This reader has some good ideas for StudentsFirst’s next campaign, now that the Olympics is over:
| It really disgusted me how Rhee compares education in the US to being in the Olympics and how we wouldn’t want countries like Luxembourg and Hungary to get more gold medals than us, yet they are beating us in education. I mean, seriously? Luxembourg? Luxembourg has a $80,119 GDP and is one of the most wealthy of countries. Their children learn 3 mandatory languages in school, and they only have a 4.5% child poverty rate. Of course, those students are going to be more successful. Hungary, on the other hand, only has a $19,591 GDP. However, when I looked at comparisons in literacy and math, the U.S. and Hungary were close in many areas, usually with the U.S. edging Hungary out a little. Hungary has a 10.3% child poverty rate. The United States has a $48,386 GDP. Much higher than Hungary, but much lower than Luxembourg. The U.S. also has a 22.4% child poverty rate, second only to Mexico, which has 26.2. (I got these statistics from NationMaster.com) To me, one of the greatest factors in education is poverty! It’s kind of like the little dirty secret that keeps getting swept under the rug. The U.S. needs to start addressing this. The school I teach at has a 75% free and reduced lunch population. These kids are more worried about the next meal than the next test. According to the US Census Bureau, “more than one in five children in the United States (15.75 million) lived in poverty in 2010. 2010. More than 1.1 million children were added to the poverty population between the 2009 ACS and the 2010 ACS. The 2010 ACS child poverty rate (21.6 percent) is the highest since the survey began in 2001.” If StudentsFirst really cared about putting their students first, they would put their money into addressing the poverty issue instead of making insulting advertisements like the one with the out of shape Olympian. |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We really need someone to make an infographic showing poverty rates alongside test scores, then show a “rank differential” chart (e.g. if you have the 12th lowest poverty rate and 8th highest scores, your differential is +4, because you are performing 4 places above what would be expected). This would have the dual effect of showing that (A) scores correlate with poverty rates and (B) the U.S. is actually overachieving.
Professor Michael Marder, a physicist at U of Texas, has done that. Try googling for his info graphics.
Poverty calculations are tricky, international comparisons of poverty rates are really tricky.
The statistics cited by Dr. Ravitch from the NationMaster.com include a description of how the poverty rate is computed. The number is “the share of children living in households with income below 50% of the national median household income”. To be counted as poor in Hungary requires much lower household income than is required to be counted as poor in the US.
This is not to say that poverty rates in the US are acceptable in any way, only to warn that the poverty line used in the calculation is different for each country. This is more of a measure of income distribution than a traditional measure of absolute poverty like the World Bank’s calculation of poverty rates which use the same consumption level for all countries.
After watching Rhee’s interview on CNN, seeing her unjustly compare public education to an unfit Olympic athlete, cringing as she refused to give any cogent answer as to why our public education system is experiencing difficulties (but why she is sure she has the solutions), I went to the Students First Youtube channel to watch some other videos that they are presenting. For the most part, it was what I expected – anti union, anti seniority rhetoric. When I tried to provide a dissenting opinion after each video I viewed, I found comments were not enabled. So, essentially, Students First does not want to hear or let others see opinions that challenge their dogma (just as Diane mentioned in her post about the recent Cuomo education hearings). What are they all afraid of? That citizens will find out that American public education is not as bad as Rhee and company paint it out to be? That there are far more successes taking place in our schools than failures? That one of the pressing issues in education today is the lack of parity due to poverty and access? That our pop-culture craving, consumer-based society does not place education high on the list of “what’s important”? The Students First channel did allow for comments to be left regarding the channel itself and every comment was, surprise-surprise, deeply in favor of Students First. I left a dissenting comment on that page and clicked submit and, unlike other comments sections on Youtube, the comment did not appear – suggesting that each comment submitted goes through a subjective vetting process. All I can say is WOW – so much for balanced discussions.
Stay tuned. More on this tomorrow.
I really appreciate this readers comments. I’m do tired of the finger poointimg. The time & money, wasted on foolishness, could’ve been used to address the issue of child poverty.
