as well as the next guy, but on this one, he's wildly off-base. There may be more on-the-ground teachers and parents blogging these days--and making more persuasive, data-based arguments. But, no, Mr. Russo. There is no secret "reform critic" handshake. There are more people speaking out against "reform" because--well, because they're finally mad as hell and...etc.

And finally: Mr. Russo says he's not taking sides. Just reporting. And maybe his entire blog is simply bait--throwing out some names and opinions and hoping to engage, start a conversation. But--Russo's piece feels like projection/flipping to me: taking whatever tactic you're using and then accusing your opponent of doing it to you first. Best defense, good offense, and so on.

This Russonian digression didn't get my Big Picture blog written, alas.

How about: Top ten trends in market-based reform? Nevermore.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 8:16 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend