The Teachers College community is divided about the institution’s decision to honor Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York Board of Regents. Tisch has made her mark as a champion of high-stakes testing and charter schools.
Professor Celia Oyler wrote the following message to her graduate students:
“An Open Letter to Graduating Master’s Students in the Elementary and Secondary Inclusive Education Programs
I will not be attending convocation this year as I am on parental leave. I know if I were attending I would not be able to remain silent while Merryl Tisch is given a TC Medal of Honor. Her actions while Chair of the New York State Board of Regents have wrought incredible damage upon our noble profession.
Merryl Tisch has ushered through the Board of Regents many policies with which I vehemently disagree; these include: decoupling teacher certification and master’s degrees from university-based teacher education (approving Relay Graduate School of Education); allowing InBloom to collect and sell private data on each K-12 student in New York State schools; and requiring all school districts to tie teacher evaluation to Value Added Measures based on student test scores. There are numerous problems with using student test scores to evaluate teachers (Value Added Measures). See here, here and here to start.
Despite these well-documented concerns, Teachers College’s initial press release indicated that TC was awarding Merryl Tisch this honorary degree because of her efforts to establish this system of teacher evaluation. To be honest with you all, when I first read the press release, I sobbed. My chagrin is shared by many. For instance, read New York State Principal of the Year (2013) and TC grad Carol Burris’s comment about Merryl Tisch on Diane Ravitch’s blog posting about the Tisch award.
If I were at the graduation convocation, I would wear a sign on the back of my robe. It would probably say, “USING STUDENT TEST SCORES TO RATE TEACHERS DISHONORS US”. Some people are suggesting that students and faculty could turn their backs when Tisch is talking; other people have the idea to hold up signs. In any case, I know that I couldn’t be silent. I would feel complicit; my silence would be condoning the award. I would make sure to sit next to a colleague or two or three who would also agree to take an action with me.
I cannot sit silently while teachers across this country are being viciously attacked and demeaned by the junk science of VAM. For instance: A district in Florida fired A Teacher of the Year based on her VAM. In Los Angeles, a well-loved community-minded teacher committed suicide after his VAM scores were published in the newspaper and he was ranked as one of the lowest teachers in the district; he specialized in welcoming children who spoke little English.
When I was a child, I voraciously read all the books I could find about the Underground Railroad, the Abolitionist Movement, the anti-Nazi movement (including the White Rose Society), the Civil Rights Movement. As a teacher I often included a focus on the South African anti-apartheid movement. For as long as I can remember, I have asked myself, “Would I have stood up?” “Would I have had the courage to defend the side of freedom and justice?”
There are activists in the educational community and TC alumni who are debating whether to call for a protest of the Merryl Tisch award at your graduation. While there are different opinions on this topic, they are all asking if there will be a protest from the graduating students. They realize that you are entering teaching at a very difficult time and they admire your courage. They are hoping that as beginning teachers you can find small ways to protect both the children and our profession by protesting the horrible anti-child and anti-teacher policies pushed through with Race to the Top funding. They hope you are entering the field of education knowing we need to fight courageously for an education that is based on children’s individual needs and does not try to reduce them to test scores; that you want to teach subjects even if they are not on the tests, such as the arts, music, drama, science investigations, and social studies inquiries. I have assured them you are visionary and courageous and that you see urban communities of color as full of multicultural resources and assets to be cultivated rather than as sinkholes of deficits that need to be corrected into middle class mainstream discourses as measured by the tests.
My heart is beating as I type these words, as I know that public education is under an organized assault by corporate reformers who seek to script your curricula and make you teach to their tests. These corporate reformers—The New Schools Venture Fund, the Gates Foundation; the Broad Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and so on—seem to have nearly unlimited funds.
What we have on our side is our vision for a different kind of education: one that supports children to dance and sing and debate and play and create and dream and make art and design projects that show their ideas about how to make the world a better place. What we have on our side is our belief in humanity, relationships, solidarity, diversity, democracy, freedom, justice, and equality. I know that none of you entered our teacher education program with the mere goal of helping children score well on a standardized test. You entered teaching to touch the hearts and minds of children, and to listen to and value their stories. And to tell them through your words and your actions, “I see you, I expect huge successes from you, and I love you.”
Please walk with dignity into St John the Divine, no matter what you choose to do or not do about Merryl Tisch. And always remember that no Value Added Score can EVER measure how much value you have added to a child’s life.”
With love,
Celia Oyler
God Bless you Ms Oyler. Hopefully your students and faculty co-workers will make it clear to all how unacceptable granting this award
truly is.