Poverty is not a “dirty secret that keeps getting swept under the rug.” It’s the central purpose of public education. You can make the argument that teachers are not responsible for the poverty of their students. I’m not a teacher, and so I’m sure others know more about this than I do. But if you reject the premise that teachers are responsible to help correct for poverty, than you also reject the reason I (and many americans) support the public education system. Teachers have the kids for 6 hours a day, it costs hundreds of billions of dollars each year. It’s all worth it if public education helps bring folks out of poverty, but if teachers are incapable of having an signifigant, and accountable impact (as much of the debate on this blog suggests) there’s I see little reason to fund education in the private sector.
Sorry, Benny, you are wrong. Public schools cannot provide homes for the homeless or create jobs for the jobless. They never have.
Neither can charter schools or religious schools.
Schools provide educational opportunity. Some use it to rise out of poverty; many don’t and can’t.
I’m not saying ALL impoverished children must succeed in order to justify public education. I’m saying the amount of upward mobility provided by public schools is a great measure of their worthiness as a publically funded program. Stop pretending reformers don’t think about poverty, reform movement is made up of many people who can’t stop thinking about poverty. We can and should debate the efficacy of particular policy proposals, but when you and others argue that teachers should not be held accountable for the performance of their poor students, I feel like you are missing the whole point of education. Of course it’s not teachers fault that some students are extremely difficult to educate effectively. But if the current teaching force can’t do so despite this, the government has essentially two options: find people who can, or get out of the business of public education entirely, since it is funded/concieved of as a poverty support (and prevention) system.
You address poverty by creating jobs and making sure families have health care. Don’t blame the schools for the failure of the 1% to give back a fair share to society and the failure of government to do what it does in other modern societies. Greed doesn’t produce a decent society. There must be a reasonable balance between private and public interest. We have lost it.
I believe it was Mrs Clinton who said “It takes a village to raise a child”. That’s correct in the sense that we have to rethink how we approach education, health, training, politics, etc. Schools need to be education centers, health centers, adult training centers, job placement centers, provide counseling, and political centers. We have all of these things in the cities but they need to be centered together. The schools need to be communities where people can get help and feel they have a say in the their community, state, and country.
What you say about greed and values is of course dead on. But, you continue to dodge my point, which is that blame or no, the reason we, as a nation, fund inner city schools (through title 1 ect…) is that we believe they will provide upward mobility. Under that framework it is completly fair for us to ask “how’s that going?” “what needs to be changed?” If there is no good answer to either of these questions it’s pretty hard to justify the billions of dollars we spend on education every year. Maybe you are right, maybe all we should focus on is housing, and job creation, or other poverty prevention programs; however, taken together, those claims amount to an attack on public education far greater than any made by Rhee or the Gates foundation.
Benny, I’ll provide citations later. I am a teacher, prior to that I did profiling and counter terrorism work for the Army as a Warrant Officer. I have advanced degrees in Social Sciences and Economics. Schools reflect the social health of the communities. I’ve lived in other countries. Finland, for example, has kitchens and medical clinics in their schools. They invest in ameliorating the effects of poverty. They understand that sick, tired, emotionally stressed kids can’t learn as well as healthy nourished ones. They give their schools a fighting chance.
Once more, to be clear, I’m not disputing that assertion. I’m asking: If that’s all schools do, (“reflect the social health of the communities”) why do we have them? It’s a pretty expensive barometer of community health. Federal investments in educaiton are premised on the idea that we can make poverty better with access to education. If that’s wrong fine, but then your school (and all schools) should lose all federal support. At least until they have a “fighting chance”.
no, you are wrong. I was there when Title I was funded. It was funded to equalize resources for schools and districts with high levels of poverty, because of equity. NO ONE expected that sending Title I money to schools with poor kids would abolish poverty. Thats why the anti-poverty programs of the 60s had many other parts, not just school funding. LBJ funded housing, and Medicare and Headstart, because he knew that poverty had deep causes, and education is not sufficient to “cure” it.
I never said we should fund only housing or only anything. I say we should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
And you need to read up on history some more. And sociology.
We don’t truly believe that inner city schools provide upward social mobility. As Americans, we believe that they have the POTENTIAL to provide students with the social and cultural capital necessary for upward social mobility. We are a capitalistic society and, just as written believe in the myth of Horatio Alger, so, too, do we often falsely comfort ourselves by believing that ALL schools provide students with the tools (networks, norms, language, etc.) necessary for success.
However, if you look at the history of education (including segregation, white flight, hyperghettoization, social reproduction, etc.), you will see that our system of education has become increasingly based in critical race theory. If we TRULY believed that inner city schools provided the same or even comparable access to social and cultural capital, we wouldn’t need neighborhood schools and we certainly wouldn’t need magnet schools to lure suburban students to city schools.
In no other country are educators expected to provide an equal education to students with special needs, students who don’t speak the primary language of instruction and assessment, children who live in extreme poverty, etc. Take a long look at high performing countries and their student populations. Countries we always tout for engineering, science, and math (Japan, China, India) don’t educate their poor children and require tuition to attend school. Those students are then EXPECTED to attend study sessions (for a price) with their teachers. Oh, and did I forget to mention that teachers in those countries are RESPECTED and earn salaries significantly higher than their American counterparts when calculating the salary to cost of living ratio?
I suggest you read up on Wacquant, Lareau, Bourdieu, Ladson-Billings, Dixon, Rousseau (no, I don’t mean Jean Jacques), Delgado, Pike, and Yosso before you discuss what “we” believe about public education. “We” don’t all believe what you do. I will be more than happy to send you the literature review from my dissertation if you want to know what more and more educators believe about public education.
Please do send me your lit review (bennydocter@gmail.com), I’d be happy to read (probably just parts of) it. But to clarify, I know that upward mobility stuff is bourgeois and a bit naive, but it is the premise on which the ESEA was founded. If you wish to defend it within that framework (which you will need to do, because this is America after all) you should stay far away from claims that teachers can’t provide significant impact on student performance. I didn’t mean to speak for educators, but rather the honestly portray the legislative purpose embodied by title 1, over the years. As a society we’ve chosen to invest in upward mobility, if title 1 funded teachers can’t provide that, they are likely to get fired. Which is what we are seeing now.
Benny, I used to be an inner city teacher but my salary was not paid by Title I. Ask yourself why so many teachers leave urban schools. Ask those of us who have left and we will tell you that it’s because of the politics. Politics where teachers who don’t do their jobs or come to work over 90 minutes late every day or don’t teach or leave their students unattended when they should be teaching are rewarded with excellent evaluations touting all they do for the administration, not for the school and certainly not for the students. They are rewarded for being the eyes and ears of the administration and for ratting out anyone who dares question if what they’re being told to do is really in the students’ best interests. Why would effective, dedicated teachers stay and allow themselves to continually be demoralized, put down, and criticized in their evaluations by administrators who never even set foot in their classrooms? The problems start at the top. Once you change that, then you can work on teachers.
I mean, whatever works. So long as we’re stuck with the claim that interventions aimed at changing student outcomes are inherently futile/destructive. It is a claim that gets repeated all too often on this blog.
^not stuck
To Diane: Now I feel like I’m repeating myself, but it seems warranted because you continue to misinterpret my claims. I am not arguing that title 1 was funded on the condition it would single-handedly abolish poverty. You read that absolutism into my statement based on some prior bias or just by being careless. All I’m saying is that is was funded at the federal level as part of the “war on poverty.” While I always need to read more of history and sociology, you are missing a crucial point when you say that Title 1 was created to equalize resources. It certainly did work toward that goal, but equality of resources was a means to and end, and that end was to improve social outcomes for children in poverty.
There are a million Johnson quotes to this end, but as an example “for every one of the billion dollars that we spend on this program, will come back tenfold as school’s dropouts change to school graduates.” There was a clear intent to bring up school performance.
I find that when pressed about being held accountable student outcomes, teachers unions, and their advocates, shortsightedly attempt to halt conversations about reform by throwing up their hands and say “this isn’t our fault, it’s the poverty.” To you I say, we know it’s
the poverty, that’s why we hired you. Now make it (slightly) better, or get out of the way.