I have in the past shared with my students as young as 7th grade my participation in various actions – for civil rights, against the Vietnam War, etc. While I was never arrested, i could have been – one we had just changed shifts in occupying an office of Nelson Rockefellar (I was in the group going out) when the police arrested everybody.
I have always felt the responsibility to speak up, sometimes on behalf of those who could not – that occurred in several situations of employment, it occurred in a campaign for national political office.
I am now old. One week from today I will turn 67. Rather than being tired and worn-down, I find myself speaking up even more as I age.
In July of 2006 I wrote I am unwilling to remain silent anymore
It was not that I had ever gone completely mute on moral issues, but I had reached a point where I felt I had a responsibility to speak because I could. Even when the issues did not necessarily DIRECTLY affect me.
I have just reread that piece. I feel the same now, almost 7 years later.
My reasoning is as it was, which is why I strongly support Dr. Oyler in what she did.
That reasoning can be traced back more than two thousand years to these words by HIllel:
Kudos to Dr. Oyler for her open letter.
As we Quakers are wont to say: This Friend Speaks My Mind!
Thank you Ken. I have a lot of respect for you and your voice. Your line, “I will not remain silent in the presence of those who seek partisan or personal advantage in manipulating elections, courts, laws and regulations.” could be changed slightly to say:
I will not remain silent in the presence of those who seek partisan or personal advantage in manipulating public school education, elections, courts, laws and regulations.
Keep resisting, Ken, you are an exemplar. I love reading your posts here, thank you. And, I can tell you that 67 is not all that bad…
Bravo. Touching and so eloquently stated.
Reading this letter reminds me this is exactly why graduating Teachers College was one of the greatest times in my life. These were the people who I worked with, learned from and valued. Maybe they haven’t lost the identitiy completely. I sure hope not.
Dr. Oyler…you speak for all of us.
You sure do speak the sentiments of tens of thousands of teachers who have to deal with this horridness of the GREEDY sweeping this country.
An extraordinarily moving letter. Bravo!
Prof. Celia Oyler just delivered the best Commencement Address TC could listen to for this year. Many thanks for speaking truth to power.
Thank you Prof. Oyler. Would it be possible for you to submit this as a Op-Ed in the New York Times or Washington Post?
Yes, publish and circulate this inspiring letter.
I agree, this really says it all, and so eloquently.
Thank you Celia for speaking out. You speak for many of us.
Professor Olyer writes from her heart…a noble and dedicated educator. It will be interesting to see how her students take to heart her message, and implement a form of protest re Tisch. In California, our Governor announced on Tuesday that he will direct
$1 Billion from his recently passed intiative, Prop. 30, to the implementation of Common Core and it’s resultant standardized testing. Hope our California educators show the same brave and outspoken attitude of Professor Olyer.
Such heartfelt words. They brought tears to my eyes. These are the very reasons I am retiring early. I feel for anyone entering education. I actually try to talk them out of it. If anyone of these so called “reformers” would spend a day in our shoes they would see what we do each and every day. Please stand up for our children.
Next year’s TC Medal of Honor should go to Professor Celia Oyler. Of course, what are the odds that she’ll still be working there?
Compliance has its place and its time; that time has passed.
Thank you, Celia – one of your former students! How inspiring! Please submit this to the NYTimes for wider distribution. It is so important to resist this for our kids, our future. Christine Clayton
What inspiring words… thank you. This should move like wildfire across the state of NY.
Professor Oyler,
Thank you for your focus on what really matters. I know that in your world you are a conductor that creates magic! Your sense of what is important is what keeps me turning the next page in the hopes of a better tomorrow for our children.
I can not agree with Ms. Oyler more . Hooray for you to have the guts to stand up and say it aloud. I did not go into education to teach children how to pass tests but how to read and do math; and, more importantly, how to become productive members of society. Can you measure that with a test?
Well said, Prof. Oyler. I have shared you wise words with the people of New Zealand, who are just setting off down this ill-advised path of reform. Kia kaha. http://sosnzexpress.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/professor-oyler-an-open-letter-to-my-students/
A beautifully contrapuntal piece! As Elie Weisel also reminds us:
‘An immoral society betrays humanity because it betrays the basis for humanity, which is
memory. An immoral society deals with memory as some politicians deal with politics. A moral society is committed to memory: I believe in memory. The Greek word alethia means Truth, Things that cannot be forgotten. I believe in those things that cannot be forgotten and because of that so much in my work deals with memory… What do all my books have in common? A commitment to memory.’
I graduated from Teachers College with an MA in Curriculum and Teaching in 1966. I did not attend the graduation ceremonies as the only person in NYC who was part of my family was my husband. If I were graduating today, I would definitely be there and doing all the objecting I could.