Benny, one more time! We do not oppose being held accountable. We ask for a fair accounting! Even the test developers do not advocate the current uses of them. I teach in one of Nevada’s poorest schools. Half my students are learning English. The tests my students are given have absolutely no significance, importance, or relevance with regard to their life. The tests do not affect student grades. They are not used to make retention decisions. The students overall could not care less about their test scores. At this time my district spends over 30 percent of the school budget on testing, having laid off counselors and nurses, having school health programs gutted, all in order to pay for more useless tests. Tell me, what adult in their right mind would risk their job based on the actions of an 8 or 9 year old on a standard bubble test. Compound that with the delayed cognitive abilities noted by Coleman back in the 60’s and you have put us in an untenable position. We do make it better, we just can’t fix everything. When we “get out of the way” there might not be anyone to take our place. Be careful what you ask for. Are you a teacher? Would you be likely to become one? Have you had students who can’t see because their glasses were broken more than a month ago, or who have never seen a dentist and have teeth rotting out of their mouth? I grew up in foster homes and orphanages. School didn’t matter to me when I was hungry or being beaten regularly. “We know it’s the poverty,” No You Don’t seem to know that, or else you are delusional and unwilling to do your part to help ameliorate some of the more deleterious effects it has on our children. Taking care of children that aren’t our own calls for sacrifice. We just are not really willing to care for children’s basic needs.
you a teacher? Would you become one? The school can helmew as an
Below, I’m posting a link to a piece that reminded me of the Student First videos comparing US Education to the Olympics. However it uses the Olympic competition to make a point about US Healthcare, pointing the finger of blame in an entirely different direction of that Michelle Rhee’s videos.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2018868510_guestmedolympicsbezruschka08xml.html
I believe most states fund their schools through local property taxes, supplemented, more or less, by state and federal funds. I hope, Benny, you do not believe that this formula has equalized the funding of the schools. I live in a wealthy community (by the skin of my teeth). The schools my children attended rank with the elite private schools. The majority of students have resources, in school and at home, far beyond what is available to most children. Almost all the graduates attend college.
I wish that I could say my last students had the same opportunities. I had students who came very early so they could make sure to get breakfast especially at the end of the month when family assistance ran out. I had students who regularly fell asleep in class after working a job after school to help their families . I also had the students who like many adolescents lacked the ability to resist the neighborhood and their peers. Tell me how I teach the child who can’t see the board because his glasses broke and his parents will have to lose a day’s income to make a trip to a clinic. Well, I did teach these young men and women (who also struggled with “disabilities”), and I would still be teaching them if the measure of their test success wasn’t the measure of my ability, and the district didn’t make a practice of weeding out more highly educated and experienced teachers before they got tenure.
It is a little hard to tell from this graph, but it looks like less than half of public school funding comes from local taxes. You can look here:
http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html
I should add that the data is a bit dated, but I doubt the distribution has changed very much.
@Benny,
I’m the one who posted the original comment that Ms. Ravitch re-posted on her blog. I would like to defend my comment about poverty being “dirty secret swept under the rug.” Obviously, it is not a secret that poverty is growing in America. Anyone can look up the statistics on the internet, but I have to wonder if many are in denial about it, or at least that is the way I feel when I see good programs like Parents as Teachers and Head Start (that specifically help low income children get off to a good start educationally) have their budgets so severely cut. Do we, as a nation or as states, think if we cut these programs, the problems will go away? I, for one, don’t. Others might disagree.
As a teacher in Missouri in a small rural school, I see poverty every day with my students. My students, who are living in poverty, live with parents (or more often, grandparents) who are poor. They are growing up with attitudes and circumstances that are going to keep them in the cycle of poverty. (I recommend Ruby Payne’s A Framework for Understanding Poverty. It really opened my eyes.)
I KNOW that I make a difference in many lives, and believe me, I try my best to do what I can for my students that will not only educate them academically, but also build their character. I don’t for one minute say to myself, “It doesn’t matter what I do.” I hold myself accountable every day.
The cycle of poverty they are in, though, will continue despite social programs like welfare and medicaid (Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe there is good in those programs when used correctly and honestly, despite that many would argue to the contrary.) Poverty will also continue despite a child’s right to a free and public education, UNLESS one can teach a child the “rules” for fitting into the middle class (which, unfortunately, is disappearing) so that they might lift himself/herself out of the cycle (again, check into Ruby Payne’s A Framework for Understanding Poverty). That is difficult to do when little time is given to devote to character building and life skills. Instead, for the last 10 years, we have been pressured to test prep to “bring up those scores.”
To make matters worse, it would seem there are now two groups of people in poverty: those who come from a cycle of poverty. In other words, they are poor, their parents were poor, their parent’s parents were poor and so on; and there is also a whole new generation of people in poverty. Families who accumulated a lot of debt to have that perfect house and the matching SUVs. They maxed out credit cards to keep their kids in designer clothes and shoes, and then 2008 happened; foreclosure happened; unemployment happened. I think those children have a better chance of succeeding because they weren’t born into poverty, but who knows what kind of long term impact this will have on those children.
The focus of education has become so narrow since the era of NCLB took over, With the goal of students becoming proficient in reading and math, creativity has been stifled. The arts and character education have suffered to the point it is almost nonexistent in many schools. It is no wonder that teachers feel like they are losing their way. It is also no wonder that students are losing momentum.
The problem I have with StudentsFirst is that their agenda (at least in Missouri) is to put their money into the legislation proposals that hurt and demoralize teachers (example: making student achievement on a state test as 50% of a teacher’s evaluation, merit pay for teachers (HB1526) (SB628); taking away tenure (SB806). Also, part of their mission is push for more charter schools and vouchers/scholarships for unaccredited districts (SB706). The unaccredited districts in St. Louis and Kansas City are dealing with high level of poverty. I know that something has to be done to help fix those districts, but opening more charter schools (although giving parents more choices if that is what is needed is a good thing) is not going to bring those children out of poverty. Meanwhile, billionaires, like Rex Sinquefield, are getting huge tax breaks for contributing to those scholarship and voucher programs. Meanwhile, this has a trickle down effect on the rural schools who don’t receive any of the voucher money, yet have to make do with the budget cuts in education (that have been justified because of the money being received for the vouchers).
I think I can speak for most teachers and say that we don’t expect a quick fix either. We are ready to go to work and do whatever it is we need to do for our kids to succeed, but we would like to be included in the process of figuring out solutions, instead of being told how and what we will be doing by those (mostly in government) who have never spent a day in the classroom as a teacher.
I feel like I am digressing, so I will end my comments with this: For all the “bad” going on in education, there is good. For example, in my classroom when everything comes together and that teachable moment is maximized in such a way that my heart bursts with happiness…that is good; or when a student comes up to me and gives me a during summer vacation when she sees me at the grocery store, or a parent taking the time to thank me for taking extra time to work on handwriting with their child. On a bigger scale, I see teachers and supporters coming together with the Save Our Schools movement. The link, , lists several facts about education in Missouri that you don’t read in the headlines, but that I keep sharing because it highlights the progress we have made. That is good. (I know I’ve said a lot about Missouri , but it’s where I live and teach, so it’s what I’m most familiar with. I know other states are dealing with similar issues.)
Sorry, the link I tried to include in my previous post didn’t show up.
http://www.masaonline.org/vnews/display.v/ART/4ea5b8e41a943
A teacher from other than Missouri could easily say the same things you have addressed. Michelle.
So first off, Thanks for this post. It’s the first here that actually addressed the point I was making, instead of just spewing irrelevant rhetoric. And of course thanks for (what it sounds like) is a dedicated career in the most difficult field out there. I guess my point of difference with you is that I don’t think that your (what I have no doubt is an insulting figure) salary can be administered on the basis that you “hold yourself accountable”. In the private sector, income and expenses effectively holds the system accountable. But because that’s no way to run a school, we need to legislate accountability as part of the funding formula. The particulars of that accountability are an immensely difficult question, and one which am really not comfortable enough with recent literature on child development to argue about. I have a hunch that NCLB is not worth its salt but I need to do more research to have an opinion on it (thanks by the way for sending me that link. Every little bit helps me in my quest to learn more on this subject. I’m waiting for an email from the former bridgeport teacher above). All that being said, the union’s reflexive resistance to accountability has got to stop. It’s ultimately self destructive. If we don’t find an external mechanism for evaluating (and hiring and firing our nations educators) they’re going to rip apart public education for its failures, and you’ll have no way of demonstrating the “good” you speak of. So I ask you, what’s your mission? how will you know you have succeeded? how can we (your ultimate employers) measure that success? If you have trouble answering any of these questions, we are going to have a rough ride protecting public education.
I appreciate that you understand that public schools cannot be run like a corporate kind of business. I’ll try to address some of your questions by describing what I do (along with the other teachers in my district).
At the school that I teach at, I am evaluated formally and informally on a yearly basis by my principal or assistant-principal (however, the position of assistant has been cut, so now there is just one). The evaluation system has many factors that are taken into account as far as teaching the lesson at hand and managing the classroom. My principals also pop unannounced anytime they want to check on me or my classes. (I will say that evaluations may be more or less depending on how many years a teacher has taught. Beginning teachers are evaluated more at my district, and I would not have a problem if reforming education included experienced teachers being evaluated more often.)
I use formative assessments and summative assessments to evaluate my students progress, not to mention day to day informal assessments such as observations, questioning, and student feedback.
I teach one block of reading. Students take a benchmark test at the end of each quarter to monitor progress and to use for placement. I get data on all the concepts tested, such as comprehension of fiction/non fiction; clarifying, questioning, compare/contrast, figurative language, elements of fiction, etc. I use that data to drive my reading instruction. Where students are low, that’s what we work on and focus on to bring up, in addition to following the given curriculum.
I teach 4 blocks of communication arts, which encompasses writing, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, literature, reading for information. I start out the year by assessing how students did on the state test, the MAP. I also give 3 benchmark tests during the year. As with the reading benchmark, the CA benchmark gives me data on all areas that students were tested on (sentence structure, grammar concepts, reading for information, drawing conclusions, inferring, compare/contrast, fact/opinion, etc.- there’s overlap in the reading instruction and the comm. arts instruction). I analyze that data to drive my instruction in the classroom. If the students, as a whole, are mastering a particular concept (80% and above) I may just review it instead of going into it more deeply. In areas the students were low in or progressing in (70% and lower), the focus and instruction are more intensive.
I also teach a block of CA intervention. Using the RtI (Response to Intervention) model, I use my student data to regularly reteach, or clear up misunderstandings to students who for whatever reason are not mastering a particular concept. They are reassessed in those areas, and if they master, they don’t stay any longer than necessary. I carefully follow their progress through the year to see if they are improving in the areas they are lacking. For some, this makes a huge difference, and they will make gains to bring them up to grade level. For others, gains may not be made, but they haven’t fallen through the cracks either. The extra small group instruction goes a long way to helping them in other ways, like building a stronger relationship with their teacher, and learning to cope with and handle frustrations.
Along with all of this, I still try to make my lessons and teaching engaging and interesting, plus I try to add in things that would be fun like my Back to the Future media lesson, where students end up creating a movie storyboard from a selection in a book.
I’m not sure how more accountable I can be. I know where and when I’ve succeeded because I have the data to back it up. I know when and where I’ve failed because I have the data to back it up. I know which direction I need to go in when I fail because I have data to help me focus on what I need to do. I believe that my administrators have ample evidence to know whether I am an effective and successful teacher, and I trust that they will fulfill their duties and responsibilities IF I or another teacher were not “making the grade,” so to speak, and take the measures they need to ensure that either I improved in areas that I was lacking or that I was let go.
This will be my 7th year teaching. I make less than $35,000 a year, and have been frozen for 3 years. I still have over $15,000 in student loans I’m paying off. During the school year, I get to school by 7:50 a.m. most days, am lucky if I leave by 5 or 6 p.m., and usually spend at least 5-6 hours on Saturday or Sunday to keep up with what I have to do. I don’t tell you this to complain; it’s my reality (as well as many other teachers). I CHOSE to teach, I love to teach, and I am proud to be a teacher.
Bravo Michelle! You read my mind. Hold me accountable for what I do or fail to do. We can not guarantee outcomes for students. They have to do the work. We help, we guide, we use the best methods we can. I wish some of these “miracle workers” would share their secrets. (I know the Rhee’s and others have no ethical secrets.) All we can do is our best. I too use these methods as well as after school and summer reading groups and clubs. One of my M.A.’s is in Linguistics. Reading is the hardest subject to remediate.
@ K Spradlin
I have suggested on several posts here that a peer evaluation system, something like what is done in higher education, might be effective in K-12. That suggestion has never gotten much traction here. In a post about National Board certification, Warren said “And let’s be honest, we all know who the best teachers are in every building and in every district.” If that is true, it seems that peer evaluation would work. Do you think it would be a good solution to the evaluation and merit pay issue?